www.americanbanker.com Open in urlscan Pro
18.66.122.43  Public Scan

Form analysis
1 forms found in the DOM

https://www.americanbanker.com/search#nt=navsearch

<form class="Page-header-search-form" action="https://www.americanbanker.com/search#nt=navsearch" novalidate="" autocomplete="off"> <label> <input placeholder="Find your interests" type="text" class="Page-header-search-input" name="q"
      required="true"> <span class="sr-only">Search Query</span> <button type="submit" class="Page-header-search-submit"> <svg>
        <use xlink:href="#icon-magnify"></use>
      </svg> <span class="sr-only">Submit Search</span> </button> </label> </form>

Text Content

Author
Log In
Subscribe
 * Banking
   
    * Commercial
    * Consumer
    * Community
    * Industry & People News
    * M&A
    * Small business
    * Earnings
    * Bank Industry Data
   
    * Commercial
    * Consumer
    * Community
    * Industry & People News
    * M&A
    * Small business
    * Earnings
    * Bank Industry Data

 * POLICY
   
    * Politics & policy
    * Regulation & compliance
    * Federal Reserve
    * CFPB
    * Fraud
   
    * Politics & policy
    * Regulation & compliance
    * Federal Reserve
    * CFPB
    * Fraud

 * PAYMENTS
   
    * Payments Home
    * Cryptocurrencies
    * Digital payments
    * Credit cards
   
    * Payments Home
    * Cryptocurrencies
    * Digital payments
    * Credit cards

 * TECH
   
    * Technology
    * Digital banking
    * Fintech
    * Cyber security
    * Artificial intelligence
    * Advances in Tech
   
    * Technology
    * Digital banking
    * Fintech
    * Cyber security
    * Artificial intelligence
    * Advances in Tech

 * CREDIT UNIONS
   
    * Credit Unions Home
    * Opinion
   
    * Credit Unions Home
    * Opinion

 * WORKPLACE
   
    * Workforce management
    * Recruiting
    * Diversity & equality
    * ESG
    * Compensation
   
    * Workforce management
    * Recruiting
    * Diversity & equality
    * ESG
    * Compensation

 * OPINION

Follow Us In Real Time
 * twitter
 * facebook
 * linkedin

© 2023 Arizent. All rights reserved.
Menu

Show Search
Search Query Submit Search
Log In
Subscribe
 * Banking
   
    * Commercial
    * Consumer
    * Community
    * Industry & People News
    * M&A
    * Small business
    * Earnings
    * Bank Industry Data

 * POLICY
   
    * Politics & policy
    * Regulation & compliance
    * Federal Reserve
    * CFPB
    * Fraud

 * PAYMENTS
   
    * Payments Home
    * Cryptocurrencies
    * Digital payments
    * Credit cards

 * TECH
   
    * Technology
    * Digital banking
    * Fintech
    * Cyber security
    * Artificial intelligence
    * Advances in Tech

 * CREDIT UNIONS
   
    * Credit Unions Home
    * Opinion

 * WORKPLACE
   
    * Workforce management
    * Recruiting
    * Diversity & equality
    * ESG
    * Compensation

 * OPINION

 * Leaders Forum
 * Events
 * Research
 * Podcasts
 * Webinars and Whitepapers
 * Magazine
 * Jobs


Digital banking


INNOVATORS OF THE YEAR

By Editorial Staff
May 8, 2023 3:43 PM
 * Twitter
 * LinkedIn
 * Email
 * Show more sharing options
   Share Show more sharing options

Close extra sharing options
 * Twitter
 * LinkedIn
 * Email



Innovation is hard. Coming up with new ideas, making sure those ideas have
practical value and executing on the ideas — and perhaps more importantly,
getting other people on board to help with the execution — takes willpower,
tenacity, long hours of hard work, smarts and an ability to communicate and work
with others inside and outside an organization.

American Banker's editorial staff has chosen to honor 20 leaders who we believe
are innovating in banking and in financial technology in 2023. Read on to see
who we chose and what they are contributing to the industry.


IMMAD AKHUND

Founder and CEO
Mercury

When Silicon Valley Bank failed in mid-March, many startups sought a new place
to park their cash. Mercury, a neobank designed to serve startups, offered that
new home, with quick account-opening and protection of up to $5 million in
deposits through sweep networks.

CEO Immad Akhund, who co-founded Mercury in 2018, said that the neobank added
thousands of new accounts in the week following SVB's failure. Mercury also
expanded products in March to serve venture capital firms with entities in
additional geographies. Akhund said the neobank was able to enhance its
technology with a 150-person engineering team.

