722: Rob discusses his career journey going from CIO to COO and ultimately to co-CEO. He gives a brief thumbnail sketch of Cenlar’s business and describes his purview in his new post alongside Jim Daras. Rob also talks about the advantages of being a technologist in his role, the importance of developing a solid relationship with the company’s board of directors, and the benefit of having a close relationship with his CIO successor. Finally, Rob covers the trends in technology that are on his personal radar and reflects on what he attributes to his career success.
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721: Sastry discusses the company’s mission of powering the business’s strategic shifts and fueling innovation all while transforming the core. He gives a brief overview of TIAA’s business, the two sides to his purview as Chief Information and Client Services Officer, and how his team collaborates with clients to deliver solutions that resonate with each stakeholder regardless of which stage they are at in their retirement journey. Sastry also describes the way his team is organized, how it drives the broader strategy of the company, and how it is developing a data and AI strategy to realize the organization’s mission. He goes into detail on the types of creative partnerships including those with Universities to upskill talent and diversity groups to open up opportunities for members of those groups. Sastry talks about his involvement in one such group, Girls in Tech, and the impact that it has had on his outlook for DE&I in the industry. Finally, Sastry covers trends in artificial intelligence and the metaverse and reflects on the keys to his career success.
Some executives have the same job across many companies. They bring a strong toolkit into different environments, and, for a time, help drive change for those companies. Other executives have many jobs in the same company. They get to know their companies as well as anyone. When they reach executive levels, they are well equipped to collaborate with and mentor those who have taken over their old responsibilities. They understand how the company works better than most. They have a great internal network to tap to drive innovation. Ramon Richards is the latter type of executive.
Richards joined the $47.5 billion revenue mortgage financing company Fannie Mae 23 years ago. Since then, he has six roles prior to ascending to the role of CIO in August of 2021:
He admits that he did not think he would remain with the company for more than two decades when he joined. He has stayed, however, because he has been able to learn and take on new opportunities. “On my journey, the work has remained interesting and challenging and has kept me fully engaged,” he noted. “Another important part of it, being in the world of technology, you’re always learning, and the learning was encouraged.” He also understands that Fannie Mae has had tremendous advantages in keeping an executive of his tenure in the fold for so long. “I’m deeply connected with our mission and highly motivated with the things that we are doing and how we are trying to improve access to housing,” Richards said. “I understand the culture and I’m able to identify where there are opportunities for us to continue to evolve as a company. I think there’s an ability to connect the dots differently when you really understand how all aspects of the company works from business to operations to technology, which has allowed me to influence differently than maybe someone who hasn’t spent as much time understanding the inner workings of the company.”
Richards and his team have driven a tremendous digital transformation over the course of the past several years. There has been a focus on building the skills of the future so that his team can meet the demand for digital capabilities across the enterprise. He has also driven a reduction in legacy technology so that there is a better, less complex tech stack that he and the team manage. Agile practices have also been an important change factor as has the shift to a greater emphasis on automation and cloud technology. Richards’ team is increasing the pace at which it can deliver software while also reducing costs along the way.
The IT team now has a better foundation upon which it can innovate. To exemplify that innovation, Richards highlights an automated underwriting system that his team helped put in place to incorporate consistent rent payment history in credit evaluations. Long time renters who pay their rent every month should be establishing credit worthiness for what is typically the biggest bill of the month. And yet, it has not typically contributed to an evaluation of credit worthiness. This allows Fannie Mae to qualify more borrowers for mortgage loans. It is an idea that almost seems obvious once it is explained, at yet it is a first of its kind in the industry. There were considerable tech changes necessary to allow this idea to blossom. “We have taken advantage of some of our cloud capabilities as well as machine learning capabilities…to unlock the payment rental history,” said Richards. “This is a major contribution to the company’s core principle of increasing access to housing.”
The key to unlocking innovation at Fannie Mae is in building a team that is curious and ambitious enough to want to develop the best ideas for the future. It begins with having the right training. “We have a curriculum that we’ve established to build the skill sets to be a full-stack engineer,” said Richards. “We have a curriculum in place to build advanced cloud engineering skills, as well. We also invest in leadership and management skills because you need both in order to have a high-performing team.” Additionally, his career path has become more de rigeur for his colleagues. When an employee is ready for the next opportunity, suggesting other parts of the company can increase the possibility that they will stay rather than seek that next opportunity outside of the company. “In the kind of talent market that we’re in today, it’s important to retain your individuals,” Richards underscored. “We are very focused on finding new opportunities for individuals when they’re ready for the next chapter in their career. It’s a much better answer for the company than those individuals deciding to leave.”
