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Digital transformation has been accompanied by digital demystification at
Known as Decode, the award-winning program breaks down complex topics for people at all levels and in various roles at the bank, helping them understand the "why" behind technology decisions, Haus said.
"Speaking in your audience's language is the key," said Haus, chief information officer of consumer and community banking at Chase, where he oversees more than 16,000 technologists and an annual budget of $9 billion.
It's a key Haus has used to unlock significant changes in the way
Under his leadership, the bank has modernized legacy systems, moved critical workloads to the public and private cloud, and used artificial intelligence to accelerate software development and testing. His plans for the years ahead include an expansion of AI-driven workflows in software development, continued cloud adoption, and using advanced AI and machine learning to strengthen security, fraud detection and the customer experience at Chase.
While innovation comes with costs, Haus enables bank leaders to see the value. When discussing the drawbacks of older technologies, for example, his team frames them as friction that prevents Chase from moving as quickly as a startup.
"My goal is to show how a technical 'cost' is actually an investment in the firm's competitive edge," said Haus, who joined Chase in 2020 after stints with Capital One, AOL and PayPal, among other companies.
Another example is the AI-powered agents his team built to replace manual processes for testing software. Processes that once took weeks now take minutes, speeding up the journey that a business idea takes from a conference room whiteboard to the app on a customer's phone, Haus said.
"By quantifying the gap between a manual process and an automated one, we can move the conversation from 'technology spending' to 'speed to market.'" he said. "We aren't just maintaining systems; we are building the agility required to remain the primary engine of our customers' financial lives."
The AI agents align with another of Haus's priorities: freeing software engineers to focus on higher-value work.
"We don't hire engineers to write code," he said. "We hire them to know what code to write. That means we look for talented, creative minds that want to solve big problems. When that's the case, why then bog down teams with tedious, repetitive work in technology lifecycle management, large-scale testing and more?"