"Most of the banks in the U.S. rely on third parties to build anything, so they
can't really build things for themselves," Akhund said. "Whereas we are
continuously improving the existing experience, making it smoother, faster,
automating it, but also building cool things. … We're just making continuous
improvements all the time."

Akhund immigrated to the United States to join startup accelerator Y Combinator
with his previous startup, a mobile ad network called Heyzap that was acquired
in 2016. The idea for Mercury arose when Akhund had trouble obtaining a business
banking account as an immigrant. 

Mercury offers specific products and services for startups that are less common
among banks, like venture debt, a network of venture capital and entrepreneurs,
education materials and opportunities to gather investments. In its first year,
Mercury's venture debt offering received 600 applications, signed 18 term sheets
and loaned out $80.5 million.

The company has raised more than $163 million in funding at a $1.63 billion
valuation. Mercury also said, going back to Akhund's roots, more than 40% of Y
combinator companies use Mercury as a banking partner. —Catherine Leffert
Connect with the industry’s top innovators and influencers

At DIGITAL BANKING, hear firsthand from American Banker's Innovators of the Year
and the Most Influential Women in Fintech about how they're driving their
organizations forward. Secure your place today.

Learn More





VANESSA ANGELES

Head of new product development (emerging solutions), global treasury management
U.S. Bank

As head of new product development for global treasury management at U.S. Bank,
Vanessa Angeles has been on a tear of developing new products for her clients. 

In 2021, she led her new product development team in creating a solution that
automates the tasks and regulations related to escheatment, or the process by
which unclaimed assets, including uncashed checks, are turned over to state
custody. In a 2022 analysis, Aite-Novarica Group deemed the integrated offering
and automated approach to handling unclaimed property to be unique to the
Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank. Organizations that have high volumes of episodic
checks, such as those in healthcare, commercial real estate, and utilities, are
prime candidates for such a service. 

Angeles is also launching U.S. Bank's Virtual Account Management product in
2023. Initially, it was considered a defensive product that would help clients
ensure requests for payment would not be lost, but Angeles saw the potential for
more. 

"There are many use cases and industry applications for VAM, as it is a solution
that meets the need for any business that requires intensive cash management,
such as frequent account openings or closings, precise reporting and fluidity —
like title and escrow companies, suppliers and construction," Angeles said in an
interview for American Banker's Most Powerful Women to Watch program in 2022. 

Her team also continues to develop application programming interfaces that
developers can use to access treasury management and payment capabilities from
U.S. Bank; existing ones include disbursements via Zelle and account
validation. 

In 2023, a cash forecasting solution tool that incorporates artificial
intelligence and machine learning for commercial and corporate customers is
under development. It will let corporate treasurers view their cash positions
across all of their financial institutions.—Miriam Cross




TOM BRUNE

President
Ventures Lending Technology

After becoming president of Ventures Lending Technologies last year, Tom Brune
led the organization to double its income, reach its first year of profitability
and launch a product for building online loan applications.

"Our focus had been on streamlining internal lending operations for our
customers, and it was clear the next step was to give our customers a better way
to manage their application pipeline by managing their own borrower application
process," Brune said. "Our vision is to allow Apply+ to be used for loan
applications, grant applications and any other way to distribute capital to
borrowers."

Brune said the organization that became Ventures recruited him as a co-founder
in 2013 to help reinvent the lending process for the Small Business
Administration 504 loan program. The company now dominates the space; 99.7% of
loans approved through the program last year used the Ventures platform.

Since then, the company has pivoted to a broader audience of lenders with its
flagship product, Ventures+, which provides lenders with loan processing and
portfolio management functions. – Carter Pape




MARC BUTTERFIELD

Senior vice president
First National Bank of Omaha

Marc Butterfield proved his innovator mindset several years ago, when he became
one of the first bankers to start using alternative data in lending decisions. 

More recently, Butterfield, who is senior vice president at First National Bank
of Omaha, has become an earlyish adopter of embedded banking. His team launched
a credit-card-as-a-service solution called Bend by FNBO.

The bank, which has $26 billion of assets, has been in the co-branded card
issuing business for decades and has clients that include MGM Resorts and Ford. 

"We started hearing more and more from our customers that they wanted more and
more control over their digital experience with those customers," Butterfield
said. They wanted to embed their cards deeper into their digital ecosystems, he
said. 

"So how could you navigate that with offering a regulated product like a credit
card, but still give them the feeling that they have total control of that user
experience?"

The bank built a way for co-brand card clients to pick and choose card-related
activities and embed them in their own digital channels, in partnership with
Marqeta, which provides software hosted in Amazon Web Services. 

