His career follows one pattern: walk into a complex, high stakes environment, build the data and decision tools it is missing, and test them in real hands before trusting them. Today he works directly with clients, from figuring out the problem to putting the solution to work, and contracts through Matias Banks Holdings LLC, a veteran-owned small business.
“I've been responsible for the people, the decisions, and the outcome. In the Army, that meant leading soldiers. In business operations, it meant developing teams and getting leaders information they could act on.”
He started as an enlisted soldier
Dr. Banks enlisted in the U.S. Army in 2005 and earned his commission as an officer. Over twelve years he served as a Field Artillery Captain and as a program manager supporting special operations forces. He led up to 250 soldiers, managed more than 50 programs valued at over $20 million, and directed a $90 million supply chain operation across deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. He earned two Bronze Star Medals and a Meritorious Service Medal. The Army taught him the method he still uses: assess the situation, align the team, deliver.
He builds the numbers leaders trust
In 2018 he joined a defense electronics manufacturer whose departments each kept their own numbers, with no single source everyone trusted. He built its business analytics department from the ground up. His team cut the time it took more than 100 engineers to get data from two weeks to near real time, and reduced data errors by 30%. A backorder initiative he led generated $28 million in revenue and improved on-time delivery by 20%. He connected six separate databases into one data warehouse that surfaced $600,000 in annual manufacturing savings, improved forecast accuracy by 87%, and rescued a failing project with Kanban, finishing six months sooner and recovering $1.5 million of a $4 million budget.
He connected the data behind the revenue plan
As Director of Business Operations for a global technology business, he built the analytics and forecasting foundation its leaders run on: dashboards for seven departments, decision tools that tie bookings, billings, backlog and pipeline to the revenue plan, and early warning on supply chain risk. His team's data overhaul more than quadrupled how much of the sales pipeline leadership could see. Working with sales, the team built one source for pipeline and repeat business that tied more than 85% of the next year's revenue to known programs and helped finance align the revenue plan. When two major programs fell out of step and broke the planning process, he took ownership of rebuilding it. He mentors analysts and data scientists in modern analytics and automation.
One problem he could not put down
Before his doctorate, Dr. Banks built an employment app for the Community Anchor program in Colorado Springs, which helps people coming home from prison find work. His conversations with Juaquin Mobley kept returning to one problem: people without a bank account pay check cashing fees just to use the money they earn. That problem became his dissertation. Today he builds TAP-in, a workforce app, for Community Anchor Academy. He has also built a transportation management application for the transportation authority of a U.S. Pacific territory, a training management platform for a Colorado workforce program, and the Tech Horizons Program, a CompTIA certification track recognized by the U.S. Department of Labor.
He tests an idea before he trusts it
His dissertation, Decentralized Finance: A Technical Path to Financial Inclusion, used Design Science Research to build and test Pay'd, a working phone app for sending money and paying bills without a bank account, designed for unbanked and underbanked African American and Latino communities. A review panel liked its simple sign up and warned that the cryptocurrency under it could turn people away. He kept both lessons. He brings the same method to AI. Wylie Estimates turns a contractor's description of a job into a priced proposal, and Florida Permit Lookup puts public permit records from separate Florida city and county systems behind one search. His study The Brand Intelligence Gap tested whether AI brand scores can be trusted, using 864 paired observations across four AI models.
The record behind the work
- Doctor of Management, Technology Management, Colorado Technical University
- Master of Science, Data Science, Northwestern University
- Master of Business Administration, Project Management, Colorado Technical University
- Bachelor of Arts, Economics, Western State Colorado University
- Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
- ITIL v3 Foundations
- Trained in PMI project management fundamentals and Scrum Agile
- U.S. Army veteran, Captain