Intelligence at scale. Impact at speed.
Today I am launching XipHub. It exists to solve a problem I came to know well from the inside. Almost every regulated business is trying to use AI right now, and almost none of them are getting real, dependable value from it. I had become convinced the reason is structural, and that closing the gap would take a real platform, not another tool. XipHub is that platform, and I am here to lead it. This is what it is.
Why I'm Building Again
At the end of March, I stepped down as the bank's Chief Data Officer to start a company. I have been turning over how to write this, because the easy version sounds like a story about leaving, and that is not how it feels from the inside. It feels like the opposite. Four years inside a bank, first running technology and then its data, taught me the industry. The problem that actually pulled me out is younger than that. It took shape over the last couple of years, as AI went from a curiosity almost no one took seriously to something every institution suddenly had to make real. I could see it clearly and could only ever work around it, and at some point working around it stopped being enough.
Building When the Rules Keep Moving
Watching the open banking rule play out has been a lesson in what regulatory uncertainty does to a small bank. The rule was finalized, challenged in court almost immediately, and eventually sent back toward the drawing board. From inside a community bank, I followed it less as a policy drama and more as a planning problem, because that is what it became.
Why I'm Not Betting Against Them
People have been predicting the end of community banks for as long as I have been paying attention. Too small to compete, too slow to modernize, about to be swallowed by the big banks or routed around by fintechs. The pressures behind those predictions are real. And yet the obituary keeps turning out to be early. Having spent time in this part of the industry, I have come to see why, and what tends to set the community banks that endure apart.
What Instant Payments Actually Demand
Instant payments have quietly crossed the line from launch to infrastructure. Most of the country can reach a real-time rail now, which was not true a couple of years ago. But from where I sit, having spent a chunk of my career in payments, the milestone is not the interesting part. The interesting part is the gap between being connected to a rail and actually running meaningful volume across it, and the operational weight that real-time quietly piles onto a bank.
What Mattered and What Was Noise
Plenty happened in bank technology this year, and most of it was noise. Rather than cataloging all of it, I want to name the two shifts that actually changed how I think, the ones that still felt real once the conference hype wore off. They are not the flashiest stories of the year. They are simply the two that mattered.
Startup Lessons, Seen From Inside a Bank
Distance changes how you read your own history. With some years between me and the startup chapter, and a stretch on the other side of the table inside a bank, a lot of what used to feel like friction or bad timing looks different now. Some of the walls I spent energy resenting turned out to be the actual shape of the business. Here is what I would tell the version of me who was building back then.
What the Middleware Collapse Revealed
For a few years, Banking as a Service looked like the rare arrangement where everyone won. Fintechs got to offer bank accounts without a charter, small banks got fee income and a foot in the digital door, and the people using the apps got slick products. I wanted that arrangement to work. Years ago, when I was building a payments product, a partnership like this was exactly what I was looking for and couldn't get. So when the model started breaking in the most visible way possible, I paid close attention, this time from inside a bank rather than outside trying to get in.
How the Three Layers Work
Banking as a Service has been a buzzword for a few years now, but the mechanics of how it actually works are often misunderstood. People use "BaaS" and "embedded banking" interchangeably. They are not the same thing, and the distinction matters.
What Instant Settlement Means for Community Banks
FedNow went live on July 20 with 35 certified institutions. After decades of batch-processed payments, the Federal Reserve now has its own instant payment rail. I've been waiting on something like this for a while, and I'm already turning over what it means for community banks.