"Marqeta has a very robust set of credit card APIs that our partners use and
consume as services," Butterfield said. "They're enabling a capability that
otherwise would've taken us months or even years and a lot of money to develop."

The first client to go for this was Greenlight, a challenger bank for families. 

The digital experience around the card looks and feels like a Greenlight
experience, Butterfield said. Greenlight controls how users manage their credit
cards, for instance, by letting them add authorized users. Greenlight also
designed its own statement, though FNBO made sure it met compliance
requirements. Behind the scenes, Greenlight is picking and choosing options FNBO
is providing to give Greenlight an illusion of control. — Penny Crosman




VINCENT DELIE

Chairman, president and CEO
F.N.B. Corp.

F.N.B. Corp.'s "eStore" takes shopping around for financial products to the next
level. 

The platform lets users of the website, app or in-branch kiosk browse an array
of deposit accounts, loan types, business products, financial education content
and more, add selected items to a "shopping cart," and "check out" — that is,
apply or learn more. (Users of the in-branch kiosk can send their cart to their
email address or inform the branch that they'd like to check out there.) The
digital platform was first unveiled in November 2021 in the app and in select
branches, and was installed in all branches by September 2022. 

The eStore project was chairman, president and CEO Vincent Delie Jr.'s idea. He
collaborated with the digital technology team from concept to eStore's current
state. It's also part of his "Clicks-to-Bricks" vision, which involves weaving
digital and traditional channels together for a consistent user experience. The
next step for eStore is a unified application that will let people purchase
multiple products simultaneously without repeatedly filling in the same fields.
For this, the bank is drawing on capabilities it learned from expediting its
online Paycheck Protection Program portal, particularly related to the secure
upload of documents and efficient back-end processing. 

Engagement with eStore, or interactions as measured by page views, grew 104%
between 2021 and 2022. The Pittsburgh bank sees eStore as a key part of its
digital banking strategy and notes that the number of mobile banking users grew
by 13% in 2022 compared with 2021. The number of online applications increased
by 17% in the same period. The bank also credits eStore infrastructure with
speeding up the launch of Physicians First, a bundle of specialized products for
physicians, including mortgages, loans and private banking services. The
Physicians First program accounted for 25% of retail mortgage production for FNB
in 2022. 

Innovation also goes beyond technology at F.N.B Corp. Its new office building,
currently under construction, is in a predominantly minority area in Pittsburgh.
To support the neighborhood, the development team, including F.N.B., awarded
nearly $30 million in contracts to minority-owned businesses and more than $7
million to women-owned businesses to help construct the building. —Miriam Cross




MISHA ESIPOV

CEO and co-founder
Nova Credit

As the CEO and co-founder of Nova Credit, Misha Esipov has been helping people
deemed "credit invisible", like immigrants and thin/no file consumers, leverage
alternative data to prove their creditworthiness, enabling lenders to gain a
more accurate picture of consumers financial history to inform a more
risk-averse underwriting process.

Nova Credit's flagship product, Credit Passport, helps immigrants establish
creditworthiness by leveraging the credit history from their home country and
translating it into a local-equivalent score.

Last year, Nova Credit launched Cash Atlas, which allows consumers to connect
their bank accounts to its platform, giving its clients a direct view into
consumers' bank statement history. This allows consumers with little to no
credit history to prove they have a consistent income and history of bill
payments, all in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

An immigrant himself, Esipov moved here from the Soviet Union in 1990, when he
was three. He later graduated from New York University and joined Goldman Sachs.
In 2016, he co-founded Nova Credit.

"My family experienced firsthand the financial obstacles that come with being an
immigrant, so I approached the problem with a personal connection," Esipov said.

As a graduate student, Esipov realized just how many of his peers were
international students who experienced some version of the problem that
migrants' credit histories do not follow them across borders.

"We believe that once consumers have access to their data, it's up to them to
determine what they want to do with it," Esipov said. "That served as the
philosophical approach behind Nova Credit, and after seven years of partnership
building, meeting regulators, building data integration, standardizing
information, we now have connectivity into two billion consumers all around the
globe." – Carter Pape




ASHISH GARG

Co-founder and CEO
Eltropy

Ashish Garg, co-founder and CEO of digital communications platform Eltropy, was
inspired to start a company that supported credit unions and community banks
based on personal experience. He and his wife had high-paying jobs but no credit
history when they moved from India to California, and found a credit union in
Redwood City willing to extend them a loan so they could buy their first home.
Garg later used a cash refinance of his home to start Eltropy in 2013. The
company bills itself as a digital conversations platform for credit unions and
community banks. 