This people-powered innovation engine came in handy when the pandemic struck. Many of Fannie Mae’s customers were hit hard by the health crisis that quickly became a financial crisis for many. “Fortunately, we had made some good progress on some of the digital capabilities that we were building, and we were able to take advantage of those capabilities to deliver a payment deferral function for the company faster than we had delivered that type of function in the past,” said Richards. “It became clear to us that the investment we were making in our digital core was important for the way we wanted to operate as a company moving forward. It was an early example of the potential, and I think it also helped in motivating and inspiring a lot of our folks to set the company up for future success delivering products that would benefit homeowners and renters.”
Richards is still having fun in his post as CIO and sees vast opportunities to continue to innovate, learning new skills along the way.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. He has written two bestselling books, and his third, Getting to Nimble, was recently released. He also moderates the Technovation podcast series and speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
718: Kamran and Roelant discuss the genesis of Adyen and the company’s vision for driving the future of Unified Commerce. Kamran gives a brief history of the company, how he got introduced to the platform, and why Adyen has chosen to grow organically instead of pursuing an M&A strategy. Roelant gives his perspective on why unified commerce is imperative for the future of digital transformations, and shares learnings from working with customers during the pandemic. Finally, both executives then talk about the process of international expansion, the hurdles associated with it, and translating the business model across regions.
697: Ramon speaks about the digital transformation of Fannie Mae and the mortgage lending industry. He gives an overview of Fannie Mae’s business and what the digital transformation at the company entails including incorporating automation, maturing a data strategy, and building a team to foster innovation. Ramon describes the process of upskilling the employees with the digital skills necessary and how technology facilitated resiliency during the pandemic. Finally, Ramon looks ahead at the trends in technology that are on his radar and reflects on his long tenure as well as the keys to his success.
683: Ather Williams III; EVP & Head of Strategy, Digital, and Innovation at Wells Fargo; and Prakash Kota, SVP & Chief Information Officer of Autodesk, discuss the technology-led business model innovations at their respective companies. Prakash begins with the digital transformation he has led at Autodesk. Both executives then give their perspectives on identifying and operationalizing innovation opportunities and adopting an agile mindset to measure the value realized from these opportunities.
675: In this interview, four executives from the financial services industry give their perspectives on talent, data, and innovation at their respective companies and what the future of the industry looks like. Citizens Bank’s Michael Ruttledge discusses the company’s in-house engineering academies and training programs and how automation is helping with a more efficient self-service-focused customer experience. Comerica’s Megan Crespi covers the DE&I recruiting programs at the company and her thoughts on the “Amazoning” of customer expectations. Ally Bank’s Sathish Muthukrishnan talks about leveraging data to differentiate the digital-born company from its competitors. Finally, Truist’s Scott Case gives insight into the merger of BB&T and SunTrust that formed the company and how its Digital Straddle helped facilitate the merger during the pandemic.
667: In this interview, Dave covers the topic of how Upstart is leveraging artificial intelligence models to increase people’s access to credit. He provides an overview of the company’s business model, how it collects the data it uses across multiple constituents, and the learning process he went through during the development of the company. He then describes the way artificial intelligence fits into the model, why this approach is its differentiator, and what hurdles he faced along the way. Finally, Dave talks about the company’s IPO, why this was the right time to go public, and how his experience building out Google’s cloud business set him up for success with Upstart.
649: In this interview, Kathy discusses how she is driving the modernization and simplification efforts at the company to evolve the customer interactions from a digital perspective. Kathy also gives her perspective on the war for talent and how her experience starting her role during the pandemic has informed her view on remote onboarding. Finally, she shares a few lessons learned from her diverse array of experiences, what the future of women in tech looks like, and the various trends in technology that she is keeping her eye on.
Ather Williams III is the Senior Executive Vice President and Head of Strategy, Digital Platforms, and Innovation at Wells Fargo, a post he has held since October of 2020. In that role, he leads corporate strategic planning, defines and manages digital platforms and capabilities, and oversees innovation priorities, opportunities and company-wide efforts to drive transformation.
