Daniel Ahn, CEO and Co-founder of Delfi, discusses how AI-native balance-sheet management, financial risk management, and asset-liability management (ALM) are helping banks and credit unions strengthen resilience, manage interest-rate risk, and drive data-driven growth in today’s volatile financial landscape.
Daniel, could you walk us through your professional journey and how these experiences shaped your perspective on financial risk management?
My career on Wall Street—including at Citigroup, Citadel, BNP Paribas, and elsewhere–taught me that balance-sheet analysis and financial risk management is still too manual, too slow, and too dependent on expensive, specialized quant teams.
My career as a government official and policy advisor, including at the Federal Reserve, taught me that everyone needs risk management. Whether you’re a large Wall Street firm or a community bank or credit union serving main street, everyone is exposed to existential financial risks and complex balance sheet decisions.
The difference is that Wall Street banks have the resources to address those risks head-on, while most community banks and credit unions are often left hanging. I believe that technology can make the sharpest modern tools available to everyone.
What inspired you to start Delfi, and what gap in the financial services ecosystem were you aiming to address with an AI-native platform?
At Delfi, we built the centralized, automated balance-sheet intelligence platform I wished I had when working on Wall Street, not just repurposing Excel sheets. Our brilliant development team worked hard to make this technology fast, affordable, and accessible to the 8,000+ community banks and credit unions serving main street.
We built Delfi as a scalable AI-native platform from day one so that local, community, and regional depository institutions can act with the same speed and sophistication as their largest counterparts.
Delfi’s mission emphasizes democratizing advanced financial risk management for institutions of all sizes. Why is this particularly important in today’s volatile market environment?
Market volatility has turned balance-sheet management into a board priority. Recent rate movements have shown us all how fast unrealized losses, liquidity pressure, and margin compression build when institutions don’t have immediate visibility into financial risks.
Banks and credit unions of all sizes need tools that let them model risk, compare strategies, and take action to respond efficiently and effectively. Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank, unfortunately, learned this lesson the hard way.
Volatility shouldn’t paralyze banks and credit unions. Technology is how even smaller institutions can compete and protect their members/customers.
From your experience as a former chief economist and banker, what are the most common balance-sheet management challenges that smaller financial institutions face today?
One big challenge is fragmentation. Too many institutions still evaluate interest-rate risk, liquidity, loan growth, funding, and portfolio strategy in silos, with outputs that don’t talk to each other.
The second challenge is speed. Quarterly reports and consultant-driven ALM workflows are too slow for a market that moves daily. Financial institutions increasingly require real-time insights to make better balance sheet decisions and manage emerging financial risks.
The third is objectivity, on the seller side, because broker-driven analyses can come with an incentive to move their own inventory rather than provide the best balance-sheet decision for the bank or credit union.
How does Delfi’s AI-enabled platform help institutions align analytics with actionable strategies for managing interest-rate risk and capturing growth opportunities?
Delfi helps institutions move from “what is my risk exposure?” looking back to “what should I do next?” With our platform, a CFO can evaluate decisions. For example, they can analyze a potential hedge, security purchase, loan participation, deposit strategy, or M&A scenario and see the impact on earnings, liquidity, and risk exposure in basically real time. This kind of speed and flexibility lets leaders decide the best possible strategy.
Then we help them take action. Delfi Exchange takes you from analytics to execution. We entered into partnerships with Community Capital Technologies and other suppliers to build solutions for you then and there. For example, helping clients figure out how best to deploy capital as the balance sheet transitions from securities to loans. We are engaged with a credit union doing that right now.
While many institutions see market volatility as a risk, how can credit unions and banks turn the current interest-rate environment into an opportunity for disciplined growth?
Volatility is an opportunity when institutions can evaluate tradeoffs objectively and fast. A bond, loan participation, hedge, deposit pricing strategy, or even M&A may look attractive on the surface. But the real question is: how does this decision really impact my performance? Also, how is my balance sheet as a whole impacted under stress?
With Delfi, institutions can run those scenarios in real time and help capture margin, improve pricing, protect liquidity, and pursue growth without taking on hidden risks they only discover when things get difficult.
What are the key elements of a modern, data-driven approach to asset-liability management that differentiates successful institutions in today’s market?
Modern ALM has four hallmarks: it’s integrated across the full balance sheet; it’s continuous rather than quarterly; it’s predictive rather than looking back, and it’s tied directly to execution.
That means running high-fidelity simulations on real loan-level and deposit-level data, stress-testing across multiple rate paths with market-derived probabilities and being able to act on the results immediately—whether through a hedge, a loan sale, or a funding shift.
The institutions pulling ahead are the ones that have stopped treating ALM as a compliance exercise and started treating it as a daily decision-support engine for the CFO.
How has bringing Wall Street–level analytics to smaller institutions changed the way they approach decision-making and risk management?
Delfi’s AI powered analytics have fundamentally changed the cadence and the confidence of decision-making. CFOs and treasurers are running scenarios in real time during Asset-Liability Committee (ALCO) meetings instead of waiting for the next quarterly report, and they’re walking into board meetings with quantitative answers instead of gut feelings.
AI analytics also change the nature of decision-making, from reactive and slow to proactive and data driven. Instead of asking whether a transaction looks attractive in isolation, institutions can ask how it affects earnings, risk, liquidity, and resilience across the entire balance sheet.
That gives management teams a common language for tradeoffs and helps smaller institutions make decisions with a level of sophistication that historically required large quant teams and expensive infrastructure.
Could you share the vision behind the new CUSO and how it empowers credit unions to make more informed, data-driven balance-sheet decisions?
The vision behind Delfi CUSO is to make advanced ALM and balance-sheet intelligence accessible to the credit union movement in a structure built for credit unions.
Every credit union in the country should be able to protect its margin, manage interest-rate risk precisely, and unlock disciplined growth, all without needing to build a Wall Street quant desk to do it.
We’re proud to be partnered with One Washington Financial, Maps Credit Union, and Members1st Credit Union to make this vision a reality and help credit union CFOs punch above their weight.
What advice would you give to financial leaders seeking to strengthen their balance sheets and leverage technology to improve resilience and growth?
My advice is to stop treating balance-sheet management as a backward-looking report and start treating it as a forward-looking strategy function.
Don’t wait for the next rate shock to find out where your balance sheet is exposed.
Invest in tools that give you a real-time, integrated view across lending, funding, liquidity, and interest-rate risk, and make sure your analytics connect to execution venues so insight can become action.
Pick partners who are aligned with your mission—whether that’s a CUSO or another fintech—rather than legacy vendors who profit from complexity and from “but that’s how we’ve always done it” type of thinking.
And remember that member/customer experience and balance sheet optimization support each other. The institutions that manage risk best and make the most intelligent balance sheet decisions are also the ones who are best able to pass on savings to their members/customers and offer stabler and more competitive financial services for years to come.
Quote:
“There is a difference between caution and passivity. One is a virtue, the other is a choice.”
–Daniel Ahn, CEO Delfi