Garg describes 2022 as the most remarkable year in his company's 10-year
history. For one, it acquired two companies: video banking firm POPi/o and
Marsview AI, which uses artificial intelligence to help contact center agents
decode customer intent in text, voice and more. Eltropy also added about 250 new
credit union and community bank clients, bringing its total up to 550. It
introduced new capabilities, including video notary services, appointment
management, co-browsing and more. 

One client, InTouch Credit Union in Plano, Texas, finds that Eltropy helps
smooth over staffing gaps. "The exciting part about partnering with Eltropy is
the ability to shift from one communication platform to another within the same
call, the same chat, the same text, seamlessly, keeping all of the
authentication and security in place," said Kent Lugrand, president and CEO of
InTouch, in a case study on Eltropy's website. "I think that's going to make a
big difference for us." —Miriam Cross




KATHY GRIGG

Head of decision sciences group
Fifth Third Bank

As banks rethink the way they make credit decisions with the use of artificial
intelligence and so-called alternative data, Kathy Grigg, head of the decision
sciences group at Fifth Third Bank in Cincinnati, has developed a model for
credit card origination that is expected to increase approvals at the $207
billion-asset bank by 10%. Instead of relying on credit scores, it uses other
data, such as deposit history.

"We have information, obviously, on how our customers are already using our
products and services, particularly in the deposit space," Grigg said. "We're
able to leverage that information to infer how customers might perform in credit
in a way that maybe isn't being captured by bureau data alone. We can see
positive deposit history and approve additional customers who might not
otherwise qualify, without taking out an additional risk." 

The deposit data is never used to decline a credit application, only to approve,
she said.

Some credit score executives say the best way to predict whether someone will
repay debt is to look at their past repayment of debt. 

But this is insufficient, Grigg said. 

"We still continue to look at past repayment of debt," she said. "[T]here are
times when people have limited experience with credit or their credit score may
not be as high, but that doesn't mean they are risky, it's just that the credit
bureau wouldn't have access to that information." 

Grigg's group also builds machine learning models that are used for marketing
emails and direct mail, making suggestions to customers based on their past
behavior. — Penny Crosman




DAVID HALES

Chairman and CEO
Global Innovations Bank

David Hales has been growing a tiny community bank in Kiester, Minnesota to
partner with fintechs that store, exchange and transmit money. Hales bought
Global Innovations Bank in 2018, then named First State Bank, and has since
grown assets from $18 million to $50 million. The bank has also been hiring for
the past 18 months, and now has a staff of 17.

As chairman and CEO, Hales sets direction for the bank's strategy, operations
and compliance, including initiatives to expand fintech offerings. 

Global Innovations Bank hasn't stopped serving its surrounding community, where
it was founded in 1899, with commercial and agricultural lending, and plans to
expand loan offerings in southern Minnesota and northern Iowa by using deposits
from its fintech banking program, the bank's main growth driver. 

Hales also served for more than two decades in the United States Air Force,
including 14 years in active duty and 11 years in the reserves. He started as a
nuclear forensics scientist and became a cyberspace operations officer, retiring
in 2019 as a colonel. Global Innovations Bank offers a free, interest-bearing
checking account for active or retired U.S. military service members and their
families, with discounts on G.I. Bill Pay services.

Global Innovations Bank also partnered with Ncontracts, a risk management
technology vendor, for infrastructure and compliance oversight as its fintech
business grows. As regulatory scrutiny on bank-fintech partnerships increases,
the bank wanted to ensure that fintech partners meet oversight and reporting
requirements. —Catherine Leffert




JACK INGRAM

CIO
WECU

In the "buy, build or partner" debate, WECU is leaning hard into partnerships. 

This strategy dates back to 2019, when member displeasure was high and NPS
relationship scores were tanking after the Bellingham, Washington, credit union
converted to a Fiserv DNA core and Fiserv's Architect digital banking solution.
For instance, mobile app functionality was cumbersome and the app was
essentially a shrunken version of the desktop site. Ingram had joined as chief
information officer ten months before the core conversion in 2018. "I asked to
have the digital lift reassigned to me," he said. "It was a sink or swim kind of
moment." 

The credit union concluded that no single vendor would deliver the experiences
it and its members wanted. It used software-as-a-service platform Influitive to
build YouX to encourage customer feedback and engagement on its website. It
teamed up with BankingOn to improve the mobile app and Technivation to upgrade
the desktop experience. Posh Technologies is behind the digital assistant, which
feeds directly into live chat at the contact center. 

One enhancement that Ingram is most proud of is what he calls the Marketplace
within the WECU app, which the credit union launched last year. "There is this
tendency to throw a laundry list of stuff under the 'More' menu," he said.
Instead, the app now curates checking, savings, card and loan products in a
simple and visually appealing way. Ingram and his digital products team chose
Mantl and Alloy to enable speedy account opening and know-your-customer checks,
respectively, and CreditSnap to prequalify customers for loans. The next steps
are developing a friend referral mechanism, considering the credit union
recently branched out into another county, and upgrading the debit card round-up
process. 

