With the eyeballs of about 350 bankers upon him, Ben Udell opened his breakout session at the 2024 Financial Brand Forum asking marketers to consider this hypothetical: “You have to write a blog post about a high-yield savings account. But that means you also need to write an email to clients, a direct mail piece, a sales piece for bankers, and then a training guide for managers to help their bankers sell the product. That’s going to take you days if not a week to write.”
Or, with some good prompting, Udell tells them, ChatGPT can deliver a first draft on all of this in about five minutes. It’s the sort of hook that gets seminar attendees sitting up a little bit straighter.
Udell, SVP of digital innovation at Madison, Wis.-based Lake Ridge Bank, and a 2024 BankBeat “Rising Star in Banking,” has a way of capturing people’s attention as he touts the power of generative AI. He promotes the value of AI at the bank, throughout the industry, and through his website RobotsArePeople.net, a sandbox of sorts where he tests AI and pushes the boundaries on tech tools in order to advance people’s use of — and comfort with — what is simultaneously exciting and fraught.
“Ben is part innovator, part disrupter,” said Paul Hoffmann, president of the roughly $3 billion Lake Ridge, which was formed as a result of the 2023 merger between Monona State Bank, Monona, Wis., and State Bank of Cross Plains, Wis. Hoffmann and Udell came from the Monona side of the merger, and have worked together for 15 years.
Prior to the merger, Udell was senior vice president of consumer banking, but opportunities opened for Udell when the two institutions merged. “As part of that, we had to reorganize ourselves to be thinking differently,” Hoffmann explained. Because the fastest advances in banking were happening on the retail side, Udell was refocused to digital innovation. He has since worked to improve the bank’s mobile banking app, helped identify marketing opportunities, used AI to assist the C-suite with strategic planning, and encouraged teams inside the bank to embrace the power of AI to do their jobs more efficiently. He’s also utilized AI to help the merged bank write a mission statement and bring its separate policies into alignment. “Ben has helped to kind of be that ambassador to help us learn how to use this tool and how we might be part of it,” Hoffmann said.
Udell has embraced his new role over the last 18 months because it freed him from many of the challenges today’s leaders face. “It was just very hard to carve out a lot of time to think about the future of the bank because you’re dealing with more of the day to day,” Udell said. “You can’t just step away from that and think more creatively and go try to innovate and run into dead ends and waste all this time because you have this team that you’re managing and this leadership role.”
Innovation requires resources and resources are often the byproduct of scale. At the time of the merger, Udell said Hoffmann and Lake Ridge CEO Jim Tubbs, who came from the Cross Plains institution, sent a clear message to their merging teams that they were committed to growing the community bank and were committed to investing in digital tools. “That really assuaged a lot of concerns [about the merger] and on the flip side, it was much more encouraging,” said Udell, who is not shy about promoting his own brand and expertise beyond the bank by speaking at conferences, writing for trade journals, even self-nominating for this recognition.
That doesn’t mean he’s leading Lake Ridge into pools of risk through his focus on AI. Most of his efforts have revolved around internal uses and promoting efficiency. “We think about anything we’re writing: We’re communicating, we’re comparing, we’re reviewing, we’re putting into our brand voice … none of that’s private information … We can use AI for that, and it’s going to help us be more productive,” Udell said. Lake Ridge has a process to scan PDFs with handwritten notes in which AI can incorporate the notes into the next version of the document, saving staff time. “It’s fascinating to see how individuals who start picking up on that frankly work faster.”
Udell respectfully disagrees with the disrupter label. “I’m a persuader.” He’s also an innate questioner, with academic credentials that include an MBA from UMass Amherst and a degree from the Graduate School of Banking at UW-Madison. And he’s making a difference at Lake Ridge Bank.
“He’s trying to help people be more productive and do a better job and have the bank be consistent across the board on all of its things,” Hoffmann said. “He’s a unique individual.”
Unique, because he sees the “humanity” embedded in the technology. “Approaching AI as though it’s a human being will yield your best results as you learn how to use this new technology,” Udell writes on his blog. That’s what he’s attempting to teach the industry through his speaking and the educational webinars he’s leading for the Wisconsin Bankers Association: How to prompt AI, how to get AI to cite its sources so you can fact check it, and how to use it smartly and ethically.
