Jeremy Hubbard is Chief Technology and Data Officer at Rest, one of Australia’s largest superannuation funds. He is accountable for technology, cyber security, data analytics, and artificial intelligence. With over 30 years in technology, Jeremy previously served as CIO at UBank and held technology leadership roles at Once Australia, Capgemini, and Oracle Corporation. He is passionate about building high-performing teams and shaping organisational culture. A graduate of AICD’s Company Directors program, Jeremy holds a Bachelor of Information Technology from the University of Queensland and is completing a Master of Organisational Leadership at Melbourne Business School.
Recently, in an exclusive interview with CIO Magazine, Jeremy shared insights into how technology must disrupt rather than merely support business, a conviction formed at UBank in 2011 when launching Australia’s first digital home loan forced the team to challenge every non-negotiable banking assumption — from KYC to wet signatures — and redesign around how customers actually wanted to buy, not how banks had always processed. On industry trends, Jeremy sees GenAI for productivity as overhyped — useful but a starting point, not a destination — while agentic AI is underestimated, signaling a structural shift where AI acts on members’ behalf and funds with strong identity, governance, and data architecture will move fast while others retrofit. His advice to senior engineers aspiring to CIO: stop optimising for technical depth, start investing in business fluency, speak the language of outcomes, build relationships outside tech, and never stop learning. The following excerpts are taken from the interview.
What moment early in your career first convinced you that technology should disrupt, not just support, the business?
It happened gradually, then all at once, which is probably how most shifts actually feel in hindsight.
I was in the early days of UBank, watching customers interact with financial products. The technology we were building inside the enterprise was nowhere near as easy to use, fast, or useful as what people already had in their pockets. The iPhone had arrived. Customers were setting the bar, not banks.
The moment that crystallised it was the launch of UBank’s home loan product in 2011. A mortgage had always been manual and paper-based – forms, branches, wet signatures, weeks of waiting. We made it digital. But to do that, we couldn’t just digitise the existing process. We had to challenge every assumption in it, including the things the bank considered non-negotiable. Know-your-customer checks. Approval workflows. The whole model. We had to redesign it around how a customer actually wanted to buy a home loan, not around how the bank had always processed one.
That experience convinced me that technology’s job isn’t to automate what exists. It’s to ask whether what exists is worth automating at all, and if not, to build something better.
What do you love the most about your current role?
I keep coming back to scale and consequence. Rest has over 2 million members, 48% of them under 30. I feel genuinely privileged to play a role in shaping their experience and their retirement outcomes, people who are decades away from retirement and not thinking about super at all. That gap between where they are and where they need to be is exactly where technology can do something meaningful.
I also love that the role demands two completely different things at once. One part of my job is running a complex technology organisation, cyber, data, delivery, AI strategy, platforms, people. The other part is being a business leader at the executive table, shaping what Rest becomes over the next five years. The tension between those two keeps it honest. You can’t hide in either one.
I’m passionate about building high-performing teams and helping people reach their potential, watching someone step into a role they didn’t think they were ready for is genuinely one of the best parts of the job. At Rest I’ve been building a team where people have clarity of purpose, feel connected to member outcomes, and do the best work of their careers. There’s still more to do, but we’re well on our way.
Which trend in financial services technology is overhyped right now, and which is being underestimated?
AI is simultaneously the most overhyped and the most underestimated force in financial services right now, it just depends on which part of it you’re looking at.
The overhyped end is GenAI for productivity. Every fund, every bank, every fintech has announced a co-pilot or a summarisation tool. That work has value, but the industry is treating it like a destination. It’s a starting point. Many organisations are still at Stage 1, using AI to assist humans, and declaring victory.
What’s being underestimated is agentic AI and what it means for member service. We’re moving toward a world where AI doesn’t just assist people, it acts on their behalf, at scale, across the full arc of a member’s financial life. That’s a structural shift. The funds and banks that get their foundations right now (identity, governance, data architecture) will be able to move fast when the window is open. The ones that don’t will find themselves trying to retrofit governance onto systems that were never designed for non-human actors. That gap will compound quickly.
What shift in the threat landscape should every board member understand by end of 2026?
The shift boards need to understand is that the threat environment is now operating at machine speed, and most of our defences were designed for human speed.
