Amplify Employees with AI, with DJ Seeterlin

Well, yeah, I've been in banking for about 25 years.

And then it transitioned from the CIO that I'd been serving as for quite a few years here at Chesapeake Bank into this role after we'd really had a lot of success innovating, doing interesting things.

At one point, I took over responsibility for our operations, our deposit operations area.

And because we as a company do a lot in payments with our national payments business and our factoring business, I realized I better learn a little bit of something about payments if I'm going to manage all these ACH and everything that's flowing through here.

So I got deeply involved in the industry, joined up with the ABA and lots of other groups just trying to learn from all the people around me.

And through that, got early access to information, took part in things like the Fed Payments Task Force groups and things and could see forward and see down the line and say, well, instant payments is going to be a thing.

They're not necessarily talking a lot about it in community banking circles in 2017 and 2018, but we can see forward enough now being involved in those conversations to recognize the future.

Yeah.

We started leveraging the insights that I was able to gather from being involved in the industry and the insights of what we knew about our technology partners because I got very involved in advisory boards at Jack Henry and other groups to understand what their future looked like.

I just started plugging those things together and were able to launch some pretty interesting products.

We launched virtual debit cards before I could buy it anywhere.

We knew we wanted to solve the problem of issuing debit cards to somebody in their mobile app.

And I was just surprised I couldn't find it anywhere.

So we found a partner to build it for us.

And, you know, we just kept going down that track of solving problems.

And we recognized, hey, there's an opportunity here to do something and create some focus in that area.

So spent some time doing that.

Now my focus is primarily, like you said, in innovation and strategy.

I spend a lot of time in our corporate strategy work.

understanding how we should focus as a business and what our strategic focus ought to be, as well as thinking about those new things and looking around the corner to try to imagine what's coming and how we can best position ourselves for those things.

It includes things like AI and digital assets and anything that's kind of outside of the norm of how the business currently operates.