David Fapohunda is a Managing Director at Barclays, where he leads operations, technology, and AI strategy across the Corporate, Consumer, and Payments businesses. Over 26 years in financial services, spanning Citi, PwC, and Barclays, he has led global operations of 6,000+ people, managed budgets exceeding $1.25B, and delivered platform modernizations that consolidated and migrated legacy systems to cloud-native platforms. A frequent speaker at Money20/20, BAI, and the American Bankers Association, and a trustee of The Putney School, he writes widely on AI governance, board accountability, fraud prevention, and servant leadership in the agentic AI era. He studied Finance and Information Systems at Pace University.
Recently, in an exclusive interview with CIO Magazine, David shared insights into a 26-year journey that began at Citi with a global KYC rollout and evolved into leading operations, technology, and AI strategy across Corporate, Consumer, and Payments at Barclays. On AI, David believes the technology doesn’t replace empathy; it enables it, giving leaders the capacity to reinvest in human moments that matter while building governance, transparency, and control into every model. Looking ahead, he sees the next generation of leaders needing wisdom, business acumen, and the confidence to question and direct AI, not just operate it. His advice to aspiring professionals is to pair intellectual curiosity with the boldness to speak up, challenge, and learn from failure. The following excerpts are taken from the interview.
Looking back 25+ years, what moment or early role first showed you that technology and data could reshape financial services operations?
It was 1999, at the very start of my career at Citi, and I was helping to coordinate the project management of a Know Your Customer application that was being rolled out globally, working from the development and engineering side. As someone just entering the industry, the world of financial crime, regulatory requirements, and client resolution was entirely foreign to me, and I loved learning it. The expectations of the bank and the regulatory demands together formed the problem statement I still find compelling today. How do we truly know who our customers are and confirm that their behavior aligns with our understanding of them? How do we do that consistently across a global organization, for a global client base that interacts with the bank in dozens of different ways? The moment it truly clicked was when I understood how a global institution ran countless individual processes across every business line and every country, and how the consistent delivery of technology could bring them all together, creating a common data platform that unifies the customer to the bank and lays the foundation for a genuine 360-degree view. That was when I learned that delivering frictionless client service while adhering to a complex global footprint of regulation is one of the truly hard problems an institution faces, and that data and technology were the way through it. That problem became the throughline of the next twenty-six years of my career, from core banking and payments platforms to real-time fraud systems and, today, enterprise AI.
When you think about your current role, what part of it do you genuinely love most, and why does it keep you motivated?
I am a problem solver and a builder at heart. I have always enjoyed puzzles, taking things apart to understand how they work and then creating something new. What I love just as much is collaborating with others and finding the synergies that surface solutions I could never have arrived at on my own. It fulfills me to be in an environment where I am inspired and can, in turn, inspire others. As a leader, I feel a genuine excitement for success when I am working in the most detailed part of a project. That throughput of knowledge at the granular level, the problem, the solution, and the camaraderie of the people around me, is what makes me feel, at the end of the day, that I have actually accomplished something. What keeps me motivated is the hope that in the years ahead I can help develop innovative solutions at pace and scale that shape many different industries, each one its own puzzle to solve.
Efficiency and empathy have to coexist. How will the definition of “customer-first” evolve in financial services by 2031 as AI handles more interactions?
I don’t believe the concept of customer-first will change over the next five years. It will still mean putting the customer at the center of everything you do, and seeking to delight and please them in every interaction. What changes with AI is our capability. We gain a far better understanding of our customers’ preferences, the foresight to see the challenges they will face, and the ability to offer them solutions, whether that means empowering them to solve a problem on their own or putting a human beside them to help in the moments that truly matter. That, to me, is the essence of customer-first, and AI simply enables it. The real opportunity is that AI lets us reinvest our resources where they count most, so that more people are available to hold more of our customers’ and clients’ hands through the challenging times. Efficiency, done well, is what buys us the room to be more empathetic, not less.
Data is the core asset, but trust is fragile. How should financial services leaders balance hyper-personalization with data privacy and ethics in the next five years?
