Justin Bruening ’14, grew up living near Syracuse University thinking that he might be a student here one day.
He enrolled as an undecided major and eventually switched to the iSchool because of the career prospects. “Technology was a lure,” said Bruening, who earned a Bachelor of Science in Information Management and Technology and a Minor in Political Science.
One thing that helped Bruening hit the ground running in terms of his career was the array of companies that came on campus to scout new employees.
“I really took advantage of the on-campus recruiting to get a job,” he said. Bruening secured multiple interviews due to the opportunities, which led to two full-time offers before graduation.
His first job was as a consultant with Cognizant, a technology consulting and outsourcing company based outside New York City. In this role, he honed his business analysis and project management skills.
“I couldn’t have gotten the job without the on-campus recruiting,” Bruening said.
After two years, he began working at the banking titan BNY Mellon as a Senior Associate, eventually making his way to a Vice President position at the company. He helped client teams with rollouts of digital banking solutions, managed CRM and data visualization tools throughout the bank, and coordinated sales planning for 9 lines of the organization’s business globally. A highlight of his tenure was establishing a business development team that delivered cloud-based data solutions to the company’s clients.
Around that time, Bruening became interested in fintech startups, as a lot of products came on the scene for neobanking, investing and crypto currency.
“What I noticed was that a lot of banks were trying to become fintech companies, and a lot of fintechs were applying for banking charters, trying to break into that space,” Bruening recalled. “I felt that after experiencing a Wall Street environment, I wanted to give the startup side a try.”
He shifted to a role as Senior Product Operations Manager for an AI-based savings and investing product at Digit, an early consumer fintech. In this role Justin was able to immediately use his partnership and project management skills while going deeper on software development. After launching a banking product in 2022, Digit was acquired by Oportun, which provides loans to underserved people and those without traditional credit scores.
In his current role as a Senior Product Manager at Oportun, he handles new user onboarding, product activation, and growth. Bruening has been instrumental in bringing Oportun’s loan functionality into the Digit app so both company’s products can operate together post-acquisition. He has led the effort to offer these products in Spanish to better serve Oportun’s core market.
He’s had quite a few accomplishments in his latest position – building an in-app referral feature to boost annual revenue, redesigning flows to increase activation, and driving acquisition. He has led a project enabling lenders to service their loans within the app, and rolled out the functionality to members at Oportun’s retail locations. This has bolstered app adoption rate and decreased delinquent loan payments. In short, his work has resulted in measurable gains for the company and helped its users with their financial health.
It may sound like it’s all technology all the time for Bruening, but his current position is more about using soft skills like team leadership to manage projects and experiments. He leverages data to help the company make smart choices about where they spend and how they move forward.
“It’s a pretty good fit for me,” said Bruening, who now resides in San Francisco.
He is proud that he was able to shift from banking into fintech, which is exploding with opportunities.
“The trajectory has been great and I’m still learning new things,” said Bruening, who is eager to see how AI will continue to play a part in his career.
But fintech isn’t the only arena that entices Bruening. He’s very interested in climate technology and clean energy. In late 2023, Bruening completed the Climatebase Fellowship program, where he got to advise early-stage startups in the climate impact investment and regulatory compliance management space.
“The skills I’ve learned in my current role are applicable across different industries,” he said.
While on-campus recruiting was pivotal to his success, the people he met at Syracuse—many of whom he’s still in touch with—played a big role in his professional life.
“I met a lot of friends at Syracuse who positively impacted my life and helped me build my network,” Bruening said. “It was a super-valuable experience.”