Leadership
Three Founders. Twenty-Five Years.
Leading ABT Every Day Since 1999.
Justin, Hugo, and Steve co-founded ABT in 1999 from inside financial services. They still lead it today, still start every day with a scrum, and still review every client environment personally.
Tier-1 CSP Since 2015II
MBA Member
ACUMA MemberAccess Business Technologies was built by three co-founders from inside financial services who saw what was broken in how credit unions, banks, and mortgage companies managed their technology, and decided to fix it. Justin Kirsch, Hugo Gonzalez, and Steve Tschoepe co-founded ABT in 1999 and have led it every day since.
ABT does not just deploy technology. The leadership team and their engineers redesign how financial institutions operate, then secure and govern every layer of the stack. Every day starts with a scrum across all engineering, security, development, and client teams. An issue discovered at one institution becomes a preventive fix applied across all 750.
Justin Kirsch
Co-Founder & President
Justin started his career teaching Management Information Systems at California State University, Sacramento. He spent the next decade building data platforms, security infrastructure, and IT operations at scale. As CTO at one of the country's largest mortgage servicing operations, he managed technology across 60+ subsidiaries and saw how security failures and fragmented systems created real risk for financial institutions. In 1999, he co-founded ABT to solve those problems permanently.
Justin leads ABT's strategic direction across all four foundations. His team designed Guardian and built the AI-powered analytics tools that turn data from across Microsoft 365 and client environments into actionable intelligence. The deepest expertise on Justin's side of the house is where big data, AI, and security intersect.
Today, Justin's focus is AI governance for regulated industries. His operating principle: security and productivity are the same objective. Guardian protects both.
Hugo Gonzalez
Co-Founder & Chief Operating Officer
Before co-founding ABT in 1999, Hugo worked inside financial services, processing loans and analyzing servicing operations. That perspective shaped everything he builds: technology designed for people who have to use it under pressure, under audit, and without downtime.
As COO, Hugo leads operations, software development, and Azure cloud infrastructure. His teams build and maintain MortgageExchange, Mortgage BI, App Pilot, and DocumentGuardian. His engineers are also ABT's Copilot and AI deployment specialists, configuring Copilot, Copilot Studio agents, and Copilot CoWork across client environments.
What makes Hugo's operation distinctive: the infrastructure his team builds is the same infrastructure Guardian monitors. Nothing operates in isolation.
Steve Tschoepe
Co-Founder & Executive Vice President, Operations
Steve's teams are the front line for every ABT client: support, security response, and onboarding. When a financial institution calls with a problem, his engineers answer. When Guardian flags a security event, his security operations team responds. A new client that needs to be audit-ready before their first regulatory exam? Steve's team delivers it.
His engineers deploy and secure Microsoft 365 tenants for 750+ financial institutions, applying Guardian's 160+ security controls. Steve conducts weekly reviews with ABT's largest clients, staying connected to what they are actually dealing with, not just what shows up in a dashboard.
Steve's team also leads Guardian's AI governance evolution. Hugo's team builds the AI solutions. Steve's team secures them. The standard never changes: if an examiner asks about it, ABT needs to have the answer ready.
Ready to Work with Our Team?
Two ways to get started
See Where You Stand
Get an instant security and configuration grade for your Microsoft 365 environment. No commitment, no sales call required.
Get Your Tenant GradeTalk to Our Team
Whether it is security, AI governance, licensing, or infrastructure, Justin, Hugo, and Steve's teams are ready to help.
Talk to an ABT Expert