Leadership
Three Founders. Twenty-Five Years.
Leading ABT Every Day Since 1999.
Justin, Hugo, and Steve co-founded ABT in 1999 from inside financial services. They still lead it today, still start every day with a scrum, and still review every client environment personally.
Tier-1 Microsoft CSPII
MBA Member
ACUMA MemberAccess Business Technologies was built by three people who came from inside financial services, saw what was broken in how credit unions, banks, and mortgage companies managed their technology, and decided to fix it themselves. Justin Kirsch, Hugo Gonzalez, and Steve Tschoepe co-founded ABT in 1999 and have led it every day since.
All three are certified in business process re-engineering. They do not just deploy technology. They redesign how financial institutions operate, then secure and govern every layer of the stack. Every day starts with a scrum across all engineering, security, development, and client teams. An issue discovered at one institution becomes a preventive fix applied across all 750.
| Founder | Role | Primary Focus | Key Platforms |
|---|---|---|---|
| Justin Kirsch | President | Strategy, big data, AI, security architecture, BPR | Guardian, Mortgage BI, Productivity Insights |
| Hugo Gonzalez | COO | Operations, Azure, software, Copilot deployment, BPR | MortgageExchange, App Pilot, Copilot Studio |
| Steve Tschoepe | EVP Operations | Client success, systems engineering, AI governance ops, BPR | Guardian operations, tenant hardening, security monitoring |
How ABT Is Organized
Three founders lead all teams. Four foundations serve all clients. One feedback loop connects everything.
Justin Kirsch
Co-Founder & President
Justin started his career teaching Management Information Systems at California State University, Sacramento. He spent the next decade building data platforms, security infrastructure, and IT operations at scale. As CTO at one of the country's largest mortgage servicing operations, he managed technology across 60+ subsidiaries and saw how security failures and fragmented systems created real risk for financial institutions. In 1999, he co-founded ABT to solve those problems permanently.
Justin leads ABT's strategic direction across all four foundations. He designed Guardian and built the AI-powered analytics tools that turn data from across Microsoft 365 and client environments into actionable intelligence. His deepest expertise is where big data, AI, and security intersect.
Today, Justin's focus is AI governance for regulated industries. His operating principle: security and productivity are the same objective. Guardian protects both.
Hugo Gonzalez
Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer
Before co-founding ABT in 1999, Hugo worked inside financial services, processing loans and analyzing servicing operations. That perspective shaped everything he builds: technology designed for people who have to use it under pressure, under audit, and without downtime.
As COO, Hugo leads operations, software development, and Azure cloud infrastructure. His teams build and maintain MortgageExchange, App Pilot, and DocumentGuardian. His engineers are also ABT's Copilot and AI deployment specialists, configuring Copilot, Copilot Studio agents, and Copilot CoWork across client environments.
What makes Hugo's operation distinctive: the infrastructure his team builds is the same infrastructure Guardian monitors. Nothing operates in isolation. Hugo built it that way on purpose.
Steve Tschoepe
Co-Founder & Executive Vice President, Operations
Steve leads the part of ABT that clients experience most directly: support, security response, and onboarding. When a financial institution calls with a problem, his engineers answer. When Guardian flags a security event, they respond. A new client that needs to be audit-ready before their first regulatory exam? That lands on Steve's desk.
His engineers deploy and secure Microsoft 365 tenants for 750+ financial institutions, applying Guardian's 160+ security controls. What separates Steve: he conducts weekly reviews with ABT's largest clients, staying connected to what they are actually dealing with, not just what shows up in a dashboard.
Steve also leads Guardian's AI governance evolution. Hugo builds the AI solutions. Steve secures them. The standard never changes: if an examiner asks about it, ABT needs to have the answer ready.
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