Company: MCHB
Filing Date: 2025-05-09
Form Type: 425
Source: 0001518715-25-000085
Chunk: 32

Company: Mechanics Bancorp
Filing Date: 2025-05-09
Form: 425
Chunk 32
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 make sure we're putting the right investment in and the right tools for that investment. Mark Mason Little philosophical here. What's your view on AI and banking? What concerns you or what controls are you considering? I would just give you one to ponder that someone asked me about the other day. AI is going to be on our cell phones here, whether we like it or not, in

some form and our cell phones contain a lot of confidential information, customer information, bank information, and are we creating the walls sufficiently and how are you guys thinking about that development? C.J. Johnson I'll comment first, maybe let any of our other team comment. I think technology again in general is something you really need to focus on as a bank because it has the ability to be tremendously impactful on our customers, employees, and allow us to compete with the big banks because if you're not making the investments there, you're going to fall further and further behind. So it's certainly top of mind. As to AI, we're not going to be on the vanguard there. We're going to monitor it, study it, see if there's certain applications or software that could be effective, and helpful, and I'm quite positive there will a tremendous difference in all companies and certainly in the banking industry, but it doesn’t have our, it's not top of mind for us right now in terms of practical implementation, but it's something we do think about and we have a very carefully thought out technology roadmap that a lot of us participate in. Chris leads it and it's something we've got to be all over because it's essential to our future as a company. But Chris, do you want to add anything to that? Chris Pierce I would just add and I do think we spend a lot of time looking at it. We see it as a game changer as it relates to fraud mitigation, being able to look at checks from an AI perspective and those kind of things. So we are testing it there. We get concerned about fraud, impersonations and things like that, and akin to what Mark says, we want to be very thoughtful that we don't have employees accidentally putting bank information out into the internet when they're trying to make things easier or faster. And, we've heard anecdotally people say oh well now I can use AI to record my committee meetings and have them transcribe my notes. But when you do that, you put those things out onto the internet. So it's mostly how do we protect