A CTO who can't evaluate technical quality firsthand is flying blind. They rely on vendor decks, internal summaries, and lagging indicators. By the time a bad decision surfaces, the competition has already moved.
The banking industry is about to go through one of its biggest technology shifts — AI, core modernization, real-time infrastructure. The CTOs who navigate it well will be the ones who stayed close enough to engineering to recognize patterns early. They can look at a product and know whether it's built to last. They can talk to a team and understand the tradeoffs without a PowerPoint.
The worst version of this is the AI-pilled CTO who thinks the technology has advanced enough that they don't need to understand the fundamentals anymore. Throw an LLM at it, hire some prompt engineers, call it a day. That thinking is dangerous. AI doesn't fix a broken core. It doesn't make up for bad data modeling or nonexistent testing discipline. It amplifies whatever foundation you have — for better or worse. The institutions that treat AI as a shortcut will find themselves with faster failures, not better technology.
The banks that put someone like that in charge will have a real advantage. The ones that don't will be playing catch-up.