SAN DIEGO – Banks are under pressure to adopt artificial intelligence. Their regulators want something AI has struggled to give them: proof.
Quantum General Intelligence (QGI), a San Diego company that builds what it calls "deterministic" AI for financial institutions, says it has an answer. This week it added two people who spent decades policing exactly that kind of proof inside one of the largest banks in the world.
Brent Bahnub and Bruce Marshak, the founder and the general counsel of Apogee Process Improvement, have joined the QGI Advisory Board. Both are former JPMorgan Chase executives. Between them they bring more than 70 years of experience in bank controls, customer disclosures, and lending law.
The appointments strengthen QGI's standing with the banks and lenders it is courting. They put two people from the compliance side of Wall Street behind a young company whose whole pitch is compliance.
The problem with "probably right"
Most AI tools today are built on large language models. These systems are fluent and fast, but they are probabilistic. Ask the same question twice and you may get two different answers. Sometimes the answer is confidently wrong.
That can be an inconvenience in a chatbot. In a mortgage file, it is a liability. A loan decision, a disclosure, or an underwriting judgment has to be repeatable and explainable, and it has to tie back to written policy. Examiners and courts expect nothing less.
QGI's platform is designed around that requirement. It pairs language models with symbolic reasoning and formal verification, the kind of mathematical checking used to prove that software behaves as intended. The result is AI whose conclusions can be traced, tested, and reproduced.
"Banks don't need AI that sounds right. They need AI that is right, and can prove it," said Dr. Sam Sammane, QGI's chief executive. "That is a governance problem as much as a technology problem. It's why the people we bring onto our board matter."
Who's joining
Bahnub spent his JPMorgan career on the controls side of the house. He was a Managing Director and Control Officer Executive supporting Consumer and Community Banking and Asset & Wealth Management. He led a Center of Excellence that made disclosures traceable across all of the bank's customer-facing communications. Every required statement a customer saw could be tracked back to its source and its rule.
He has more than 30 years in financial services, has co-authored five patents, and holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and an electrical engineering degree from the University of Wisconsin. Outside work, he chairs the largest Make-A-Wish chapter in the United States.
Marshak is the lawyer who worked alongside him. At JPMorgan Chase he was Executive Director and Associate General Counsel for Consumer and Community Banking. He provided legal support to Bahnub's Center of Excellence and to the team that remediates customer harm. He later served as Director and Associate General Counsel at Discover Financial Services. Earlier in his career he held senior legal roles at Washington Mutual, PNC Mortgage, Citibank, and GE Capital, covering nearly every stage of the lending lifecycle. He has more than 40 years in the industry.
"Brent built the system that made a giant bank's disclosures traceable, and Bruce made sure it held up legally," Sammane said. "That is exactly the discipline we're bringing to AI."
A board built for regulators
The two join a QGI advisory group that also includes S.A. Ibrahim, former chief executive of mortgage insurer Radian Group. The board holds its first meeting this month.
The timing is deliberate. Lenders are moving AI from pilot projects into production work such as loan review, underwriting, and quality control. In Europe, the EU AI Act is putting new obligations on high-risk AI systems, including those used for credit decisions. U.S. regulators have made clear that existing consumer-protection and fair-lending rules apply whether a decision is made by a person or an algorithm.
For QGI, adding Bahnub and Marshak is a signal to the market. The company is building its leadership around the same standards its customers are judged by.
"Trust in banking is earned one verifiable decision at a time," Sammane said. "We intend to earn it the same way."
About Quantum General Intelligence (QGI) Quantum General Intelligence Inc. builds deterministic, neurosymbolic AI for regulated industries, with a focus on financial services. Its platform pairs large-language-model capabilities with symbolic reasoning and formal verification to deliver auditable, explainable outcomes. QGI is headquartered in San Diego, California. www.qgi.dev
About Apogee Process Improvement Apogee Process Improvement LLC helps financial institutions create and manage regulatory-required content, disclosures, and controls for customer-facing communications. www.apogeepi.com