Arvest Bank announces chief technology officer

Fayetteville-chartered Arvest Bank announced Tuesday (Aug. 2) that Ninish Ukkan has joined the company as chief technology officer to lead the development of its next-generation banking platform in the cloud.

Ukkan previously had the same job at Austin, Texas-based fintech Green Dot Corp., where he led the company’s cloud migration and enterprise data platform for the company’s banking-as-a-service platform.

Arvest also announced Bryan Hicks as as head of product over Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and third-party integration. Hicks joins Arvest from the automotive tech firm Derive Systems. He previously held technology product management roles at Ford, SAP and AT&T.

“Consumers and commercial customers are demanding seamless financial services when and where they need it. It’s never been more important for institutions like Arvest to ensure the technology and infrastructure is in place to meet customers where they are,” said Laura Merling, Arvest’s chief transformation and operations officer. “We’re thrilled to have Ninish and Bryan join the Arvest team as we look to reimagine the banking experience.”

More details are at this link.

Tuesday’s announcement comes less than two weeks after Arvest Bank announced a partnership with Google’s cloud computing division to overhaul its current IT architecture and systems, including migrating its data centers to Google Cloud.

Arvest Bank operates over 200 bank branches in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas and has approximately 830,000 retail and business customers. By assets ($26.6 billion), the Walton-owned bank is Arkansas’ largest bank.