Mari Hern has served over 20 years in various roles of leadership, within the fields of app dev, service asset and configuration management and IT, with an emphasis on transformation and change leadership. She takes pride in having built a reputation for being a visionary, developing strong teams that consistently deliver on developing and maintaining efficient, effective, sustainable processes, that are automated and scalable organization-wide. Mari has a strong IT background, across banking, financial services, health care and technology sectors. Mari serves as the Vice President for IT Business Services for the USAA IT Enterprise, within the CIO of IT team. She leads teams responsible for the governance, strategy, and IT Service management, technology business management, patch and vulnerability management, database as well as the technical platforms that support those domains.

Valerie Kline has over 20 years of leadership experience in IT strategy, process improvement, program management, operations, and data and analytics in banking and insurance. Valerie is passionate about improving IT value by maximizing contributions of the parts within the context of the whole. She creates standardized and automated work processes that scale. She has strong domain knowledge in such areas as hardware and software asset management, infrastructure, security, governance, and cost allocation. She excels at building and enhancing applications to support these domains and more. She is a strategic thinker who can drill into the details. At USAA, she serves as chief of staff to the VP of IT Business Services, and she leads the enterprise technical debt remediation program, which develops, builds, and manages processes and tools for enterprise reduction of applications, hardware, software, and process tech debt. This is a full-blown transformation initiative that changes behavior across the enterprise.

Since the beginning, our mission has been to provide a range of financial services to the military community and their families. Along the way, we’ve also established ourselves as a destination employer for passionate people looking to serve those who are willing to give it their all. Our mission is to stand with our members and be there for them and their families by facilitating their financial security. It starts with offering a range of highly competitive products, exceptional service, and trusted advice. But to be the military community’s provider of choice also takes dedicated team members who share our core values of service, loyalty, honesty, and integrity.