These choices have made an impact in the NPS relationship scores that once
dipped to 27. By the end of 2022, WECU's score sat at 73.—Miriam Cross




IMRAN KHAN

Head of global innovation
TD Bank Group

Getting good at personalization — in other words, being able to give customers
useful recommendations or warnings in a timely manner using real-time
information — has been a Holy Grail for banks for the past several years. Under
Imran Khan's leadership, TD Bank Group seems to be making progress.

One example of an insight Khan, who is head of innovation at the $1.9
trillion-asset Toronto bank, has spearheaded is the ability to predict a
customer's future balance in a way that could help them.

Many banks can provide an alert when, say, an account balance drops below $100. 

"What we said was, everybody has varying needs and different ways that they look
at their balance," Khan said. "So for one customer, a balance dipping under a
hundred dollars may not even matter. They just manage things to the penny and
they're not worried about that. But for somebody else, if it dips below a
thousand dollars, that might be a cause for worry. So there isn't really that
one size fits all."

His team uses artificial intelligence to predict the customer's balance and then
look at the customer's historical patterns to determine if this is something
they should be worried about based on what is going to happen in the next couple
of weeks.

"We are able to help the customer understand that there might be a default, for
example, in a bill payment or credit card payment," Khan said. "But it's fine
tuned to that individual customer, because some customers might have credit card
bills that get to the tens of thousands, whereas others might only go into the
hundreds." 

Rather than alarm customers that they might not be able to pay an upcoming bill,
TD offers customers a preview of coming bills based on what the AI predicts and
what customers have scheduled, then gives them options to help them pay it. 

Personalization has been launched in the branches so that staff can also make
well-informed suggestions, in a manner consistent with the digital channels.

TD Bank Group has also been experimenting with having a presence in the
metaverse. It recently used it in the onboarding of interns.

"We got fantastic feedback," Khan said. "They saw us as a really innovative
organization and they're very active on social media, so it helped tell our
story. And it helped them build networks across North America." The bank is also
testing the use of training in the metaverse. 

TD Bank runs a platform called iD8 through which TD Bank staff have submitted
nearly 63,000 ideas since 2019, and 6,350 of these ideas have been executed. —
Penny Crosman




TREVOR LAIN

Founder and CEO
LexAlign

Trevor Lain and his regulatory tech company, LexAlign, help banks manage the
risks associated with small- and medium-sized business customers that they would
otherwise struggle to measure. This year, they added payments security to the
portfolio of risks they help banks and businesses manage.

The product, Security for Electronic Banking Self-Assessment, allows banks to
automate onsite audit functions that would otherwise be conducted by an expert.
The self-assessment walks business users through an interview about how they
handle the relevant aspects of a high-risk, highly regulated activity to help
banks determine where there are gaps in their processes and in their knowledge.

"We're exposing to the bank what is otherwise hidden within the four walls of
the customer, but which information the bank reasonably needs in order to comply
with fraud and other operational risk management requirements but can't
otherwise obtain at scale," Lain said. "It is in some respects the soft
information about the client and their risk posture that complements the hard
information on transactions that the banks already have."

LexAlign's differentiator is how it views the relationship between banks and
their SMB customers, according to Lain.

"We start from the premise that the customer that controls non-cash deposits and
payment originations does not have anything near a bank-level understanding of
the relevant rules, risks and responsibilities, but does know how they're
handling their operations," Lain said.

The diagnostics LexAlign creates not only reduces compliance costs for banks by
providing valuable insights about risk to banks; they also sensitize
SMB customers to the relevant rules, risks and responsibilities associated with
their payments, educate them on the gaps in their processes and how to remediate
them, and provide customized audit reports and training materials that
promulgate better security practices and empower them to manage the risk in
their payments activities. – Carter Pape




CAITLIN LONG

Founder and CEO
Custodia Bank

Caitlin Long got into bitcoin in 2012 and never looked back. More than a decade
later, she's still working to create a bridge between traditional finance and
digital assets. 

"I'm just a kid from Wyoming who went to New York after school to pay off my
student loans," Long said. "I ended up staying on Wall Street for 22 years, and
then retired back to work on passion projects. I got into bitcoin in 2012, and I
knew it was going to be significant because it was the first time that
internet-native money had been created."

Long began focusing on digital assets full-time in 2016, and worked in Wyoming
to expand legislation and acceptance of digital currencies and blockchain
technology.

