Keith Fulton

Chief Data Officer Jack Henry

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Keith Fulton is Chief Data Officer of Jack Henry, the financial-technology company whose core processing, payments and digital banking platforms sit behind roughly 7,400 US banks and credit unions. He joined in December 2024, after more than 25 years in financial-services technology, to build the enterprise data strategy and lead AI transformation across a $2.4 billion business. The job has two halves that pull in opposite directions. Jack Henry holds something almost no individual community bank can obtain — consortium-scale data reflecting the behaviour of some 244 million account holders across thousands of institutions, which makes it possible to detect fraud patterns, predict churn and surface commercial customers a small bank does not know it has. But its clients are among the most risk-averse organisations in the economy. Fulton’s stated approach to that tension is to be “responsibly bold and balanced”: he argues AI is “the tech revolution of a lifetime” and that the company therefore needs to be bold, while acknowledging that its financial clients are not.

Career Highlights

• Chief Data Officer of Jack Henry since December 2024, leading enterprise data strategy and AI transformation.
• Approved more than 100 AI tools for internal use across 7,200-plus employees, including Microsoft Copilot 365, ServiceNow help-desk AI, Claude Code and GitHub Copilot, with what he describes as big productivity gains.
• Built cross-functional AI governance spanning his own team, IT, HR, legal and the business units, plus enterprise-grade governance for employee-built applications.
• Designed customer-controlled toggles so each bank and credit union can choose which AI features to enable, rather than having them switched on by default.
• Applied consortium data covering roughly 244 million account holders to fraud reduction, churn prediction and identifying undiscovered commercial customers.
• Delivered real-time translation across more than 70 languages in customer-service chat.
• Previously SVP and Chief Information Officer of Fiserv’s Account Processing and Fintech Division (2017-2023), SVP of Digital Technology at Equifax, and Chief Technology Officer at ADP.
• Author of “Maxing Out: How to Get the Most out of Yourself and Your Team”, and writes a leadership Substack.

Professional Journey

Fulton started as a programmer and worked his way up through technical roles, spending much of his career designing enterprise software and leading engineering teams inside financial services. That trajectory matters for the way he talks about the work now: his stated philosophy is combining deep technical expertise with a business-first approach, which is the position of someone who has both written the code and had to justify it.

From 2017 to 2023 he was Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Fiserv’s Account Processing and Fintech Division — core processing for banks, the same category of system Jack Henry sells, seen from inside its largest competitor. He then moved to Equifax as Senior Vice President of Digital Technology, and earlier in his career served as Chief Technology Officer at ADP. The through-line is large-scale regulated data infrastructure: payments, credit, payroll, all businesses where the data is the product and the tolerance for error is near zero.

He joined Jack Henry in December 2024. The remit is explicitly two-sided — enterprise data strategy and data-driven product innovation on one hand, AI transformation on the other — and the two are connected by a specific argument about community banking. Individual community banks and credit unions cannot see industry-wide patterns; Jack Henry, sitting across thousands of them, can. Turning that into products means using consortium data covering some 244 million account holders to do things no single client could do alone: catch fraud rings that operate across institutions, flag accounts likely to leave, and identify commercial customers hiding inside a retail book.

The internal AI programme has moved faster than the external one. By early 2026, fifteen months into the job, Jack Henry had approved more than a hundred AI tools for its 7,200-plus employees — Microsoft Copilot 365, ServiceNow’s help-desk AI, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot — with governance running across Fulton’s team, IT, HR, legal and the business units, and a framework for the applications employees build themselves. He has described substantial productivity gains from it, and frames the goal as getting “these magical capabilities into the hands of our bankers.”

The customer-facing side is deliberately more cautious, and the design reflects it. Rather than enabling AI features across the client base, Jack Henry gives each bank and credit union toggle switches to adopt what it chooses — an architecture that concedes the point that its customers’ risk appetite is not its own. Real-time translation across more than 70 languages in customer-service chat is the kind of feature that results: clearly useful, low-risk, easy for a conservative institution to say yes to. Preparing the underlying infrastructure for agentic AI is the longer-term work.

Alongside the job, Fulton writes. He is the author of “Maxing Out: How to Get the Most out of Yourself and Your Team” and maintains a Substack on leadership.

Education

Rice University

B.A., Economics

No graduation year is published in any source located and none is inferred. The field of study comes from a secondary summary; the institution and degree level are confirmed by an executive-profile database.