Having spent most of my career transforming infrastructure, systems, controls, and operations across people, process, and technology, I’d like to reframe this question with the lens of my career in mind. It isn’t really about how you deliver hyper-personalization while balancing privacy. It’s about understanding what the customer actually wants. If a customer wants a hyper-personalized experience and feels comfortable sharing their private data to enable it, that is perfectly fine; there is no ethical dilemma there. What matters is the framework around that choice: giving the customer transparency that it is happening, the option to decide when and how their data is used, and, ultimately, the lever to remove their data whenever and however they wish. I genuinely believe customers want to be heard and understood, and they enjoy a concierge experience, but they should never be forced to make privacy the price of admission. Get the consent, transparency, and control right, and personalization and trust reinforce each other rather than compete.
What new roles or skill sets will be critical inside financial services firms five years from now that barely exist today?
Five years from now, there will still be a need for genuine human interaction, and that will demand more robust EQ than IQ. With AI, knowledge becomes abundant, so knowing when to apply that knowledge becomes the premium, and that is where wisdom comes in. We will need to reskill our workforce toward wisdom, business acumen, strategy, and leadership. The technical skills we hold will change in how they are used. An accountant, for example, will still need to know the technical craft of accounting, but may not practice it day to day; instead, that accountant may be responsible for ensuring an AI-enabled workflow is performing accurately, with precision and consistency. In effect, they become a leader monitoring an AI team, responsible for interacting with other leaders, sharing observations, cultivating innovative solutions, and thinking critically. I’m already seeing the early shape of this in my own work, embedding generative and agentic AI into production under a governance model, where the highest-value people are the ones who can direct, question, and govern the machine rather than simply operate alongside it. Those are the skill sets we need now and will need increasingly over the next five years.
Leaders are products of what they read and watch. What book, documentary, or thinker outside financial services has most shaped your approach to problem solving, and why?
I love science fiction. I think of Asimov and other science fiction writers as something close to fortune tellers. The human element, the human condition, and the ethical questions we ask ourselves will always be with us, and engaging with them helps you become a more genuine person and a more genuine leader. On the technical side, I am an avid podcast listener, and my favorites are the ones that explore other industries and how they have evolved and grown. One I return to often is Acquired, which goes deep on companies well outside financial services: their origins, how they differentiate themselves, the challenges they have faced and overcome, and how they reinvent and reimagine themselves. Looking left and looking right into other fields keeps me sharp in my own day-to-day work and helps me think more broadly and expansively about the economy, government, and the social changes that may affect me both personally and professionally. Together, these shape the way I reason and the way I solve problems.
When you need to reset your thinking on a complex problem, what personal ritual or place consistently gives you breakthrough ideas?
I find my moments of clarity at five in the morning. Sometimes it is because I have been working on a problem unconsciously and simply wake up with a clear view of it; more often, that early hour gives me the space to step outside my normal thinking patterns and see things from a different perspective, which surfaces challenges and opportunities I hadn’t imagined. The other thing that resets me is going to the movies. I get completely engulfed in the story and the magic, and for those two hours, I forget everything I’ve been carrying. I come out refreshed and energized to think and to solve. It gives me a moment to strip away my emotional attachment to a problem and start afresh, and that fresh start is often where the breakthrough lives.
What is your biggest goal? Where do you see yourself in five years from now?
In five years, I hope to be working in an environment with a strong and rich culture, surrounded by peers who are genuine and authentic, and teams that are innovative and daring enough to disrupt normal thinking patterns and deliver solutions that make a meaningful difference in people’s daily lives. I’d like to think of myself as the quiet conductor: not necessarily seen, but heard through the collaborative alignment of the musicians who work together to create a passionate experience for others. It’s a bold and slightly philosophical way to put it, and in practice it may just as often mean solving simple, practical problems, but to my mind those carry the same effect, and the same worth, as the large and magnanimous ones.
Aspiring leaders need real tactics. What’s one unglamorous skill in risk, ops, or transformation that you wish more young professionals would master early?
This is a hard one to answer because people naturally evolve with age. But if I had been more confident in myself as a younger professional, comfortable enough to speak up, ask questions, challenge my seniors, and help create an environment where I could thrive, I believe I would have made a greater impact in the roles I held. That same boldness is what allows you to take risks, to test and fail, and to learn from the failure. The other thing is an insatiable intellectual curiosity: wanting to understand how things work, how well a meeting actually went, what causes inefficiency, and how a journey truly feels for a customer as they move through it. That curiosity is the foundation for identifying problems, which in turn leads to creative solutions. The boldness of confidence, the hunger for knowledge, and those combined soft skills will make a real difference, both to a young professional personally and to the teams they work in.