Intelligent Automation and Agentic Ai

After Pioneering Internet Banking, as it was called in 1994, in 1996 I Co-authored the book, “The Financial Institutions Internet Sourcebook” with Banking Economist Kenneth J. Thygerson Ph.D. For McGraw-Hill.  

As pointed out on Google books, “The book's concepts were extended through the website (DFIN.com) to keep information current as the internet evolved.”  Digital Finance and Digital Economics as the name implies.

The book was published on January 1, 1997. I continued programming and adding content for my DFIN web site and continued my R&D work. Two businesses were successfully launched out of DFIN. We also built the initial shell for Digitu.com and Ken took that and developed it out. DigitU was an education and training site for financial institutions. Ken built a nice system with many financial institution subscribers  and sold-out years later.

In 1997, I began designing Bank of Internet USA (BofI), which was renamed AXOS in 2018. I drew directly on my 1994 pioneering work in Internet banking at La Jolla Bank. The experience influenced both my book on digital finance and banking and the early automation, workflow, and process architecture for what would become one of the first fully digital banks BofI. As a young man I built Hot Rods and furniture. Building is in my DNA. I focused on learning banking fundamentals throughout my career. I was prepared to modify them for digital banking. The concept that we needed to build was later called Robotic Process Automation. RPA is often the first stage of Intelligent Automation.

RPA + Ai = iA. Think of RPA as your hands, Ai is your brain and when put together you get Intelligent Automation. In 2000 when we opened BofI, I was hands on because we were building a new operating system and invention cannot be delegated. That is the reason that I took the time to learn the fundamentals of banking. Little did I know that my education would be used on a digital bank. My training included about one year as a controller and almost 9 years as a CFO during the transition from a manual ledger card accounting system to an online automated system. I believe that my training and involvement contributed to our success at BofI at a time when most regulated banks failed or closed.

My first focus upon opening BofI in July 2000 was deposit operations.  In those days we still needed wet signatures for regulators and deposits were very paper intensive.  We built an in-house RPA system  that leveraged technology so that no single employee completely opened a new account. The result was excellent. As opposed to a typical bank opening one new account and maybe 2 per man hour, we opened 30 new deposit accounts per man hour.  I was able to convince regulators that we had no need to mail bank statements to customers monthly as required in the regulations.