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In February 2026, Anthropic ran a Claude Code hackathon. More than 13,000 people applied, 500 were chosen, and each was given one week to build something real. When the winners were announced, the lineup wasn't what anyone would have predicted: a personal injury lawyer, a cardiologist, a roads and infrastructure specialist, an electronic musician, and exactly one professional software engineer. Four of the five had never built software for a living.

Read that again. The people who won a coding competition mostly weren't coders. This isn't a story about coding getting easier. It's a story about the distance between knowing and building collapsing to almost nothing. When a tool can execute whatever you can clearly specify, technical skill stops being the bottleneck. What becomes scarce is something older and harder to manufacture: understanding a problem deeply enough to know what is worth building in the first place. In technology, revolutions are commonplace. A Renaissance is rare. This is a Renaissance.

When Everything Changes at Once, Range Beats Depth

That hackathon proves a narrow point first. Hand a domain expert the power to execute, and a single field gets reshaped by the person who understands it best. The cardiologist out-builds the engineer in medicine. But look closely at who actually won. They were deep specialists, each owning one field, succeeding because in each case only one thing had changed. That is the easy version of the story, and banking does not get the easy version.

Banking is the hard version. It is not one field, and it is not one thing changing. When many domains move at once and collide with each other, the advantage stops belonging to the specialist who can finally execute in a single lane. It shifts to the person who can be that kind of expert across several lanes at the same time. This is the condition the word Renaissance actually describes. The first Renaissance, in the 1400s, wasn't won by specialists. It was won by people who crossed boundaries: artists who dissected anatomy, engineers who painted, bankers who funded science. When everything moves together, the opportunities and the risks stop living inside any one field. They start living at the intersections.

That is the whole argument in a sentence. Specialists optimize within a lane, but polymaths recombine across lanes, and in an era of many simultaneous changes, recombination is the scarce and decisive skill. A breakthrough in one discipline is a specialist's victory. A solution that satisfies five disciplines at once is a polymath's.

None of this means depth stops mattering. The strongest objection to everything above is that banking is a domain of hard-won expertise, and that generalists are just shallow specialists in disguise, dangerous people to put in charge of capital and risk. It is a fair challenge, and the research answers it directly. In his book Range, David Epstein separates two kinds of environments: kind ones, where the rules are stable and the same patterns repeat, and wicked ones, where the rules shift and the feedback is delayed or misleading. In kind environments, the narrow specialist wins. In wicked ones, the integrator does.

Banking spent decades as a kind environment. It has just become a wicked one. Depth still matters enormously. What no longer suffices is depth that cannot combine with anything else.

Banking Just Became a Wicked Problem

It would be easy to read banking's moment as a story about technology. Read it that way and you will misread it. The fundamentals have not moved an inch. Banking is still about trust, risk management, credit, liquidity, payments, custody, confidence, and the disciplined allocation of capital. Those are the what and the why of banking, and they are permanent. What is being rewritten, at speed, is the how. And it is being rewritten on every front at once.

You don't have to take that on faith. Jack Henry's 2026 Strategy Benchmark, a survey of 193 bank and credit union CEOs conducted at the start of this year, doesn't describe a single disruption to manage. It describes a dozen pressures arriving together.

For the first time in the survey's history, AI is the number one technology investment for both banks and credit unions, and 88% plan to increase technology spend over the next two years, up from 76% a year ago. At the same time, deposits are under open assault. Banks now rank deposit attrition as their single biggest worry, roughly $3 trillion has already drained from banks and credit unions to fintechs, and the U.S. Treasury's own stablecoin projections imply another $1.7 trillion could follow. For the first time in three years, CEOs name fintechs, not other community institutions, as their biggest competitive threat, because for younger accountholders, banking has stopped being a place you go and become a feature on a phone.

Underneath all of it, the monetary system itself is changing shape. Industry strategists increasingly describe a new hybrid monetary era, in which traditional finance and on-chain finance collide: the GENIUS Act, tokenized deposits, stablecoins, and a wave of national trust charters granted to crypto and fintech firms reaching for direct access to the Fed's payment rails.

The operational fronts are moving just as fast. Payments are being rebuilt, with 94% of institutions planning to add new services, even though only 36% have a formal payments strategy. Lending is going AI-native, with 95% planning to enhance it with automation and AI. Fraud is migrating from transaction monitoring to identity itself. And the scarcest resource of all, talent, is the biggest aggregate concern across every respondent.

