AI Impact, Hand Delivered.
We help banks and credit unions adopt, advance, and achieve their AI goals with innovative approaches, rigor, compliance and speed.
LeapFI is an AI advisory and engineering firm that helps banks, credit unions, and financial institutions adopt, advance, and achieve through AI, with strategy, technology, and people working as one system.
Where financial institutions get stuck.
From the strategic questions in the boardroom, to mobilizing the people who execute, to the technical work of reaching production.
“Help me get clear and strategic about AI in our institution.”
Smaller institutions can’t chase everything. The challenge isn’t budget size, it’s focus. Most are using AI and stuck in experimentation.
“Help our leadership team align on the way forward.”
The bottleneck is people, not technology. When leaders disagree on AI’s role, the organization can’t commit and the investment stalls.
“Help us do more with the resources we have.”
Used well, AI is the most direct lever on the efficiency ratio, letting a lean institution deliver what once required scale.
“Help us turn our AI investment into real return.”
Spend is up; returns aren’t. Rarely the model’s fault, it’s AI bolted onto legacy process instead of designed into the operation.
“Help us move our pilots into production.”
The capability gets demonstrated; the discipline to run it reliably never gets built. Only a fraction of pilots reach production.
“Help us deploy AI with regulatory confidence.”
For a regulated institution, speed and careful governance pull against each other. Deploy with confidence, not caution alone.
“Help us build a sustainable operating model around AI.”
Without clear ownership, decision rights, and a governance backbone, every use case becomes another orphan.
“Help us make sense of the technology landscape.”
A wrong bet locks you in; a late bet leaves you behind. The challenge isn’t access to technology, it’s choices that compound.
Adoption is easy. Impact is rare.
AI is an operating-model redesign.
Ten pillars that must be in place, and activated, for AI to deliver your institution’s goals.
Where AI creates value, what you’ll do about it, and what you deliberately won’t.
One accountable owner, clear decision rights, and the discipline to move pilots to production or kill them.
Every initiative tied to a financial outcome, every dollar traceable to the goals it serves.
The controls, validation, and exam-ready evidence that let you deploy AI a regulator can question.
Modern, modular infrastructure that runs AI safely alongside your core.
One governed, trusted version of the truth, including the unstructured data where the signal hides.
AI built into what you offer, embedded intelligence that opens revenue, not just cuts cost.
The skills, roles, incentives, and culture that decide whether AI gets adopted or quietly ignored.
Internal work redesigned end to end around AI, not tools bolted onto yesterday’s workflows.
Deeper insight, better experience, and earned trust. AI that strengthens the relationship, not erodes it.
From baseline to scale.
Five disciplines, one operating model, 27 services in total. Select a discipline to see what sits inside it.
We assess strategic clarity, leadership alignment, and organizational readiness, the diagnostic that tells you whether you’re ready to build.
A structured read of your people, process, technology, and data, showing exactly what’s between you and real deployment.
Core integrations, data quality, and architecture gaps, whether your institution can actually support the use cases you’re being sold.
We benchmark your AI maturity against comparable institutions so leadership can calibrate ambition and investment.
Where AI creates real value and real risk, mapping where it strengthens your position and where it exposes you.
Built for the way institutions actually run.
A product line built out of the engagements, so the operating model does not live in a slide deck.
LeapFI - OnSide
An always-on service and software platform that keeps your regulatory and compliance documentation current. OnSide monitors regulators and changes in law, flags when a policy should change, drafts the updated language for your approval, and keeps a clear audit trail shaped into board-ready reporting. Nothing changes until you approve it.
Business problems. Working software.
The engineering practice of LeapFI. We take a concrete problem inside a bank or credit union, whether it is slow, expensive, manual, or stuck in pilot, and ship software your people actually use.
Strategy to working software.
Assistants, copilots, and knowledge systems for teams inside the institution.
Document processing, exception handling, case intake, and task routing.
MCP servers, APIs, and secure connectors to core and enterprise systems.
Permissions, audit trails, human review, monitoring, and rollout discipline.
Systems we build, by business horizon.
Representative builds, not generic AI labels. Each one has a user, a workflow, a technology footprint, and a business reason to exist.
Working software in weeks, for one overloaded team.
Ingests borrower documents, prior memos, financial statements, and policy guidance. Drafts memo sections, flags missing items, and assembles a cleaner package for the credit officer.
Sits on top of the existing queue. Pulls case context from core, CRM, and ticketing systems, writes the case summary, and routes each item by type and risk.
Drafts customer responses from live account context and approved language, inside the tools agents already use. A human reviews and owns every send.
Cycle time and capacity across a multi-team workflow.
Automates the file as it moves: document intake and extraction, completeness checks, conditions tracking, and live status across the LOS, imaging, and email. No more reassembling the file at every handoff.