Now, she serves as founder and CEO of digital asset-focused Custodia Bank. For
the last year, Custodia has been embroiled in a legal battle with federal
regulators, who in January rejected the bank's application to become a state
member bank and obtain a master account. 

Long said she never expected to get so deep in tug-of-war with regulators.

"We actually viewed our business plan, as proposed to the Fed, as very friendly
to the traditional banks," Long said. "We were going to be a new breed of
bankers' bank that was going to bring technology to the traditional banking
world, especially to those banks that don't have technologists on staff to be
able to build it."

Long said that although regulators have made it more challenging for Custodia,
the bank still plans to operate this year with a Wyoming state charter.

Throughout Custodia's legal and regulatory challenges, Long had also publicly
warned regulators of bank-run risks and potential failure and fraud of major
crypto companies like FTX. She said that digital assets also pose increased
risks to the traditional banking sector, which is why she thinks companies like
Custodia, which is focused on digital assets, should be accepted.

"The whole concept of online banking, much less digital assets that move at the
speed of light, has massively changed risk management for the banking industry,"
Long said. "This has to be bridged very carefully for that reason, so that
digital assets don't trigger bank runs in the traditional banking system."
–Catherine Leffert




MATTHEW MAXEY

Chief innovation officer
Synovus Bank

Under Chief Innovation Officer Matthew Maxey's watch, Synovus Bank recently
began offering embedded finance under a new brand called Maast. 

It created application programming interfaces for its merchant acquiring
payments, business checking and business lending functions and now offers them
to small and medium sized businesses through some business clients' technology
stacks. An example of this might be a company like Toast, which provides
technology for restaurants including human resources, payroll and inventory and
fixed asset management. 

"As a starting point, we decided to take what we do best, which is payments and
deposit instruments and lending, and repackage that into an API delivery model
that we plan to do in a full digital onboarding experience under the Maast
brand, but it's powered by Synovus Bank and it leverages our balance sheet,"
Maxey said. "We used a separate tech stack to make that happen." 

Maast has its own CEO, executive team, operating structure and technology. The
idea behind this is to let Maast move quickly the way fintechs do. 

Maxey also set up an innovation incubation lab at Synovus, which has about $60
billion of assets and is based in Columbus, Georgia. 

"The intent of that lab was to pull testing capabilities out of the bank so we
could lower our risk and speed up decisions," he said. The lab uses test data
powered by a series of partners.

"We can try things and throw them away much faster," Maxey said. "You're picking
up rocks, looking under the rock, if it doesn't meet a need, doesn't align with
our strategy, we put it back down and move on to the next thing. The goal is to
have a small pile of rocks that are highly valuable that we can move up to the
front of our investment pipeline at the executive level." — Penny Crosman




LAURA MERLING

Chief transformation and operations officer
Arvest Bank

Laura Merling devised a framework for transformation when she was at AT&T. Now
she is putting that five-pillar approach — which includes a multi-year business
vision and customer understanding — to work at Arvest Bank. 

Since Merling joined Arvest in 2021 as chief transformation and operations
officer, she has found concrete ways to solve customer problems. From late 2021
to early 2022, she conducted a vulnerability study that uncovered seven
categories of frustration among customers and subtler but still present
annoyances she dubs "rocks in their shoes." 

"In aggregate, those would add up to potentially driving a customer to leave,"
she said. 

Last May, the bank put action plans into place to address these issues big and
small; several wrapped up last year while others are ongoing. One example is
adding functionality to the mobile app so customers can upgrade a certificate of
deposit at maturity themselves rather than walking into a branch or making a
call. 

Under Merling's watch, the Fayetteville, Arkansas bank also started migrating
its data centers to Google Cloud in the summer of 2022. The bank is on track to
finish this year. The Google partnership coincided with another initiative by
Merling: Me@Arvest, a re-skilling and up-skilling program that will help people
rise within the company. 

Finally, Merling spearheaded the adoption of a new core system by Thought
Machine, which lets the bank construct its own products at its own pace. Arvest
rolled out equipment finance lending on Thought Machine last October, which it
built from the ground up in less than nine months, and expects all commercial
loans will go through Thought Machine by early 2024. — Miriam Cross




SCOTT NATHAN

Global head of anti-money laundering detection and customer insights
Citigroup

In a field dominated by regulatory concerns, Scott Nathan is an innovator. As
the global head of AML risk detection and customer insights at Citi, Nathan
often hosts demonstrations with regulators and other banks to help them
understand novel technologies that allow the financial sector to help keep the
country safe by fighting financial crimes.