None of these is happening in sequence. They are happening at once, and they are entangled. A deposit problem is now a stablecoin problem is a payments problem is a regulatory problem. This is exactly the multi-front, everything-at-once condition where range beats depth. Banking, in other words, is entering its Renaissance.

How to Spot a Polymath Worth Following

So who should bankers actually follow through a moment like this? Not the deepest expert in any one of those fronts. The criteria, stated plainly, are banking domain depth, AI readiness, blockchain and programmable-money awareness, regulatory judgment, a real execution history, public influence, and genuine range across all of it. We do not pretend to have all the answers, or to find them in any one place. But we read widely, and the names below are the ones we keep returning to. They are a deliberately diverse group with a single thread in common: they grasp banking's durable purpose, and they can connect it across the exact pressures laid out above.

One thing to keep in mind as you read. You do not have to agree with any of these people, and following someone is not the same as endorsing them. The point is to see how each of them reads a landscape that is shifting under all of us. What you are after is their perspective, not the perspective. And the ones worth your attention are the ones who put their thinking into public, who write, speak, and argue in the open, because a view you cannot see is a view you cannot learn from.

The 10 Polymaths Bank Leaders Should Follow

Listed alphabetically by first name, not ranked: Alex Johnson, Bob Mark, Caitlin Long, Chris Nichols, Frank Rotman, Greg Kidd, Jackie Reses, Jo Ann Barefoot, Noor A. Menai, and Patrick Collison. This isn't a leaderboard. The point is range.

Alex Johnson: The Independent Banking Analyst

Alex Johnson built Fintech Takes into one of the most-read independent reads in financial services by doing exactly what this list values: thinking in public, several times a week, about where banking, technology, and policy collide. He spent two decades inside the industry's research shops before going independent, so his analysis is grounded rather than breathless, and he is unusually good at connecting a regulatory shift to a product decision to a balance-sheet consequence in a single thread. When everything is moving at once, the scarce skill is holding the whole board in view and explaining it plainly. That is his entire job, and he does it in the open, which is exactly what makes him worth following.

Bob Mark: The Risk-and-Regulation Authority

Bob Mark quite literally wrote the book on risk and the rules that govern it, co-authoring the texts a generation of bankers learned enterprise risk management from, after running risk as Chief Risk Officer at CIBC and building the financial-risk practice at Coopers and Lybrand. Risk management is one of banking's permanent fundamentals, but the how is being rewritten as AI reshapes credit, fraud migrates to identity, and capital rules adapt to tokenized money, and almost no one connects the quantitative discipline, the regulatory framework, and the boardroom's governance the way he does. He founded UCLA's financial engineering program for the same reason this list exists, to teach people to integrate across silos rather than master one. If you want the durable grammar of risk before you go rewriting its vocabulary, he is the one to read.

Caitlin Long: The Bank-Charter Blockchain Bridge

Caitlin Long crossed from Wall Street capital markets into Bitcoin, blockchain law, digital assets, tokenized deposits, and bank-charter strategy. She maps directly onto the industry's central anxiety: how to meet a hybrid monetary era without surrendering the deposit franchise. Her work on tokenized deposits, the franchise-preserving alternative to stablecoins, is precisely the bridge most CEOs are now trying to build.

Chris Nichols: The Community-Bank Workflow Thinker

Chris Nichols lives in the mechanics that decide whether a community bank performs: loan pricing, deposit strategy, payments, customer profitability, AI adoption, and balance-sheet discipline. When the survey's top aggregate priority is operational efficiency, Nichols is the person translating that abstraction into the loan committee, the deposit desk, and the relationship manager's workflow, where it either becomes real or doesn't.

Frank Rotman: The Data-Driven Credit Polymath

Frank Rotman embodies the shift from credit-as-intuition to credit-as-information. His Capital One lineage is the proof point: it's where the industry learned credit could be run as a data business. As 95% of institutions move to AI-native lending and most still lack the minimum viable data to power it, Rotman is the clearest guide to treating data and credit as one discipline.

