{"id":30448,"date":"2024-07-01T06:00:23","date_gmt":"2024-07-01T11:00:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bankbeat.biz\/?p=30448"},"modified":"2024-07-03T07:45:06","modified_gmt":"2024-07-03T12:45:06","slug":"rising-stars-2024-ben-udell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bankbeat.biz\/rising-stars-2024-ben-udell\/","title":{"rendered":"Rising Stars 2024: Ben Udell"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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: \u201cYou 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\u2019s going to take you days if not a week to write.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Or, with some good prompting, Udell tells them, ChatGPT can deliver a first draft on all of this in about five minutes. It\u2019s the sort of hook that gets seminar attendees sitting up a little bit straighter.<\/span><\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_30449\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-30449\" style=\"width: 242px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-30449\" src=\"https:\/\/bankbeat.biz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/06\/ben-udell-252x300.jpg\" alt=\"Ben Udell photo\" width=\"252\" height=\"300\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-30449\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Ben Udell<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Udell, SVP of digital innovation at Madison, Wis.-based Lake Ridge Bank, and a 2024 <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">BankBeat <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cRising Star in Banking,\u201d has a way of capturing people\u2019s 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 <\/span><a href=\"http:\/\/robotsarepeople.net\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">RobotsArePeople.net<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, a sandbox of sorts where he tests AI and pushes the boundaries on tech tools in order to advance people\u2019s use of \u2014 and comfort with \u2014 what is simultaneously exciting and fraught.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cBen is part innovator, part disrupter,\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Prior to the merger, Udell was senior vice president of consumer banking, but opportunities opened for Udell when the two institutions merged. \u201cAs part of that, we had to reorganize ourselves to be thinking differently,\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019s also utilized AI to help the merged bank write a mission statement and bring its separate policies into alignment. \u201cBen 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,\u201d Hoffmann said.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Udell has embraced his new role over the last 18 months because it freed him from many of the challenges today\u2019s leaders face. \u201cIt was just very hard to carve out a lot of time to think about the future of the bank because you\u2019re dealing with more of the day to day,\u201d Udell said. \u201cYou can\u2019t 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\u2019re managing and this leadership role.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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. \u201cThat really assuaged a lot of concerns [about the merger] and on the flip side, it was much more encouraging,\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That doesn\u2019t mean he\u2019s leading Lake Ridge into pools of risk through his focus on AI. Most of his efforts have revolved around internal uses and promoting efficiency. \u201cWe think about anything we\u2019re writing: We\u2019re communicating, we\u2019re comparing, we\u2019re reviewing, we\u2019re putting into our brand voice \u2026 none of that\u2019s private information \u2026 We can use AI for that, and it\u2019s going to help us be more productive,\u201d 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. \u201cIt\u2019s fascinating to see how individuals who start picking up on that frankly work faster.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Udell respectfully disagrees with the disrupter label. \u201cI\u2019m a persuader.\u201d He\u2019s 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\u2019s making a difference at Lake Ridge Bank.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cHe\u2019s 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,\u201d Hoffmann said. \u201cHe\u2019s a unique individual.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Unique, because he sees the \u201chumanity\u201d embedded in the technology. \u201cApproaching AI as though it\u2019s a human being will yield your best results as you learn how to use this new technology,\u201d Udell writes on his blog. That\u2019s what he\u2019s attempting to teach the industry through his speaking and the educational webinars he\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 a hypothetical. <a href=\"https:\/\/bankbeat.biz\/rising-stars-2024-ben-udell\/\"> [Continue] <\/a><!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":409,"featured_media":30449,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"generate_page_header":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[54,380],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Rising Stars 2024: Ben Udell - BankBeat<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/bankbeat.biz\/rising-stars-2024-ben-udell\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Rising Stars 2024: Ben Udell - BankBeat\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"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 a hypothetical. 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