Originally published on LinkedIn, John’s Corner is where Fortimize CEO John Hamon shares the perspectives, challenges, and hard truths he sees from the front lines. View original publication.
“There Is a Lack of Grit Around Here”
That is Tom, the CIO at a credit union I work with, on a text he sent me on a day he was supposed to be off. He went on.
The institution, he wrote, is in “a slow slog hampered by the inability to derive a strategic vision with practical planning and investment.” His CEO is “chasing point solutions and quick wins prioritized in the context of ‘any activity is good.’” The CEO has now started repeating the line that data is the issue for AI—language Tom has been using with him for two years.
“He will tell me I am too slow,” Tom wrote. He has not been too slow. He has been right.
Tom is not the only one
Across dozens of community banks and credit unions our firm has served since 2012, a version of this conversation now arrives every few weeks. The CIO sees the integration work that has to happen before any AI investment can return anything meaningful. The CEO sees what the trade press is saying his peers are doing. The board sees the need for an answer, and the loudest answer wins.
What is new is the cost of being on the wrong side of it. The institution that runs another two years on the old point-solution playbook will not be where it was when those two years started.
What scale was actually buying
For most of the last quarter century, the moat in banking was scale. National banks beat community banks not because they were better at understanding customers, and not because they offered better products, but because they could afford the data infrastructure that let them act on what they knew. A community bank could not. The cost basis to know your member as well as Bank of America knows its customer was prohibitive for an institution under five billion dollars.
That cost basis is now collapsing. What used to require a hundred-million-dollar IT budget can now sit on a Salesforce platform with Data Cloud underneath it for a tiny fraction of what the same capability cost ten years ago. The infrastructure that was the price of admission is becoming the cost of doing business. The moat is being filled in.
What just became possible
A two billion dollar community bank or credit union can now operate, for the first time in twenty-five years, with a customer record that is actually unified. Mortgage origination, the core, the LOS, and the contact center all writing into and reading from the same source of truth. The teller sees what the call center sees. The relationship manager sees what the underwriter saw two weeks ago. The next conversation with the member begins where the last one ended — and it begins with the right product.
Once that foundation is in place, AI becomes useful, because there is a clean record for it to operate on. Referral management, predictive servicing, and local pricing decisions can all run from it. The community bank that does this work has an asset the national bank cannot replicate: deep local relationships, decades of underwriting context, and a customer record finally good enough to act on. Bank of America cannot buy what Tom’s institution already knows about its members. It can only try to compete with it on price.
The bank a few miles over
In the bank a few miles over, the next two years play out differently. The CEO keeps buying point solutions. The fraud detection AI runs on the contact center’s records, which do not match the LOS. The Agentforce pilot generates impressive demos and zero throughput. The board hears about new platforms quarterly. None of them connects.
By the third year, the institution’s growth has stagnated, the cost of acquisition for new members has climbed past the revenue per member, and the local peer that did the unglamorous integration work two years earlier is taking share in the same zip codes.
The institution that ran on the old point-solution playbook will not be acquired because it bought too little technology. It will be acquired because it bought a great deal and could not use any of it. The CEO will retire with a story about how the industry consolidated. That story will be wrong. The industry is consolidating around the institutions that decided to compete.
The ninety-minute test
Across the engagements I have watched closely, the predictor of which side an institution lands on is rarely budget and never vendor selection. It is whether the senior team can hold one ninety-minute conversation about the integration architecture without the CEO redirecting it back to the next pilot.
Tom has not been able to have that conversation in eighteen months. That is not a CIO problem. That is the institution’s actual answer to the question.
The institutions that win this round have a CEO who is willing to be uncomfortable for two quarters while the data plumbing gets done, before any of the visible AI work begins. That CEO is also, almost always, the most exhausted person in the executive suite. The window opens for community banks and credit unions at exactly the moment their leaders are most tired.
Ask yourself something simple:
If you are running a community bank or a credit union, ask yourself something simple. When was the last ninety-minute conversation you held with your CIO about the integration architecture, with no slide deck and no vendor in the room?
If you cannot remember it, she can. She has been waiting for it. So has the institution.
Whatever you have been buying in the meantime, the silence about that conversation is what your team has been reading as your actual answer.
The question on your desk is not whether to invest in AI. That question was answered two years ago by your board and your competition. The question is whether the conversation missing from your CIO’s calendar is the answer you want on your record three years from now.
What do you think?
If this resonates with you — whether you’re a CEO, CIO, board member, or technology leader at a community bank or credit union — I’d genuinely like to hear your perspective. Drop a comment below or feel free to reach out directly.
