How Jack Henry Uses AI and Data Science to Transform Community Banking

**Keith Fulton** (0:00)
And we build a technical team that handles all the details of the authentication, vulnerability scanning, RBAC, cloud hosting, containerization, et cetera. All that is handled for the Vibe Coders.

**Peter High** (0:18)
Welcome to Technovation. I'm Peter High, President of Metis Strategy. My guest today is Keith Fulton. Keith is the Chief Data Officer of Jack Henry, a 50-year-old financial technology company that generates approximately $2.4 billion in annual revenue and serves more than 7,400 banks and credit unions across the United States. Jack Henry provides the core technology infrastructure that powers community and regional financial institutions from banking and credit union cores to digital banking, payments and data platforms, making it one of the most consequential fintech companies operating behind the scenes of American banking. In his role, Keith oversees the company's data strategy and AI transformation, earning the de facto mandate as the company's chief AI officer as well.
Since joining the company in late 2024, he's driven AI adoption across Jack Henry's 7,200 employees while simultaneously developing AI-powered capability for the banks and credit unions the company serves.
His philosophy centers on being what he calls responsibly bold and balanced, a framework that navigates the tension between the pace of AI innovation and the risk sensitivity that defines financial services. Keith brings more than 25 years of experience building and scaling technology organizations. He had a series of senior technology leadership roles at companies like Equifax, Fiserv and ADP. He's also the author of Maxing Out, How to Get the Most Out of Yourself and Your Team, a really fantastic read that I highly recommend. I look forward to speaking with Keith about how Jack Henry is harnessing the power of aggregated data across hundreds of millions of banking accounts, how AI is opening new opportunities for the community banks and credit unions this company serves, and what it takes to drive transformation at scale in one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world, among other topics I'm sure we'll cover together. Keith, welcome to Technovation. It's great to speak with you today.

**Keith Fulton** (2:01)
Thank you for having me, Peter. Long time listener, first time caller.

**Peter High** (2:04)
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Now on to the interview.
I'm so pleased to have you on this as a great fan of your work now across many different organizations. But let's talk about the one that you're a part of now, Jack Henry. For some, that will not be a known entity. I'd love to have you fill in some planks on what I have learned from you as a fascinating business. Talk a bit about Jack Henry.

**Keith Fulton** (3:25)
Yeah. Jack Henry is a niche. It's a little bit of a niche company, but we are a software company that sells software to banks and credit unions, community banks and credit unions primarily. Across the country, we have at least one product. It's roughly 7,400 financial institutions in the country. We are the core provider for about 1,700 of those. We are the beating heart, the ERP system, the all things, the system of record, or the underlying bank or credit union. In about 1,700 of those, we have a very wide net that we cast. But at the end of the day, we're a software technology company. Calling us a FinTech might be a little bit of a stretch, but we're in that space.

**Peter High** (4:10)
Talk a bit about your role. You were the chief data officer of the organization. What's that entail in an organization like yours, especially one that clearly has a very data rich environment?

**Keith Fulton** (4:20)
Exactly. I have two main roles here. The first one is the title roles, the chief data officer. I really view that as an internal facing role of how do we get the data around the enterprise inside of the running of Jack Henry to be in good shape and unified and all that. Then the broader side is the external facing role. What are the software plans we're going to build that enable our banks and credit unions to win? How do we help them get smarter and align products that help them execute on their business strategies in the data analytics space? There's a ton of stuff going on there. It's really an exciting space. The other one though, redefines a ton of stuff going on is the AI space. I'm also the chief AI officer for the company.