Michael Cullum Unlocks AI-Driven Insights for Financial Institutions at Bud
Michael Cullum, VP of Engineering and Data at Bud
VP of Engineering and Data at Bud
Michael is an accomplished technology executive serving as the VP of Engineering & Data at Bud Financial, a data intelligence fintech company. Since joining Bud in 2019, he has been instrumental in leading the data and engineering teams and driving strategic initiatives. With a strong focus on strategy and execution, Michael ensures that Bud builds, delivers and maintains a high-quality platform. His expertise lies in developing cutting-edge technology and AI solutions, as well as building data analytics tools that empower organizations to transform their data into valuable customer insights.
With over 15 years of experience in the tech industry, Michael has held various positions in software and data platform engineering at renowned companies. His previous work includes a specialization in data platform engineering at scale while working at SamKnows. Throughout his career, Michael has been actively involved in open source projects and has made significant contributions to the Symfony and PHP communities, particularly in the areas of security and standards. Michael began his career in the web hosting industry, including founding a company that was later acquired.
Michael is deeply passionate about leading high-performing teams, driving innovation, and achieving outstanding results. With his unwavering commitment to excellence and his profound understanding of technology trends, Michael continues to shape the future of engineering at Bud Financial, positioning the company at the forefront of the industry.
Transcript
We generally work with sort of larger financial institutions to help them take transactional financial data and turn that into actionable insights. So that might be through enabling sort of better engagement with consumers and your customers, or it might be about better understanding them for affordability assessments, collections, and so on.
We're a tech company. We're a data company. We're an AI company, and we have been for years.
Being a digital champion, it's great to see Bud being recognized for being that ideal of what a tech company should be. And obviously, I'm really proud of the team that we have here at Bud.
We're thinking internally about how we use Bud, how we use AI. At Bud, having the right tools and being able to use the right technology. It makes massive differences in terms of how efficient people can be and being able to focus on the task at hand.
We use Astra as sort of our primary database and data store when we're looking at sort of individual customer data. So every sort of banking transaction that's running through our systems, we're using Cassandra to store that, the enrichments associated with that, instances of customers, how we're managing every sort of core bit of data in the Bud platform that we need to be able to serve goes through Cassandra.
And if we think about the transactional data volumes that we're processing, sometimes we're dealing with hundreds of thousands of banking transactions a second. Being able to run that through Astra, it just handles it without breaking a sweat.
My advice is focus on what you're good at as an organization and work with other partners where you can. The expertise we have in databases versus the expertise that DataStax has in databases, there's a big delta there, right? We could get by.
But working with a company like DataStax, where they have a huge amount more expertise, you're ultimately delivering a better experience.