about.
I’m Zach. I build tools for the small, repetitive problems I keep running into — often somewhere between my grocery cart and dinner.
At Protiviti, my work spans analytics, strategy, and operations: digging into messy systems, checking what the data actually says, and working with a team to get a fix through. I bring that same curiosity to my own projects, where I choose the problem and build the tool. The client work below is about bank remediation; the projects on this site are independent builds, often starting with something bothering me. Like half a produce box going in the trash.
the day job (“client work”)
By day I consult for a top-5 card issuer on remediation — finding issues in the functions you’d assume a bank had nailed down: APR, rewards, settlements, minimum payments. We scope the issue, validate the affected population so no one gets missed, and deploy the fix so it doesn’t happen again. Then we make the harmed customers whole — money back, credit-bureau reporting corrected.
So far that work has turned up issues across millions of accounts, including cost leakage in legacy payment logic I found by reading the SQL directly.
It takes a lot of analysis, which I enjoy. It takes just as much translation — making complex analytical ideas accessible to people with real domain expertise but less analytics background, and building consensus to push a fix through a bank.
helping the practice work better
I share the Chief of Staff role for Protiviti’s approximately 70-person analytics practice with a colleague. Alongside client work, I help with the day-to-day work of moving practice priorities forward.
I proposed and lead our monthly leadership forum, bringing practice leaders together and inviting leaders from other groups to develop partnerships. It’s a chance to connect people working on related problems and figure out where we can work together.
I also help advance AI learning and adoption. I run our office’s training program — 500+ people trained, increasingly on AI — and taught our firm’s AI crash course during its national upskilling push. My favorite moment is when the epiphany lands: someone who’d never touched AI suddenly sees what it can do for their everyday work.
after hours, usually in the kitchen
My independent projects are where I take a problem from “this is annoying” to something I can use. Sometimes that means applying AI to a grocery cart; sometimes it’s a simpler tool. I choose the problem, make the product decisions, and keep refining the result. They’re personal builds, separate from my work at Protiviti.