August 2025

Neighborhood Trust Financial Partners is excited to welcome David Bautista as our new Vice President of Product Management. In this strategic leadership role, David will drive the vision, design, and delivery of innovative financial coaching solutions that support low-wage workers and expand access to inclusive financial products.

As Neighborhood Trust scales its core offerings—TrustPlus and Pathways, which are sold to and seamlessly embedded within a growing portfolio of workplace and financial institution customers and now expanding through a new direct-to-client strategy—David will oversee a cross-functional team responsible for engineering, UX, agile delivery, and data architecture. He will also lead the development of a platform that integrates our human-to-human financial coaching with an AI-driven product-matching and -enrollment process tailored to address specific debt challenges. His work will be essential to Neighborhood Trust’s vision for worker financial empowerment at scale.

David brings over a decade of experience in product strategy and leadership, most recently serving as Chief Product and Technology Officer at Change Machine. With a proven track record of leveraging technology for social impact, he combines deep expertise with a recently earned MBA from Columbia Business School. David is deeply committed to advancing financial inclusion and supporting solutions that help low-wage workers overcome barriers to financial security. He has also volunteered extensively at food pantries and soup kitchens across New York City, reflecting his personal dedication to community service.

During his first weeks on the job, we learned about David’s past experience, his interest in Neighborhood Trust’s work and impact, his perspectives about org culture and transformation, and more. Here are some highlights from our conversation with him:

Q: What motivated you to join Neighborhood Trust? What aspects of the work are most exciting to you?

I spent a couple of years volunteering at various nonprofit food pantries and soup kitchens in NYC, and I was intrigued by how these different organizations tackled the same essential problems—inventory management and food distribution—in different ways. I saw firsthand that the use of technology was often the differentiator.

And then towards the end of my tenure at Change Machine, I started business school at Columbia with the intention of pursuing a career in philanthropy. While at CBS, I took a class on social enterprise with a professor who first introduced me to Neighborhood Trust’s work. I got excited about the idea of moving to a social enterprise where I could have a more hands-on role in social impact and take on the challenge of building a scalable product strategy.

I was really drawn to the opportunity to build products that have a direct impact on people. I was also intrigued by the idea of moving to Neighborhood Trust’s B2B2C approach, and excited by the organization’s plans to explore direct-to-consumer models.

Q: How do you envision using your prior experience to contribute to Neighborhood Trust?

In my past work, I’ve focused a lot on what makes a financial platform actually useful—not just from a tech perspective, but also thinking about the people side—like Financial Coaches and clients and the real challenges they deal with on a daily basis. I’ve learned that it’s important to build for what people actually need, not just what we assume they need.

I’ve also been involved in shaping platform strategy at the org level—helping teams shift how they think, how they communicate, and how ideas flow and are shared internally. That kind of mindset change is key if you want to build something that really scales.

At Neighborhood Trust, I’d use that experience to help push the platform forward—making sure we’re solving the right problems, supporting people who matter, and building something that can grow as the organization’s reach and impact grows.

Q: Where would you like to see Neighborhood Trust at this time next year?

I’m focused on transforming how Neighborhood Trust works internally to build a tech platform that scales to meet real user needs. For me, it’s important that the product team is involved from the start–from early ideation to decision-making to funding–and embraced at all levels of the organization, rather than brought in to build things after a strategy has been set. I want to make sure all strategic conversations flow from what clients need and the problems we need to help them solve. In other words, I’d like to see that our biggest tech and product initiatives are directly tied to our core business model and what our clients really need.

Q: What is the best piece of financial advice you’ve ever received?

There’s something we used to say at Change Machine: “Savings is an activity, not an amount.” I think that’s the best piece of advice I’ve received because it’s usually the first step that’s the hardest when trying to build a habit. Even at a time when I didn’t have as much room to save, I took this advice to heart and I’ve been able to build up this habit over time.

Q: How do you like to spend your time outside of work?

I’m really into tabletop/board games! I go to a local board game meeting a couple times a week, run a game of Dungeons & Dragons once a week, and personally own around 50 board games. I think it’s a perfect way to make new friends, exercise your brain, and have fun!