Greg Kidd: The Payments, Identity, and Tokenized-Banking Builder

Greg Kidd sits at an intersection most people don't recognize as one: payments, digital identity, regulated money, digital currency, Ripple, and banking infrastructure. That's the same intersection the industry keeps circling, with fraud migrating to identity, payments migrating on-chain, and deposits migrating into tokenized form. The future of banking won't be won with a better app. It'll be won on identity, settlement, and trust, and Kidd works on all three.

Jackie Reses: The Digital-Bank Builder

Jackie Reses has built a bank inside a tech company and then gone out and run a chartered one, which is exactly the dual fluency a CEO worried about fintechs needs to study. At Square she built banking and lending from almost nothing; at Lead Bank she took a century-old community institution and turned it into modern banking-as-a-service infrastructure, growing it past $2.5 billion in assets while serving the very fintechs pulling deposits away from everyone else. She treats regulators as her most important stakeholders rather than an obstacle, which is the posture that separates durable digital banking from the kind that outgrows its own controls. If you want to watch deposits, payments, lending, and compliance get rebuilt as one system, watch what she builds.

Jo Ann Barefoot: The RegTech and AI Governance Voice

Jo Ann Barefoot insists on the half of the equation banks would rather skip: the regulator's side. No institution modernizes if supervision, compliance, and consumer protection stay analog while the products go digital, and the whole hybrid-money story hinges on rules that haven't been written yet. She connects law, policy, SupTech, RegTech, and AI governance into one argument for moving the system forward together.

Noor A. Menai: The Sitting-Bank CEO

Noor A. Menai carries the perspective that's hardest to fake: he runs a regulated bank right now, balancing the exact tensions the survey measures, including deposits, liquidity, capital, customers, and operational risk, while still pushing into AI and programmable money. He has also sat where policy gets shaped, on the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco's Community Depository Institutions Advisory Council and the FDIC's Subcommittee on Supervision Modernization, and he is a regular commentator in national media and on global banking stages. Paired with his Chia Network board service, that vantage point puts him at the seam between today's banking and tomorrow's tokenized money, which is where every bank leader now has to operate.

Patrick Collison: The Payments Infrastructure Builder

Patrick Collison is the CEO of Stripe, the company that quietly became core infrastructure for the internet economy, moving payment volume equal to roughly one percent of global GDP, which gives him a view of how money actually moves that almost no banker has. Under him Stripe pushed straight into the seam this piece is about, buying stablecoin infrastructure, launching a blockchain built for stablecoin payments, and arguing in public that programmable money is an upgrade to the rails themselves, not a sideshow. With 94% of institutions racing to add payment services and only a third holding a real strategy, his reasoning about where settlement, stablecoins, and AI-driven commerce converge is some of the most useful you can read. And unlike most operators at his scale, he writes it down, in annual letters, congressional testimony, and open forums, so following his thinking is easy.

Now Audit Your Own Leadership Bench

Set bankers' own stated priorities beside this list and the through-line is unmistakable. Efficiency, deposits, younger accountholders, AI, payments, tokenized money, identity, and talent do not belong to separate disciplines anymore. They have collapsed into a single, entangled problem. And not one of these ten people is a single-lane specialist. Epstein's own conclusion is blunt: our greatest strength is the exact opposite of narrow specialization. It is "the ability to integrate broadly." That is the skill banking now demands.

The hackathon told us what the next decade rewards: not whoever knows the most about any one thing, but whoever understands a domain deeply enough to recombine it with everything changing around it. For a bank leader, this list has two uses. First, follow these ten, because their thinking is where the recombination is happening in public, and following it is the cheapest way to see around the next corner. Second, and harder, turn the same test on your own institution. Look down your leadership bench and ask an uncomfortable question: have you built range, or have you simply assembled ten specialists in ten separate lanes? In a kind environment, that team is fine. In a Renaissance, it loses. The institutions that thrive will be the ones that can integrate as fast as the ground beneath them moves.

The same logic applies to the technology a bank buys. The forces pulling banking apart, efficiency, margin, fraud, and AI, converged because they are one problem, which is why Amberoon built a single platform around the board's agenda instead of ten point tools in ten lanes. It brings that AI to community banks to run more efficiently, defend net interest margin, and prevent the fraud and financial-crime losses that drain earnings, with prototypes built alongside the FDIC, U.S. Treasury, and FinCEN and the simplicity of a dial tone. Big Tech power, without Big Tech scale. Talk to us.