AI has fundamentally changed the offensive side of the equation, and most defensive postures haven’t kept pace. The window between a vulnerability being identified and exploited has collapsed from years to hours. AI-automated phishing is now achieving click-through rates of 54%, a 450% increase over standard phishing, and Microsoft detected 8.3 billion email phishing threats in Q1 2026 alone. [i] [ii] This is what’s already happening.
For board members, the implication is straightforward. Cyber is a member and customer trust issue before it’s anything else. Trust, once lost, is extraordinarily hard to rebuild, and in financial services, it’s the foundation everything else rests on. Cyber is also a team sport. The threat doesn’t discriminate by organisation or sector, and the industry is stronger when we share intelligence, collaborate on standards, and treat this as a collective responsibility.
The question to ask your CIO isn’t “are we compliant?” It’s “can our controls keep pace with threats that don’t wait for a human to review them?”
What book, podcast, or idea has most influenced how you think about risk and innovation?
The Great Mental Models by Shane Parrish. It might sound abstract for a technology role, but at its core it’s about one thing: seeing the world as it actually is, not as you want it to be.
That distinction matters enormously in risk and innovation. Most bad decisions in technology come from one of two places, ego getting in the way of the facts, or being too far from the consequences of the decision to feel them clearly. Mental models are a way to pressure-test your own thinking before you commit. First principles thinking. Second-order consequences. Inversion, instead of planning for success, asking what would make this fail and working backward from there.
For me, the practical impact has been in how I approach risk conversations. The instinct in most organisations is to frame risk in a way that makes it easier to approve. I’d rather name it plainly and let the decision stand on honest ground.
What’s one piece of technology, in any industry, that you think is genuinely brilliant and why?
SpaceX and the reusable rocket.
For decades, everyone in aerospace accepted one thing as fact: rockets are single-use. SpaceX asked why, found no good answer, and built the rocket that proved it wrong. The result changed the economics of space entirely.
What’s equally compelling is how they got there. The first Starship test flight in 2023 exploded over the Gulf of Mexico before stage separation. Subsequent flights failed in different ways. In most organisations that level of public failure would have ended the programme. Instead, SpaceX treated each one as data, iterated fast, and by late 2024 were catching the booster mid-air on return. Eleven flights, six successes, five failures. It shows no sign of stopping.
That willingness to fail visibly, learn quickly, and keep going is rarer than it sounds. Most organisations manage risk on paper. SpaceX went and found out what would actually break. I find that genuinely brilliant.
What one sentence would you want your team to see every day?
Know the goal. Back each other. Find a way.
What is your biggest goal? Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
My biggest goal right now is simple: get Rest to AI-native before the window closes. The super industry is at an inflection point, and the funds that build the right foundations (identity, governance, data architecture) in the next 12 to 18 months will be the ones that can move with confidence when agentic AI is ready to scale. The ones that don’t will be retrofitting. That gap compounds.
Beyond Rest, I want to keep growing as a leader. I’m completing a Master of Organisational Leadership at Melbourne Business School, and that’s deliberate. The hardest problems I face are human ones. How you build culture at scale, how you lead through uncertainty, how you develop people who then go on to lead others. That’s where I want to keep getting better.
In 5 years, I see myself in a role with broader scope, whether that’s a larger organisation, a board portfolio, or both. Impact is what I’m after: a chance to make a bigger difference for more people, contribute to decisions that matter, and keep building teams that do work they’re genuinely proud of.
What’s one piece of tactical advice you’d give a senior engineer who wants to become a CIO?
Stop optimising for technical depth and start investing in business fluency.
The technical skills got you here and they still matter. The gap between a great senior engineer and a CIO is about business fluency: the ability to influence senior leaders and drive real business outcomes. To take a complex technology decision and make a business leader care about it. To understand what the CFO is worried about, what the CMO is trying to achieve, and frame your work in terms they’re making decisions against.
The engineers I’ve seen make that transition well didn’t wait for permission to play a bigger role. They started speaking the language of outcomes, customer outcomes, business outcomes, cost and risk, before anyone gave them a leadership title. They built relationships outside their team. They got curious about the parts of the business that had nothing to do with technology.
And they never stopped learning. Technology moves fast, faster now than at any point in my career. The leaders who stay relevant are the ones who stayed curious, adapted quickly, and were honest about what they didn’t yet know. That habit of continuous learning keeps you effective on the way up and once you’re there.
[i] Threat actor abuse of AI accelerates from tool to cyberattack surface | Microsoft Security Blog
[ii] Email threat landscape: Q1 2026 trends and insights | Microsoft Security Blog