Chris Otten
Co-Founder & Technical Director
Aspire Digital
VP, Emerging Payments — Synchrony
- Personal topher.otten@gmail.com
- Aspire Chris@madebyaspire.com
- Cell 614-499-3575
- LinkedIn /in/topherotten
Founder Operator Problem-Solver
I help people and organizations unblock what's actually stopping them.
Find the real problem. Work within what’s actually possible. Ship something that works today, not what would be perfect with unlimited time and budget.
Problem-First
The bottleneck is almost never what it looks like on the surface.
22 Years
Payments and fintech across PNC, Huntington, and Synchrony.
4 U.S. Patents
Issued 2021–2025, assigned to Synchrony Bank.
Founder + Operator
Running Aspire Digital with my wife Jaime to help small businesses compete like enterprises.
Where I’m coming from
Twenty-two years in. Still the most energized I’ve ever been about what’s next.
Most of my career I’ve had a front-row seat to how big companies build things. Now I get to take everything I learned and help smaller teams move faster, smarter, and with the kind of leverage that used to be out of reach. The tools are there. Someone just has to know how to put them together.
Outside of work, my best friend and partner is Jaime. We built Aspire Digital together and still make time to host friends and family at home, travel whenever we can, and spoil our two very opinionated boxers rotten.
Selected Work
A few recent examples. There are plenty more.
Every project came with its own politics, constraints, and people problems. This is how three of them went.
Inherited a platform nobody wanted. Now clients are asking when they can get on it.
The account lookup platform had an adoption problem that more features weren't going to fix. I rebuilt the go-to-market around how merchants actually work. Clients that were avoiding it are now requesting access. Active across every eligible Synchrony merchant through 2026.
Clients lined up
Requesting access. Not resisting it.
Direct2Device: a problem I spotted as a banker and solved as a clean API.
As a banker I watched the in-branch credit attribution problem cost real customers and real teams. At Synchrony I built the fix: Direct2Device, a tokenized link from originating device to user device. Four issued patents. Used company-wide. Cited in shareholder communications.
4 patents
11138599 · 11615412 · 11978047 · 12443948
Built a digital acquisition platform in half the time. Then tripled the projected lift.
Stakeholders wanted a phased rollout. I gave them exactly that: an A/B testing framework that protected the single-codebase architecture the product needed. We launched in half the projected time. Then came back and delivered the full prefill feature in one-third of the original estimate. Conversion came in at 3 times the projected lift.
3× the lift
Against original conversion projections.
Aspire Digital
Compete like enterprises — with a person who actually cares.
My wife Jaime and I built Aspire Digital together. It’s a husband-and-wife studio that gives small businesses the tools and the human attention that most of them can’t get from a traditional agency.
Jaime leads UX and creative. I handle strategy, architecture, and technical direction. Between us, we cover what most agencies split into five separate invoices.
What I’m building now
Most enterprise AI investment isn’t failing on the technology. It’s failing on the people layer.
Hands-on with token efficiency, RAG, on-prem deployment, and the piece most companies miss: workforce adoption. That’s what’s stalling organizations that bought AI tools and watched them collect dust.
Twenty-plus years of bringing product discipline to complex problems, now applied to the biggest platform shift I’ve seen. It takes the technical depth to build it right and the patience to actually walk a team through it. That’s what I bring.
- Token efficiency & cost
- RAG architecture
- On-prem & privacy
- Workforce adoption
- Fine-tuning
Get in touch
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