Tech People in the Know: Alkami and MANTL’s Benjamin Conant

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 Benjamin Conant, chief product officer at Alkami Technology and co-founder and CTO of MANTL. The Plano, Texas-based Alkami Technology is a digital sales and service platform provider for U.S. banks and credit unions. MANTL is an Alkami solution team offering unified account origination technology geared toward empowering banks and credit unions to open loan and deposit accounts seamlessly on any banking channel in real time.

By W.B. King

While studying economics and philosophy at Vassar College, it was actually the latter discipline that ignited Benjamin Conant’s passion for a career in technology. “Philosophy is what pulled me into computer science. Symbolic logic is basically proto-programming, and once I understood that you could encode logic into a machine, I fell in love with computer science,” he told Finopotamus.

“I ended up doing a robotics project that was formative: We built a robotic arm that could interpret hand-pointing gestures and voice commands to pick up objects. It opened my eyes to interface design and human–machine interaction,” he said, noting that while in high school he was bit by the entrepreneurial bug.

Benjamin Conant

“When other kids were playing video games, I was building out half-baked business models, everything from scooter-sharing concepts (long before the Lime/Bird era) to early GoPuff-like delivery ideas, all in Excel for fun,” he noted. “Any time no one told me what to do, I defaulted to imagining systems, markets, and how technology could make them work better.”

After graduating from college, he taught math at Teach for America and then worked at Fullstack Academy as a developer fellow. Next were a series of software engineering posts, which led to the co-founding of MANTL in 2016, where he serves as CTO. In December 2025, he was named Alkami’s chief product officer.

“When I had the opportunity to partner with Nathaniel after college, I had the engineering background and the instinct to start building real products, laying the groundwork for the digital banking career path I’d ultimately pursue,” said Conant of MANTL co-founder and CEO Nathaniel Harley. “That’s when my tech career truly began.”

Shaping the Next Generation of Engineers

When Finopotamus asked if Conant had a mentor, he pointed to Nimit Maru, founder of Fullstack Academy, which is billed as an “immersive software engineering coding bootcamp” in New York City.

“I attended Fullstack after Teach for America to modernize my engineering skills. Nimit was still teaching at the time, and I got to watch him build a startup from the inside while he was simultaneously shaping the next generation of engineers,” he said.

“Seeing that blend of educator, founder, technologist, and operator was hugely influential. He eventually sold Fullstack to Kaplan,” Conant continued. “He and his co-founder invested in MANTL early and today, we talk as peers. He’s now building a fintech company called Sava (YC W25) applying AI (artificial intelligence) to trust and estate management.”

The lessons he learned from Maru and others have shaped his approach to leadership and management, noting that his approach is simple: “give talented people as much autonomy as humanly possible, and the clarity they need to succeed inside that autonomy.” He added: “Hire people who want to run, point them toward the real outcomes that matter, and stay close enough to be a thought partner without ever becoming the bottleneck. That means I lead with high trust and expectations, low politics, clear goals, and no micromanagement.”

To achieve company objectives, Conant views himself as a sounding board as opposed to a taskmaster. “I push people to think bigger than they think is possible. And when they want to take ownership of something meaningful, I get out of their way, so they mold the future of account opening and digital banking.”

‘Vibe Coding’

Since entering the tech space, Conant said there have been two significant shifts that have changed how teams prototype products. The first is vibe coding, which is an AI-driven software development approach where developers use natural language prompts to instruct large language models (LLMs) to generate, refine and debug code.

“It’s now normal to spin up functional versions of ideas in hours, not weeks. Whether AI-driven prototyping is sustainable productivity or just venture dollars lighting fireworks remains to be seen, but the change in speed is real,” he said.

The second shift is a “bundling phase” that is occurring throughout the industry. “A decade ago, ‘best-of-breed’ point solutions were everywhere. Today, banks and credit unions increasingly want one integrated platform,” he told Finopotamus. “They want account origination talking to digital banking, analytics, and servicing, all in one seamless ecosystem.”

He also pointed to React, the JavaScript framework for building front-end web user experiences, which has remained dominant for a decade. “This is another telling signal: The market has consolidated around stable, all-in-one stacks,” he continued. “What hasn’t changed is the core of engineering culture. You still win with clarity, velocity, talent density, and teams who actually trust each other.”

One True Platform

Among trends Conant sees is developing “one platform” for banks and credit unions. “They don’t want five vendors stitched together anymore. They want digital banking, deposit origination, loan origination, account servicing, data and analytics, fraud and identity, and eventing and workflow all working together as one system,” he noted.

“MANTL and Alkami are building exactly that: a true platform that can run an entire bank or credit union end-to-end and serve as a real alternative to FIS and Fiserv.”

Another trend had him revisiting the power and promise of AI applications. “Rapid prototyping, automated quality assurance, and AI-assisted architecture validation. It’s early days, but it will reshape how small teams ship enterprise-grade systems,” he said. “And the most exciting part is that in banking, the opportunity isn’t gimmicky AI; rather, it’s rebuilding core and digital banking infrastructure at the exact moment the industry finally wants it rebuilt.”

For credit unions, Conant said the industry’s “people-first” mindset aligns with these trends. “There is an incredible opportunity for credit unions to leverage technology and automation to spend less time on manual, repetitive tasks and more time doing what they do best: building real, meaningful relationships with the members they serve,” he said.

Competing in a Digital-First World

When credit unions embrace technology that removes friction from processes, like account opening and digital banking enrollment, he said “it frees employees to have deeper conversations, offer more personalized support, and transition from administrators to trusted financial advisors.”

The noted blend of “mission-driven service and the chance to use technology to elevate the human experience,” he said, differentiates credit unions from other financial institutions. “It’s what makes the credit union industry so unique, and why it’s such an exciting space to be a part of,” Conant continued. “This is why it is so critical for credit unions to partner with like-minded fintechs who can help them compete in a digital-first, digital-banking era.”