Ankur Patel interviews Courtney Rowan, SVP and Chief Digital and Transformation Officer at Citadel Credit Union. Courtney has spent 27 years watching digital go from a side project to the only front door, and she brings the rare full-arc operator perspective on what it takes to make that shift work. She breaks down the non-documentary onboarding rebuild that lifted funnel conversion 212%, the CDP/CXP stack overhaul behind true member individualization, and the three-pillar AI steering committee setting Citadel's strategy.

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Guest: Courtney Rowan, SVP and Chief Digital and Transformation Officer, Citadel Credit Union
Host: Ankur Patel, CEO & Founder, Multimodal

0:00 Introduction: Meet Courtney
0:55 What Courtney owns at Citadel
1:54 Digital evolution: from side project to the front door
5:00 Rewiring piecemeal digital channels so AI can be excellent
7:51 One continuous experience across every channel
10:04 What a charter expansion actually involves
13:07 Onboarding with no branch: human-led, digitally enabled
18:07 The fintech onboarding playbook
19:46 The results: 212% funnel conversion and more
21:35 Gen Z, values, and why credit unions get stuck
25:15 Lots of data, no unified brain: building a CDP and CXP
28:00 Don't drive a Porsche like a Ford
31:13 Standing up an AI innovation steering committee
32:52 Governance, education, enablement
36:18 Adopting AI individual by individual
37:57 AI as copilot, not a layoff plan
39:02 Separating AI marketing hype from reality
41:03 How Citadel employees use AI today
44:15 Working with incumbent and new AI vendors
46:58 The 3-5 year vision: banking that feels effortless
48:55 Closing