
Digital Banking Podcast
From Ram 1500s to real-time payments with Tommy Cotter.
In the latest episode of the Digital Banking Podcast , host Josh DeTar welcomed Tommy Cotter, Director of Data Products at Benzinga. Cotter spent his early career optimizing Ram 1500 production at Fiat Chrysler, where a single second of downtime could cost a truck. In this episode, he joined DeTar to talk about what that mindset looked like applied to financial services and why most digital transformation still amounted to putting a broken process on an iPad. They got into the build vs. buy debate in an AI-accelerated world, what Plaid's MCP connection meant for community FIs, and why hyper-personalization had nothing to do with uploading a photo of your dog. Cotter also introduced two ideas that sharpened the whole conversation: John Gruber's auteur theory — every product reflects the taste of the person calling the shots — and Ivan Vendrov's "tyranny of the marginal user," a warning about building for your lowest-engagement user at the expense of the ones who actually stay.

