Founder Operator Problem-Solver
Find the real problem. Work within what’s actually possible. Ship something that works today, not what would be perfect with unlimited time and budget.
Problem-First
The bottleneck is almost never what it looks like on the surface.
22 Years
Payments and fintech across PNC, Huntington, and Synchrony.
4 U.S. Patents
Issued 2021–2025, assigned to Synchrony Bank.
Founder + Operator
Running Aspire Digital with my wife Jaime to help small businesses compete like enterprises.
Where I’m coming from
Most of my career I’ve had a front-row seat to how big companies build things. Now I get to take everything I learned and help smaller teams move faster, smarter, and with the kind of leverage that used to be out of reach. The tools are there. Someone just has to know how to put them together.
Outside of work, Jaime is my best friend and my wife. What started as helping family and friends figure out their digital presence grew into Aspire Digital. We still make time to host friends and family at home, love to travel, and have two very spoiled boxers.
Selected Work
Every project came with its own politics, constraints, and people problems. This is how three of them went.
The account lookup platform had an adoption problem that more features weren't going to fix. I rebuilt the go-to-market around how merchants actually work. Clients that were avoiding it are now requesting access. Active across every eligible Synchrony merchant through 2026.
As a banker I watched the in-branch credit attribution problem cost real customers and real teams. At Synchrony I built the fix: Direct2Device, a tokenized link from originating device to user device. Four issued patents. Used company-wide. Cited in shareholder communications.
Stakeholders wanted a phased rollout. I gave them exactly that: an A/B testing framework that protected the single-codebase architecture the product needed. We launched in half the projected time. Then came back and delivered the full prefill feature in one-third of the original estimate. Conversion came in at 3 times the projected lift.
Aspire Digital
My wife Jaime and I built Aspire Digital together. It’s a husband-and-wife studio that gives small businesses the tools and the human attention that most of them can’t get from a traditional agency.
Jaime leads UX and creative. I handle strategy, architecture, and technical direction. Between us, we cover what most agencies split into five separate invoices.
What I’m building now
Hands-on with token efficiency, RAG, on-prem deployment, and the piece most companies miss: workforce adoption. That’s what’s stalling organizations that bought AI tools and watched them collect dust.
Twenty-plus years of bringing product discipline to complex problems, now applied to the biggest platform shift I’ve seen. It takes the technical depth to build it right and the patience to actually walk a team through it. That’s what I bring.
Token Efficiency
Every time AI answers a question, it costs money. Most companies waste the majority of that budget on poorly designed prompts and redundant calls. I find the leaks and fix them, usually cutting costs significantly without touching the quality of the output.
RAG Architecture
ChatGPT knows a lot about the world but nothing about your company, your clients, or your processes. This is how you connect an AI to your actual documents and data so it answers based on what's true for you, not what's generally true for everyone.
On-Premises Deployment
Most AI tools send your data to servers in the cloud. For industries with strict compliance requirements, or companies that simply don't want their information leaving the building, there are ways to run AI entirely on your own hardware. I've built these setups from scratch.
Workforce Adoption
The number one reason AI investments fail is not the technology. Buying the tools is the easy part. I work with teams on the change management side: the training, the workflows, and the day-to-day habits that turn a line item into a real productivity shift.
Fine-Tuning
Out of the box, AI sounds like AI. Fine-tuning is how you train a model on your company's tone, terminology, and style so the output actually sounds like it came from your team. Think of it as onboarding a new employee, except the employee is a machine.
Get in touch
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Chris Otten
Co-Founder & Technical Director
Aspire Digital
VP, Emerging Payments — Synchrony