Executive Vice President & Chief Information Officer, Associated Banc-
Search every verified Terry Williams interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Terry Williams, a retired Marine Corps brigadier general and former founder of Van Williams LLC, currently serves as Senior Vice President of Global Fixed Assets at PenFed Credit Union and Program Director at the PenFed Foundation. In a September 2025 podcast appearance, he discussed the foundation's Veteran Entrepreneur Program, stating that interested veterans can apply to the program or contact him at [email protected]. He also noted that the foundation accepts donations through its website. In an August 2025 CIO roundtable, Williams discussed data management challenges at PenFed, describing efforts to normalize investor data from disparate formats to provide advisers with a 360-degree view of high-value clients. He said the organization moved from a data warehouse to a data lakehouse approach and emphasized that data governance creates accountability. Williams also stated that the organization is in the beginning stages of a pension application modernization and has built a data action team to advise executives.
“All of our investors' data is spread all over the place to say the least. So our key is to get all that data into a single readable, normalized format so the likes of our advisers can make proper decisions and have a 360 view when talking to a high-value customer.”
“If you're talking about data analytics the way I would measure it is it's all just making decisions faster. A simple metric is measuring throughput and efficiency gain in decision making and output data compared to before I did AI.”
“We moved from data warehouse to data lake to data lakehouse — the problem is are you willing to store all your data in one location. As we move to the new era of GenAI you can have sub-agents which can go across multiple data platforms, but you still need governance, risk, scalability and ethics.”
“In 2010 the problem implementing BI was data was messy and siloed; you couldn't do ML because data was siloed. In 2025 you can't do AI because data is siloed by data load — if you haven't invested in a data lakehouse and those platforms you're at a loss.”
“We work closely with our finance teams and our HR teams to find things that have money attached — how can I get you additional QBP dollars? How can I save you X, Y and Z so you have more in your budget?”
“Data governance starts the conversation because we tend to be the gatekeepers: who is the owner of the data and how do you facilitate a conversation when owners say 'you're going to misrepresent my data'? Governance creates accountability.”
“Because of the nature of our business it would be impossible to have a single data lake — I would call it more of a data reservoir that's provided just-in-time using APIs to connect and pull based on data governance rules.”
“We're in the beginning stages of a complete pension application modernization — the biggest thing this organization has ever done — and we've built a data action team so executives have trusted advisers to tell them what is necessary.”
“Our slogan moved from 'cyber is everyone's business' to 'data is everyone's responsibility' — it's not just the executive team anymore, we've committed to the board to do it together across the whole organization.”
“Real-time analytics usually ends up being a single-system problem; embedded analytics and embedded AI imply a federated architecture for real time, whereas bringing everything together into a centralized lake creates data quality, timeliness and governance challenges.”
“There’s an inability in an online environment to read subtext — there’s a lot of layers people don’t pick up on when you’re remote.”
“If you literally transcribe the conversation — 'How are you? I’m fine' — that’s basically sockpuppets; that’s not the human way.”
“There’s a term we use in training called 'congruence' — you look like you mean what you say, and you sound like you mean what you say.”
“As a leader, be as congruent as you can be, particularly in challenging times, because human senses are heightened under stress and will observe things that can be perceived as a threat.”
“Even if you can’t be overly congruent you absolutely need to not be incongruent — slow things down: one message at a time, pause in between and check the response you get.”
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