Williams strategy role cuts across the five business lines at Wells Fargo, three of which are focused on consumer and two of which are focused on enterprise customers. “We work across those businesses, across all of our range of capabilities, covering our 69 million customers, and all of our functions to put together a coherent strategy to serve those clients in an innovative way,” noted Williams.
One of the key strategic pillars that that Williams and his team has defined and is helping to drive focuses on technology and innovation and having a digital-first, mobile-first, though not mobile only, mindset. “Digital platforms are a natural place to sit with me because it is a transformation of how we bring together a consistent consumer experience that starts with mobile across our deposits and payments business, our consumer lending business and our wealth management business,” said Williams. “[This intersection] will easily migrate across our other channels, be it an ATM, a branch or a financial advisor’s office.”
Williams considers the innovation part of his mandate to be the “fuel for the future.” The inspiration for that innovation often comes from interactions with customers and the needs they articulate, and the innovation is then driven by the team he has at his disposal within Wells Fargo together with a partner ecosystem he has curated. By way of example, Williams noted customers’ desire to rethink how they move their money around the world or new ways of investing their money. He also noted working with customers on how best to decarbonize. Wells Fargo makes its innovation channel accessible to customers and the broader ecosystem can help bring those ideas to life.
Williams noted that the pandemic has been a remarkable accelerant for mobile adoption. “All the metrics I look at weekly on our digital platforms, how we are performing and interacting with our clients, they are all up double digits year-over-year, and it is continual growth,” he said. “On the consumer side of the house, mobile is our number one channel. Between mobile and online, we have about just shy of two billion interactions with our clients every quarter.”
Williams is quick to add that these growth figures are not the death knell to Wells Fargo’s branches, however. He offers coin and currency transactions and mortgage initiation as two of a variety of examples of interactions that customers are often more comfortable doing in the branches. Williams describes the strategic approach the company is taking as mobile first but not mobile only. “Making that transition from being what a lot of banks traditionally have been which is a physical interaction first, technology supporting it, to being a technology led, physical supporting it,” Williams highlighted. “That flip is what we are driving from a strategy perspective.”
The company has also flipped the traditional script on how innovation happens. It used to be that companies like Wells Fargo built products and technology internally without outside partners to speak of. Counterexamples include payment networks for credit cards, or for clearing payments internationally, but these were exceptions rather than the rule. “Increasingly, banks are becoming ecosystem orchestrators where we build some stuff, but we enable you to experience it through APIs,” offered Williams by way of example. “That change, going from a very inwardly focused culture to an outwardly-focused culture, meaning engaged in the broader ecosystem for our clients, has been a big change.” Williams underscored that this trend happens both on the consumer and on the wholesale side of the business. Now enterprises bank through their ERP system in their treasury workstation. Wells Fargo has developed a means of plugging into that.
When asked how he measures innovation, Williams volunteered velocity of ideas through the company’s pipeline. “We run a funnel process and I measure ideas in and ideas we push into production, but it is also how quickly we can churn them through,” he noted. “Anything in the cryptocurrency area for example, is changing so rapidly that, I just need to make sure that we are getting enough reps or enough at-bats on things to see what might stick.” He also indicated that he is mindful of patents filed by the company. He also mentions that it is no longer useful to simply benchmark Wells Fargo against other banks, as had been the primary measuring stick used. “We look at some companies that are traditionally very innovative, mostly in the tech space but not necessarily banks,” said Williams. “I do look at how quickly they are launching new products, and how they are driving the industry.”
Each of the line of lines of business has a strategy and innovation lead. Their main job is to help each business think about how they are going to meet those changing customer needs and how the company will respond to competitive forces. Additionally, these leaders investigate problems Wells Fargo is trying to solve and then tap back into that innovation stream of what is happening in the market. There is also a team that is focused on innovation strategy. That team is “focused on thinking about what is five or ten years out that we need to keep our eyes on,” Williams said, “It can be a technology thing, or it could be an industry trend thing that we can see is going to impact us.”
The leaders of each of these teams come together with some frequency to share insights and to identify points of collaboration. The innovation team drives research and development, as well as the pilot and deliver, test and learn continuum to scaled ideas. “We get an idea such as cross border money movement over the distributed ledger,” said Williams. “Here is the client, here is the business case, here is the client scenario, how do we make that happen? You pull it into the lab, you can stand up a prototype and get it to run. Then once you get to a certain place, you can commercialize it and you flip it back into the business.”
This well thought out innovation engine is already bearing fruit, and Williams is confident that the best is yet to come.
