Hatch Bank’s new CTO sees most AI impact on 'operational middle'

Hatch Bank has named Jason Garcia chief transformation officer, a new role that folds operations and technology into a single mandate. Garcia joined Hatch Bank on Oct. 14. Before joining Hatch, Garcia was serving as the co-founder of fintech Holdings and has also served as an advisor to digital banking platform Mercury, according to his LinkedIn . Garcia will be responsible for turning strategy into execution while aligning operations, technology, data, AI and fintech platform capabilities across the enterprise, Amanda Swoverland , president of the San Marcos, Calif.-based bank, told FinAi News . [caption id="attachment_57390350" align="alignright" width="180"] Jason Garcia[/caption] "Historically, many institutions separate technology from operations," she said. "In a sponsor bank environment, those two areas are increasingly inseparable." Partner onboarding, transaction monitoring, data reporting, compliance testing, payments infrastructure and customer experience all sit at the intersection of people, process and technology, Swoverland said. Operational middle The appointment signals where Hatch sees the most opportunity for AI , Garcia told FinAi News. “AI could be very transformational, but the value is in the operational middle, not the front end,” he said. The work in banking, he argued, is mundane: “a person reading a document and rekeying it into a second system,” a pattern that repeats across partner onboarding, reconciliation, reporting and reviews. That is where AI earns its keep, he said — reconciling program totals, assembling the history and documents behind a compliance review, and extracting data from a partner’s onboarding materials to flag inconsistencies. Human in the loop Under what Garcia called board-level oversight, “people make every decision that affects a customer or a partner.” Far from a constraint, he framed human judgment or human in the loop as the thing that “makes the work deployable.” Proper AI deployment models are not the bottleneck for Hatch Bank; process restructuring is, Garcia said. “Hatch’s advantage isn’t access to better models; everyone has the same access,” he said. The edge is that a smaller institution can redesign a process with controls built in and ship it in weeks or months rather than years. “The constraint is rarely the model. It’s the data and the process underneath it,” which is why Hatch is standardizing partner data at ingestion before layering AI on top, Garcia said. Said Swoverland: “We view AI as an enabler of better risk management and operational scale.” She cited partner oversight, compliance testing and monitoring as early targets. But accountability stays with the bank: “AI can make us more effective, but governance and responsible use will always come first.” Register here for early-bird pricing for the FinAi Banking Summit, taking place March 1-2 in Denver. View the full event agenda here .

Hatch Bank’s new CTO sees most AI impact on ‘operational middle’

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