2026 AI Showcase: Operationalizing AI in Banking: Practical Strategies for Community Financial Institutions

CBA's AI Showcase

INSTRUCTORS:

Rob Zwink Onsetto

Byron Earnheart Barret School of Banking

Operationalizing AI in Banking: Practical Strategies for Community Financial Institutions

Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping the banking industry, but many financial institutions are still determining how to move from experimentation to real operational impact. In this session, Onsetto CTO Rob Zwink will discuss practical strategies for implementing AI within community banks and financial institutions, including operational efficiencies, customer engagement opportunities, workflow automation, and emerging technologies shaping the future of banking. Attendees will gain actionable insights into how banks can thoughtfully adopt AI tools while maintaining security, compliance, and customer trust.

Built, Not Bought
Watch an AI build a real banking tool — live, in under an hour.

In one hour, we’re going to build a real, working tool for a community bank — live, from a blank screen, with no development team, no budget, and no computer science degree. You voted on what we build; I’ll walk you through every step as it happens, using my own setup, right out in the open. But this isn’t only a coding demo. By watching how a tool like this actually gets made, you’ll walk out able to tell the difference between software that’s genuinely worth paying for and a five-figure “solution” that’s really just a list and a little math. Same skill, two payoffs: you’ll see how to build — and you’ll never sit through a vendor demo the same way again.

You pick what we build:

• Beat the Note   Lending / Retail
  Drag one slider and show a borrower exactly how a few extra dollars a month knocks years off their loan.
• Special Delivery   Marketing
  Type in your CD special, pick your colors, and walk out with a lobby-ready graphic before the coffee’s cold — no designer, no vendor.
• Ready or Not   Compliance / Branch Ops
  Run a branch through the examiner’s checklist and watch one missed posting drop the whole branch from READY to NOT READY — live.

ABOUT OUR INSTRUCTORS:
Rob Zwink is the Chief Technology Officer at Onsetto. Rob is a seasoned technology executive with over 20 years of experience building scalable financial systems and leading world-class engineering teams. His career began at JPMorgan Chase, where he advanced to Executive Director while driving modernization and enterprise architecture initiatives across global business units. Rob later held key leadership roles at BillGO and ClickSWITCH, contributing to ClickSWITCH’s technology evolution and acquisition by Q2 Holdings. As co-founder and CTO of SafeChain Financial, he pioneered blockchain-driven solutions for real estate, including the industry’s first wire-fraud prevention platform. At Onsetto, Rob oversees product architecture, security, and platform innovation, ensuring the company delivers reliable, compliant, and scalable technology for financial institutions. His deep engineering and regulatory expertise position Onsetto to lead the future of automated business switching and treasury-driven intelligence.

Byron Earnheart is the Programming Director for the Barret School of Banking in Memphis, TN and the host of the “Main Street Banking” podcast.  He has 9 Google certifications around AI and has been showing banks creative generative AI uses on his Back Porch Banking LinkedIn program for over a year.