Tech People in the Know: Acumen Financial Advantage’s Troy Kind

In what is a recurring feature, Finopotamus profiles interesting and intriguing tech professionals who are positively impacting the credit union industry.

For this issue, we visited with Acumen Financial Advantage’s Director of Information Technology Troy Kind. The Boston-based fintech bills itself as helping organizations, including credit unions, strengthen financial performance, reinforce leadership continuity, and steward resources for long-term value.

By W.B. King

With nearly 20 years of IT experience — over twelve years leading IT engineering, platform architecture, and operational maturity in highly regulated fintech environments— Troy Kind’s interest in tech was sparked in middle school.

Troy Kind

“What started to draw me into technology were the keyboarding classes. While learning to type with a wooden blinder over your hands and keyboard wasn’t necessarily fun, I enjoyed the keyboarding speed contests among my friends as we all tried to have the fastest and most accurate typing score,” he told Finopotamus. “My friends and I also had fun with the ‘Turtle programming’ in LOGO on the Apple II+. It always seemed like we were in a competition to see who could make the turtle run the longest without having the turtle needing to keep running after class had ended.”

Appropriate and Relevant Results

Kind’s slow and steady-paced career trajectory has indeed placed him in the lead. Among fintechs he has worked for is Fiserv. In 2005, he began as a software developer intern and left nearly 13 years later as director of technical delivery. Before accepting his role at Acumen Financial Technology in March 2026, he also served as the vice president of enterprise services at Velera.

“There’s been many shifts during my career starting with centralized computing with mainframes, to then distributed computing and purpose dedicated physical servers, virtualization, then the shift toward public cloud computing, hybrid cloud computing, and now the introduction of AI,” he reflected.

While noting that AI is a game changer for all departments, Kind said AI also creates challenges, such as data protection and ensuring intellectual property is preserved.

“As leaders, we need to also think about how we expand the capabilities of our teams as the use of AI drives efficiency in their jobs to get more completed in shorter amounts of time,” he continued. “AI isn’t perfect, and so leaders need to ensure that the proper safeguards are in place to review AI outputs, and validate the results are appropriate and relevant.”

What he likes about AI is its ability to provide a greater research capabilities in real-time during collaboration sessions with teammates that can be a part of the conversation. “At Acumen, we have a very exciting adoption of AI to help our analysts develop the right solutions for our clients enabling them to be more competitive in the market,” he noted.

Situational Leadership

With 45 employees, three of whom are tech-facing, Kind said he has a “people first” management style at Acumen. Leaders can’t execute vision without the support of their teams, he said.

“That is my philosophy and it’s important that mentality is carried forward. Try not to put people into situations where they don’t know what needs to happen. Allow decisions to be made at the lowest level possible,” he shared, noting that the company has over 200 clients. “If your people fully understand the direction and desire of where leadership wants to go, then let the people who turn the knobs and push the buttons do what they need to do to get the work done.”

This philosophy was instilled, in part, during his early years in database and application development by a mentor, Dean Fox, AVP Facets Development Team at Fiserv. “He reminded me consistently that employee creativity cannot be forced, and it comes at the oddest times. He taught me mentorship, and how to engage with clients, supported me during sessions, and then provided feedback immediately after meeting with clients.”

Years later while taking a leadership course, Kind realized that Fox was using “situational leadership” as part of his mentoring. “I’ve continued this through my career, trying to ensure I provided the right guidance and support based on the situation the team member is facing to help the team member be a part of the solution, and not have the solution provided to them,” he noted.

Uniting as Partners

One of the leading reasons credit unions will always be different than banks is the family atmosphere that is created within the communities they serve, Kind said, adding that “nobody likes nor deserves to be treated like another number.”

Fintechs that serve the credit union industry must bring the same relationship-based ethos to their credit union clients—because when you can connect with your clients, you can understand their perspectives and needs, he said.

“Those connections develop into strong partnerships, which in turn help the credit union industry be more creative and innovative without needing to throw millions of dollars into dedicated R&D teams,” Kind told Finopotamus, noting that Acumen is grounded in the credit union movement.

“‘People helping people’ isn’t just the core philosophy behind the industry, it should also be a basis behind modern society. Our greatest achievements have been when we have united under common goals,” he continued. “People are the foundation of both credit unions and fintechs, so when we are truly united as partners working together to solve problems, we can achieve great things.”