Liberty Bank launches AI center of excellence with Flare AI

At a glance:

• Liberty Bank, a 201-year-old mutual bank headquartered in Middletown, Connecticut, has launched an AI Center of Excellence with startup partner Flare AI.
• The center will govern AI strategy and execution across personal, commercial, and digital banking operations, with an initial focus on secure systems, productivity, customer experience, and core-process automation.
• Liberty Bank says the partnership is outcome-based rather than a conventional software-license deal, aiming to compress a multi-year buildout into weeks while meeting regulated-bank controls.

What happened

Liberty Bank has created an AI Center of Excellence with Flare AI to move AI from isolated experiments into a governed operating program across the institution. The 201-year-old mutual bank, headquartered in Middletown, Connecticut, said the center will serve as the hub for AI strategy, governance, and execution across its personal, commercial, and digital operations.

The bank brings substantial regional scale to the effort: Liberty Bank has over $9 billion in assets, 51 retail banking offices across Connecticut and Massachusetts, and more than 900 employees. It describes itself as the oldest and among the largest mutual banks in the United States, a positioning that makes the launch notable beyond a one-off vendor announcement.

Liberty Bank says the initial focus will be on:

• Deploying secure AI systems to enhance productivity and customer experience
• Automating complex core processes
• Building reusable AI capabilities

For a regional mutual bank, those priorities point to a practical AI agenda rather than a purely experimental one. The bank is not only looking for generative AI demos; it is trying to create capabilities that can be reused across business lines while staying inside the control environment expected of a regulated financial institution.

How the partnership is structured

David Hadd, Liberty Bank’s head of Business Transformation, said the arrangement is structured around outcomes rather than software licences. “Flare’s role is to design, build, and help deploy AI systems on Liberty Bank’s behalf, compressing what has historically been a multi-year technology buildout into weeks, with the security, compliance, and governance controls regulated institutions require,” Hadd said. That framing is important because banks are increasingly being asked to show how AI systems are monitored, tested, and controlled rather than merely installed.

Flare AI CEO Scott Killoh said the company takes a different approach from platform vendors. “Most banks have been sold AI platforms and left to figure out the rest,” Killoh said. “We partner with institutions to deliver working AI systems that are secure, compliant, and tailored to their business.” The staffing signal is also notable: Flare AI’s new President and Chief Strategy Officer, David Mitchell, previously spent six years as an executive at Liberty Bank, giving the partnership an unusual level of institutional familiarity.

Taken together, the partnership is less about selling a model or platform and more about packaging deployment, compliance, and business-process change into a managed program. The “working AI systems” language suggests Liberty Bank is trying to avoid the common enterprise-AI trap of buying tools before the governance, data, and operating model are ready. That distinction matters because the bank is asking Flare AI to help deliver production-grade systems rather than simply provide a toolkit for internal teams to sort out.

Why regulated AI is becoming an operating discipline

David Glidden, President and CEO of Liberty Bank, tied the launch to execution speed. “For a bank our size, the challenge has never been ambition. It has been the time it takes to translate strategy into execution,” Glidden said. The bank expects the AI Center of Excellence to drive measurable impact across customer experience, operational efficiency, and growth.

Large banks have warned that scaling AI in production is more expensive and error-prone than pilot programmes suggest, making governance and quality control critical from the start. Liberty Bank’s center is designed to address that gap by tying AI work to auditability, compliance guardrails, and measurable business outcomes. In practice, that means the bank’s AI roadmap will need to survive model validation, data controls, operational monitoring, and the expectations of banking regulators.

The announcement reflects a broader shift in how regulated industries are adopting AI, moving from experimental chatbots toward structured, governed deployments with audit trails and compliance guardrails built in. For community banks competing against institutions with far larger technology budgets, the speed of deployment matters as much as the technology itself. The next test will be whether Liberty Bank can turn the Center of Excellence into repeatable capabilities that survive regulatory review, integration work, and day-to-day banking operations.