Combines CRM notes, account activity, deposit balances, and service history into a pre-call brief: at-risk relationships, idle balances, last conversations, and next-best offers.
Captures decisions, approvals, and source documents as structured evidence while the work happens, then assembles exam-ready and audit-ready packages on demand.
New products, new revenue, or a line of business that runs differently.
An advisory layer inside digital banking, covering cash-flow analysis, product fit, and next-step recommendations, with the guardrails and human escalation paths banking requires.
Turns the institution’s data into a product commercial clients value: cash position summaries, anomaly alerts, and recommendations delivered to the customer, not just the RM.
One line of business, whether small-business lending, wealth, or specialty finance, re-platformed end to end: intake, decision support, and servicing run by AI with human control points.
The problem picks the tools.
We are not selling a single platform. Sometimes the right answer is a vendor product. Sometimes it is custom software. Delivery is chosen on speed, control, and what your team can run after we leave, with security and auditability built in, and first releases narrow enough to use and honest enough to measure.
Select, configure, and wire vendor AI products into your core, CRM, LOS, and enterprise stack, including platforms we already trust, with permissions, audit trails, and a rollout your teams can operate.
Software designed around your workflow, data boundaries, and controls when nothing off the shelf fits.
Our engineers working inside your environment, shipping alongside your team and leaving the capability behind.
Built with deep strategic and technical authority.
Senior practitioners with direct operating experience inside the institutions we serve, backed by an extended advisory board across banking, enterprise technology, regulatory affairs, and defense-grade infrastructure.
MIT-trained engineer and former Microsoft executive with 25+ years of C-level leadership across global banks and technology firms. Chief Transformation Officer at First Republic Bank, inaugural Global CDO at National Bank of Canada, and a decade at Microsoft overseeing a $3.5B financial services P&L.
Twenty years across Capgemini, Frog Design, Fahrenheit 212, and Heidrick & Struggles. He runs the leadership sessions that align institutions on purpose, direction, and growth before the roadmap gets built.
Product and GTM leader with 20+ years bridging enterprise cloud, AI integration, and product strategy, translating regulatory complexity into intuitive workflows and scalable AI features.
20+ years leading large-scale digital transformation inside major financial institutions. Lead engagement architect, running client workstreams from diagnostic through delivery, with a measurable outcome shipped every time.
Leads LeapFI’s technology direction with over 20+ years making innovation safe for regulated industries. Former CTO of CareCloud, being one of the first cloud-hosted EHRs. Josh also ran Inovalon’s Payer and Insights businesses encompassing 300+ engineers, developing risk engines covering the top 25 U.S. health plans and 330+ million patients.
Cloud and AI transformation executive who designs and builds the custom applications, automation pipelines, and integration layers behind LeapFI’s build engagements, letting institutions deploy AI without touching their core.
Open roles
Risk Policy Reviewer
Lead risk and compliance reviews for LeapFI - OnSide as we work with banks and credit unions based in the US.
- Location
- Remote, continental US
- Travel
- Only as warranted with advance notice
- Structure
- Part-time or advisory
- Product
- LeapFI - OnSide
Eleven AI specialists, on staff full time.
Each agent owns one domain and carries a defined operating procedure. Seven are reviewers with read-only access. They return findings and change nothing. Four are implementers with write access, and their work is always verified by a reviewer, never by themselves.
Verification of cloud service, SKU, and limit claims against official provider documentation.
Ingrid serves as a foundational architect for cloud infrastructure, guiding the structural integrity and scalability of platform deployments. Beyond evaluating service quotas and limit specifications, she proactively models complex multi-region topologies, defines optimal resource tagging and governance, and architects cost-effective failover strategies. She collaborates with engineering teams to translate high-level business requirements into resilient, secure, and performant infrastructure definitions, ensuring that system designs remain adaptable to evolving cloud operational paradigms.
Identity and RBAC, assurance and advisory independence wall, security posture, and compliance.
Rosa leads security and compliance auditing across access controls and system boundaries. She systematically evaluates identity hierarchies, role assignments, and permission boundaries to ensure strict adherence to security principles. Her auditing method maps every path between credentials and resources, flagging unstated assumptions or implicit trust relationships as potential security risks.
Data model and storage layout, verified against the real payloads in code.
Kenji specializes in data architecture verification, schema validation, and storage layout analysis. He validates proposed data models against actual runtime payloads to ensure long-term integrity and seamless event processing. His reviews focus on uncovering edge-case payload variations, structural inconsistencies, and potential schema evolution issues that standard test suites may miss.
Durable orchestration, human-in-the-loop events, idempotency, and timeout arithmetic.
Amara focuses on durable execution, workflow orchestration, and resilient distributed processing. She reviews long-running processes to guarantee replay determinism, precise timeout synchronization, and reliable state handling. Her analysis ensures that side effects are properly isolated and that retry strategies remain safe during unexpected system interruptions.