During the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, Nathan was
working for FleetBoston Financial (later purchased by Bank of America in 2004)
as a commercial loan specialist, but the event soon thrust him into a role as a
senior compliance officer. Under the tutelage of Jim Richards, a Bank Secrecy
Act officer and director of the financial intelligence unit for FleetBoston,
Nathan learned an appreciation for using transaction monitoring technology to
advance national security aims.

Prior to Google's initial public offering in 2004, Richards sent Nathan to a
search engine strategies conference sponsored by Google, putting him in a room
with the company's co-founder Sergey Brin. Nathan got to explain how FleetBoston
was using open source intelligence gleaned from the internet to satisfy
regulatory mandates on fighting financial crimes, and he took from the
conference a greater appreciation for thinking outside the box in his own work.

Today, Nathan is leading Citi on a multiyear effort to overhaul the bank's AML
transaction monitoring system, which turns the petabytes of data the bank
processes into actionable insights on customers that go beyond AML risk
assessment into cybersecurity and fraud risk assessments, as well.

Citi needed a more modern capability that would not only support its compliance
obligations, but also allow it to improve the bank's client experience,
according to Nathan. As part of those efforts, Nathan is also looking to break
down silos within the institution in a compliant manner. — Carter Pape




THOMAS NOVAK

Chief digital officer
Visions Federal Credit Union

Thomas Novak runs a nontraditional digital banking experience at Visions Federal
Credit Union, which this year began offering members the ability to buy and sell
bitcoin alongside checking and savings accounts.

Visions also entered a series of fintech partnerships last year to bolster the
digital member experience. A partnership with Givio allows members to make
charitable donations through their digital banking portal, and a partnership
with IDnotify provides them with free identity theft and credit monitoring.

As vice president and chief digital officer of Visions, Novak has also led the
credit union's launch of real-time payments receiving, and helped drive a 44%
increase to the institution's credit union card program interchange income,
thanks, in part, to the launch of a Elite Visa Signature credit card offering 2%
cash back.

After partnering with personalization platform Finalytics.ai, Ventures drove a
200% increase in membership applications.

Partnerships such as these are often the product of Visions's Digital Advisory
Board, a forum Novak runs that allows frontline employees to pitch features,
functionality and fintech partnerships. The sixth such partnership to come out
of this effort is expected to be announced this year — a partnership with South
Africa-based Entersekt, which provides mobile-based authentication and app
security software. — Carter Pape




JACKIE RESES

Chair and CEO
Lead Bank

Jackie Reses' latest project is ramping up a community bank to be a leader in
payments and banking-as-a-service products to serve small businesses and
fintechs. The 30-year industry veteran acquired the Kansas City, Missouri-based
bank, fittingly called Lead Bank, last year.

Reses, who serves as chair and CEO of Lead Bank, is a known powerhouse in the
fintech and finance world. She's served in leadership roles at giants like
Goldman Sachs, Yahoo! and Square, where she helped the payment company obtain an
industrial loan company charter from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation
in 2020. Reses was named one of American Banker's Most Powerful Women in Finance
in 2020 for leading the charter initiative.

Reses acquired Lead with a group of investors and other "ex-Squares" to serve
entrepreneurs and founders and be a bank that "bridges innovation and finance."
Baas can offer higher fee income, return on assets, lower customer acquisition
costs and national reach, but as fintech funding drops and regulatory scrutiny
rises, it's not a simple path forward in the space. 

Still, Lead Bank has been in the business since 2018, when it first partnered
with credit-building fintech Self. Reses also said small businesses and
entrepreneurs need options for funding and partners.

In 2020, when Reses worked in a unit at Square focused on small business
lending, the company delivered more than $820 million in Paycheck Protection
Program loans.

"One of the top takeaways from this crisis is also something we've known for a
long time: Small businesses are routinely overlooked and underserved by the
traditional finance system," Reses said in an interview with American Banker at
the time.

The $850-million-asset bank has brought on leaders from companies across the
fintech and traditional finance world, like Square's parent company Block,
Lehman Brothers and other community banks. — Catherine Leffert




PAUL RICHARDS

Head of mortgage technology
Citizens Financial Group

Paul Richards has been the head of mortgage technology at Citizens Bank since
2020, and in that time has helped overhaul the bank's home equity line of credit
(HELOC) process. While traditional HELOC loans can take several weeks to
process, the bank's product, Citizens FastLine, aims to originate those loans in
seven days.

Richards came to the Providence, Rhode Island-based Citizens from Charles
Schwab, where he oversaw IT for Schwab Compliance Solutions Group, designing and
executing engineering plans and IT operations. Richards also helped advise on
technology strategy and coding practices at Charles Schwab. Richards also spent
two years at Fiserv, where he worked on the company's technical software
development strategy for bill payment applications and systems.

