Tech People in the Know: Corporate Central Credit Union’s Ryan McMillan

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 Corporate Central Credit Union’s Information Technology (IT) Director Ryan McMillan. The $6.6 billion Muskego, Wis.-based corporate credit union serves 450-member credit unions.

By W.B. King

When Ryan McMillan’s parents brought home a Packard Bell with a CRT monitor running Windows 95 in 1997, it wasn’t just another ordinary day; it was a revelation. His fascination with tech was ignited—he was instantly hooked.

“Within a year, I had broken it enough times to learn how it worked and eventually built my own PC from parts. That experience led to a job in my high school’s tech department, where I set up my first servers running Windows NT 4.0 for the school district,” he told Finopotamus. “From there, I dove into networking, troubleshooting and building systems that had to perform reliably. That mix of challenges kept me in tech for good.”

Ryan McMillan

In 2002, he graduated Waukesha County Technical College with an associate's degree in computer systems networking and telecommunications. He went on to work for several school districts and tech companies. Holding titles such as network engineer and senior systems engineer, he said the role of the tech department has changed significantly over the years.  

“When I started, IT was the team that kept the lights on. We built servers, racked equipment, and imaged machines. Today, my team designs cloud infrastructure for APIs [application programming interfaces] and SaaS [software-as-a-service] from day one,” he shared. “We no longer buy hardware and hope it lasts five years; we subscribe to capabilities and scale as needed.”

Network security, he added, is no longer an afterthought, but rather embedded in every decision. “Privileged access controls, MDR, and continuous testing are baseline, not bonuses,” said McMillan, who served as Egnyte’s Senior Solutions Architect before joining Corporate Central Credit Union as its IT director in 2024. “The biggest shift is automation. If a task repeats, we create a runbook and automate it. I want my team to solve new problems, not repeat manual work every month.”

Demos Over Decks

Among McMillan’s career mentors is Gregg Tushaus, Corporate Central’s SVP and chief technology and strategy officer. “He taught me that strategy isn't separate from execution. It is architecture, security and member value working together. When you understand how those pieces connect, you stop building technology for its own sake and start building technology that matters,” he noted.

“I try to pay that forward by asking my engineers to tie their work to outcomes. Less risk, more resilience, better member experience, pick one and show me how your project delivers it,” he continued. “Then I give them room to present their work, ship it and own it.”

When Finopotamus asked what his management philosophy is, McMillan responded: “I set clear targets, remove blockers, and get out of the way. People that work in IT are smart; they don't need me to tell them how to solve problems.” Preferring “demos over decks,” he noted that he has been known to “vibe-code a proof of concept before the coffee cools.”

McMillan also makes sure that Corporate Central’s 68 employees, 17 of which are tech-facing, “know what success looks like and that nothing's standing in their way.” To achieve this goal, the organization holds weekly Level 10 meetings for alignment. “This way everyone gets exposure to different parts of the stack. I measure reliability, cycle time, and closed security findings,” he said. “Honestly, I also count learning as a win. If someone tried something, documented why it failed, and helped the team get smarter, then that's progress.”

Sharing Playbooks

Explaining that “cooperative DNA” is what separates credit unions from other financial institutions, McMillan noted that in 2017 he helped “standup” Emergifi, a technology CUSO that delivers managed IT services to credit unions of any size.

“I later served in a leadership role there. The idea was simple: Smaller credit unions don't have large in-house IT teams, but they still need enterprise-grade security and infrastructure. Instead of competing with them, we built something together. That's not a sales pitch; it's a pattern,” he stated. “Credit unions share playbooks, build jointly, and treat each other's members like our own. That collaborative model is hard to replicate, and it's our biggest advantage.”

McMillan and his team employed that same spirit over the past year when refining “Beastro,” its payments and operations platform. With the goal of creating a resilient operating system, he said the project entailed active monitoring, tested failover postures and operational drills.

“It's not glamorous work. There's no press release for ‘we practiced recovering from failures until it became boring.’ But when something goes wrong in production, and something always does, boring is exactly what you want,” he continued. “Redundancy across environments, clear runbooks and auditable recovery steps make the difference. Our member credit unions depend on this platform. Making it reliable is my team’s job.”

Credit Union Values Inspire Sound Partnerships

Among exciting tech trends is what’s happening with payment rails, including FedNow, RTP and Visa Direct, said McMillan. “It gives us access to faster, cleaner transaction data, and the automation to act on it in ways we couldn't before.”

An even more enticing premise is when “digital assets are done right,” he noted. “We're collaborating with several credit union members and fintechs to explore institutional stablecoin use cases. Not the speculative stuff you read about in headlines, but institutional-grade infrastructure where custody, controls and compliance are built in from the start,” he continued. “Credit unions have always led in serving underbanked communities. If stablecoins can lower remittance costs or enable faster settlement, we should be at the table figuring out how to do it safely.”

While he agrees partnerships with fintechs are critical for the continued success of the credit union movement, there are requirements: “API-first, auditable and respectful of our members' data and our brand.” To this end, he said Corporate Central is currently working with several fintechs on projects, including fraud and identity discovery and stablecoin infrastructure.

“In both cases, the goal is the same—ship capability faster, reduce risk and improve the member experience,” he told Finopotamus. “Fintechs that understand credit union values make good partners. The ones that that only want our distribution don't last long.”