Model-layer availability and cost economics, with provider documentation verified the same day.
Theo evaluates model integration efficiency, unit economics, and AI platform availability. He analyzes prompt structures, execution paths, and token utilization to optimize operational costs and service reliability. His reviews re-derive unit economics and resource requirements directly from live infrastructure configurations and actual usage metrics.
Interface inventory accuracy, including CLI to API and MCP mapping completeness and agent dispositions.
Priya oversees API surface integrity and interface contract validation across platform components. She verifies that published specifications accurately match live service behavior, command-line tooling, and protocol mappings. Her evaluations reconstruct component interfaces directly from executable code to identify unmapped endpoints or undocumented contract changes.
Two-sided review for over-engineering and under-engineering, migration realism, and whole-document proportionality.
Sam provides pragmatic architectural oversight, balancing platform scope against real-world operational constraints. He reviews system designs to prevent both over-engineering and unaddressed technical debt. His reviews evaluate component ROI, system complexity, and migration feasibility to ensure every architectural addition delivers proportional value.
Infrastructure as code (Bicep and ARM), OIDC-federated deploy workflows, and environment topology.
Tomás builds infrastructure templates and automated deployment workflows across environment topologies. He focuses on maintaining clean separation between environment boundaries, securing credential management, and enforcing strict identity federation. His implementations prioritize repeatable infrastructure definitions and validated deployment scripts.
Python and FastAPI services, durable-workflow determinism, idempotent activities, and provider seams.
Danielle develops core backend services, workflow activities, and application integration logic. She focuses on building reliable, idempotent service components that recover gracefully from worker failures. Her implementation work ensures deterministic execution across asynchronous routines and external service integrations.
PostgreSQL schemas and migrations, JSON-to-relational fidelity, importers, and round-trip parity tooling.
Viktor implements database schemas, migration pipelines, and data transformations. He develops robust import pipelines and validation tooling to maintain end-to-end data fidelity between relational storage and message payloads. His implementations rely on automated diffing to verify complete round-trip integrity before schema changes go live.
TypeScript SPA consoles, Entra ID browser authentication, confirmation UX for irreversible actions, contract fidelity, and dense-screen accessibility.
Lena builds user interface consoles, authentication workflows, and interactive operational dashboards. She focuses on interface clarity, responsive state handling, and accessible screen designs. Her implementations ensure that action confirmation states are fully verified by backend systems before displaying status updates to users.
Five keynotes built for the bank and credit union C-suite.
Each talk is rebuilt for the audience in the room: institution size, regulatory posture, board composition, and what the CEO needs the executive team thinking about on Monday morning.
AI Industrialization
Most banks are stuck in Pilot Purgatory™ and keep experimenting without moving AI into the operating model. This keynote walks CEOs through the Ten Pillars Framework, the production gate that separates winners from spectators, and the three P&L levers AI must move to justify board-level investment.
The Case for Bank Modernization
The community institution model is under structural pressure from compounding margin compression, deposit migration, and a generational shift in how members and clients expect to bank. This talk lays out the modernization imperative in honest, board-ready terms and frames the choice every CEO now has to make.
Next-Generation Financial Infrastructure
Digital money, securities, and settlement are being rebuilt on new rails, and the regulatory line is moving with them. This keynote gives community bank and credit union boards a grown-up briefing on what is changing, who the new issuers and operators are, where the opportunities sit for institutions your size, and which infrastructure decisions a CEO needs to make in the next 12 months. No hype, no dismissal.
Combatting the Deposit Drain
Deposits are leaving community institutions for cash apps, neobanks, brokerage sweep accounts, and digital wallets, and the rate is accelerating. This talk maps the players pulling those deposits, quantifies the impact on funding costs, and gives the executive team a defensible playbook to slow, retain, and recapture.
Building a Durable Corporate Strategy
Most leadership teams are operating at full speed without enough structure to define direction together. The Strategic Direction Sprint creates the space, process, and discipline for executive teams to align around a common strategic language and a small set of meaningful choices that anchor communication, prioritization, and execution.
Where Adam speaks.
State banking associations and credit union leagues.
Private board strategy days and director education.
National banking, fintech, and payments conferences.
Tell us about your event.
30 to 90-minute keynote, board briefing, or full-day strategy session, in-person or virtual, custom built per audience.
Frequently asked questions
What does LeapFI do?
We help banks and credit unions adopt, advance, and achieve their AI goals with innovative approaches, rigor, compliance and speed.
Who does LeapFI work with?
FI-focused, banks & credit unions only
How does an engagement start?
One focused conversation is usually enough to find the right place to start.
Where is LeapFI based?
LeapFI is based in the United States, and information we collect is generally processed and stored in the United States.
Not sure where to start with AI?
That’s the most common place to begin. One focused conversation is usually enough to find the right place to start.