FastLine was built on a cloud-native platform that uses automated income
verification and credit decision software to cut time and manual labor in the
underwriting process. The system also uses digital data platforms to assess
property valuations. More than 70% of HELOC applicants are eligible to apply on
Citizens' FastLine portal, which the bank says takes as little as three
minutes. 

Citizens' HELOC originations have increased from $4.7 billion in 2020 to $8
billion in 2021 and $10 billion in 2022.

Last fall, CEO Bruce Van Saun said on an earnings call that the
$222.3-billion-asset bank was looking to double down on consumer digital banking
initiatives. While overall loan levels have dropped across the banking sector,
home equity has been a strong lending segment for the Citizens. — Catherine
Leffert




CHRISTIAN RUPPE

Chief innovation officer
Colony Bank

Christian Ruppe, chief innovation officer at Colony Bank in Fitzgerald, Georgia,
has worked on several data initiatives over the past year. One is the creation
of APIs through which the $2.8 billion-asset bank can provide customer account
data to fintechs. Others include the installation of a new data warehouse and
Tableau data visualization software. 

"Basically, we wanted portability and we wanted flexibility," Ruppe said. "The
one thing that we can be sure of is that we can't be sure of what's going to
happen in the industry. So being able to move quickly to get access to data and
give access to our data to the fintechs we want to work with is going to allow
us to be extremely flexible and move quickly." 

The data warehouse took about two months to set up and deploy, Ruppe said. It
feeds Salesforce, Tableau and other applications.

"The data warehouse allows us to move data quicker and have more data in one
place rather than only calling the core," he said. It will help the bank obtain
the full picture of the customer. 

Eventually, one of his goals is to give branch staff better tools and data, so
that tasks that today take 10 minutes to do in the core system, like ordering a
debit card, can be done with a quick API call.

"A lot of people focus on improving the front end for the customers, but then
the technology that the bankers are using is so out of date that the customer
has a terrible experience when they come into the branch because they wait 30
minutes to do something that's really not that complicated," Ruppe said. 

With Tableau, Ruppe will set up dashboards and reports to support business
decisions toward improving profitability and customer acquisition. — Penny
Crosman

Editorial Staff

 * Twitter
 * LinkedIn
 * Email
 * Show more sharing options
   Share Show more sharing options

Close extra sharing options
 * Twitter
 * LinkedIn
 * Email

Digital banking Fintech Technology


MORE FROM AMERICAN BANKER


ARE COMMUNITY BANK STOCKS OVERSOLD?

Shares in small banks have plummeted during this year's banking crisis. But
deposits have largely stabilized and credit quality remains historically strong,
bolstering the case for bargain buying and a sector rebound.

May 15, 2023


20 BANKS AND THRIFTS WITH THE MOST DEPOSITS IN 2022

The top five banks and thrifts have combined total deposits of more than $7
trillion as of December 31, 2022.

May 8, 2023


CREDIT CRUNCH FUELS 48-HOUR BANKRUPTCY RUSH WITH SEVEN FILINGS

Firms across every sector are struggling with higher interest costs — making it
more challenging to refinance loans and bonds — while corporate executives are
drawing more scrutiny from investors and creditors.

May 15, 2023


5 WAYS BANKS ARE PLUGGING INTO THE ELECTRIC VEHICLE MARKET

Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase are particularly active as they build
educational microsites and drive digital lending with EV manufacturers.

May 16, 2023


BNY MELLON WANTS DIGITAL ASSETS TO BE PART OF EVERY LINE OF BUSINESS

One of the oldest U.S. banks sees innovation as part of risk management, not a
discretionary cost.

May 15, 2023


CREDIT CARD BALANCES MAKE STEEPEST ONE-YEAR CLIMB ON RECORD

Balances reached nearly $1 trillion at the end of the first quarter, up 17% from
a year earlier. The increase reflects higher spending by well-off consumers on
travel and entertainment, as well as the pressure that lower-income households
are facing from inflation and higher interest rates.

May 15, 2023

BANK FAILURES' RIPPLE EFFECTS

After two large regionals failed in March, regulators, politicians, bank
executives and others are scrambling to deal with the fallout. Here are our 10
predictions for what's next.

Subscribe


Follow Us In Real Time
 * googlenews
 * twitter
 * applenews
 * facebook
 * linkedin

 *  * About Us
    * Contact Us
    * The Magazine
    * Banker's Glossary

 *  * RSS Feed
    * Privacy Policy
    * Subscription Agreement
    * Content Licensing/Reprints
    * Advertising/Marketing Services

© 2023 Arizent. All rights reserved.
© 2023 Arizent. All rights reserved.