Boxed in by existing hard-wired software, financial institutions face a growing agility gap. Learn how to shift to a new model that can drive your competitive advantage.
Reintroducing Jack Henry™: Discover the Difference
Ask yourself these questions to assess your modernization goals. Checks remain a significant payment instrument, forcing the need to modernize aging infrastructure and leverage open platforms. Are you ready?
Read More about Status Check: Do your Payment Solutions Need a Refresh?
Looking for an optimized contact center experience? Watch POPi/o and Eltropy’s latest webinar to see how you can boost efficiency and ease staffing strains.
Read More about Contact Centers and AI: Where’s the Efficiency?
How do you stay ahead of the curve? There’s one place 5% of all institutions in the U.S. find the latest trends redefining the future of banking.
Read More about What Big Ideas Will Disrupt Banking in 2023?
By Bill Streeter, Editor in Chief at The Financial Brand
Stay on top of all the latest news and trends in banking industry.
Liz Wolverton hates the phrase “digital transformation.”
That’s rather startling because as EVP and Head of Consumer Banking and Brand Experience at Synovus Bank, she is a key player in helping to usher the 135-year-old bank further into the digital age.
Her aversion to the phrase stems from her belief that it too often translates into simply digitizing a legacy task — like changing a paper document into a pdf. Actually, she says, banks “don’t need to digitize everything.”
Two concepts are vital to becoming a modern digital bank, Wolverton believes.
One is customer centricity. “It’s about what the customer is trying to do and what they need. It’s not necessarily about the task or the technology,” the executive states.
The second is to have a business-model view of going digital. Digital must really be completely integrated into your business model, she says. “Let your digital journey revolve around that.”
Instead of focusing on “transformation” — which, she maintains, can be “a hot mess,” Wolverton prefers change to be more of a “metamorphosis.”
Using very different words from the usual business-change rhetoric, the executive says, “I want our teams and our company, which have served our clients so well, to gracefully metamorphosize into something different” to reflect what’s happening in the market. She further describes this as “a choreography between digital and human that benefits the consumer.”
These and other comments about transformation came out (ironically enough) during Wolverton’s appearance on the Banking Transformed podcast hosted by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand and CEO of the Digital Banking Report. The podcast episode, entitled “Synovus Bank: The Journey to Become a Digital Bank,” covers many of the challenges traditional financial institutions face.
The most innovative banks, credit unions, and fintechs are providing their customers a fast, secure, and reliable way to connect financial accounts.
Read More about The Fastest, Most Secure, and Most Reliable Connectivity
Find out how to strengthen your institution’s defenses against the latest cybersecurity threats in the financial services landscape.
Read More about Are You Protected From Current Cyber Threats?
Wolverton, a 20-year veteran at Synovus, had an unusual start for the head of consumer banking. She joined the bank as a young CPA with no banking experience and was immediately tasked with helping to formulate the Columbus, Ga.-based bank’s response to the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act. That experience helped her understand the nature of the industry, which she describes as being, in general, very risk averse with a “very homogenous business model.”
The biggest challenge she and her colleagues have faced in shaking up the way things are done in the bank is its very success doing things traditionally and “an aversion to pace.” However, she says that while some of that perspective remains at Synovus, she has seen much change as the bank navigates a new environment.
A prime example is management’s decision to shift away from dependence on a large technology vendor to better control its digital destiny.
Read More: After 10 Years, Digital Transformation Still Eludes Most Banks
In Wolverton’s opinion, Synovus has a very good digital experience but is just “scratching the surface of the opportunity to really differentiate.” A decision the bank made several years ago will make much more possible.
The regional bank made the gutsy decision to walk away from the traditional technology infrastructure it had long used. The bank shifted from relying on a large tech vendor and started using vendors “that aren’t really perfect yet” in terms of the usual banking requirements, as Wolverton put it.
In other words, Synovus was willing to say, “Let’s do this without all the answers,” a mentality, she says with some understatement, that is not always welcomed within banking. Doing so, however, enables the institution to take charge of how it shapes the customers’ digital experience.
“It’s really about long-term sustainability,” she adds. Ultimately, she believes, the willingness to take manageable risks like this is what differentiates Synovus from other financial institutions.
Read More: Don’t Forget Your Bank’s Strengths in Pursuit of Digital Transformation
One of the thorniest issues banks of any size must grapple with is effective use of data. Yet, so much depends on that for banks to match the capabilities of the big tech firms that millions of people now routinely use.
It’s difficult for banks to assemble the data they need and get it into usable form. Synovus is no exception. “We started like most people, trying to build this big plane of data and then figuring out how to deploy it,” Wolverton explains. “Then we pivoted and said, ‘You know what? Let’s just find a couple of use cases and build from there’.” Still, she admits Synovus is early in this evolution.
One use case she mentions is on the commercial side, identifying customer attrition risks by tracking deposits leaving the bank and using analytics to identify behaviors and provide alerts to commercial banking officers, saying something like, ‘You might want to speed up your next conversation with that client’.”
As straightforward as that sounds, Wolverton says that it’s been very hard to operationalize that bankwide. “If you flood their inbox with things that aren’t super relevant for them, then the tool becomes less credible.”
Another data-related challenge is “marrying” input from third parties the bank uses with her own analytics team. They have to deploy the insights the outside firms come up with and decide if it works. So it’s not just getting the data that makes this hard, she states, it is the need to develop a data ecosystem.
Read More: Inside Regions Bank’s Cloud-Driven Digital Transformation Strategy
The week after Wolverton was named Head of Consumer Banking in December 2021, Synovus announced it would be closing 15% of its branches. (In fall 2022 the bank operated 354 across five southeastern states). That prompted podcast host Marous to ask how she gets her branch team to agree to become digital ambassadors if they’re being replaced?
Wolverton’s answer is two-fold. First she described how every person in a closed branch has an opportunity elsewhere in the organization — often several opportunities. “With a remote work environment I can distribute this workforce in a way that is uber valuable,” she says. “When could you ever tell a teller before this that they have an opportunity in about six different areas if they want to pursue it?”
Secondly, she said, they try to show branch staff how by assisting customers to use digital banking they are helping people proactively take care of their financial health. “If we were seen as pushing customers to use digital, branch employees would likely reject it,” says Wolverton, “but when we explain how it’s beneficial to customers, they embrace it. You have to shift the mindset; it always starts with a mindset.”
Marous observed that trust within an institution is rarely discussed. Yet trust by employees that a bank has their best interests — and the customers’ — at heart makes a huge difference.
“If you don’t get your people to buy in,” he says, “the technology’s going to mean nothing.”
Learn More: Catch more of Liz Wolverton’s insights at The Financial Brand Forum 2022 where she is participating in a banker panel “Strategies to Accelerate Innovation in Banking,” moderated by Jim Marous.
THE FINANCIAL BRAND FORUM KICKS OFF NOVEMBER 13TH! In just a few weeks, over 2,500 of your peers and competitors will be at the Forum 2022 exploring the big ideas disrupting banking and the latest trends redefining the future of financial marketing. Hurry, time is running out! REGISTER NOW, before it’s too late!
This article was originally published on October 7, 2022. All content © 2022 by The Financial Brand and may not be reproduced by any means without permission.
Stay on top of all the latest news and trends in banking industry.
Listen to the brightest minds in the banking and business world and get ready to embrace change, take risks and disrupt yourself and your organization.
Read More about Banking Transformed Podcast with Jim Marous
Digital banking users on the software review site G2 have ranked Alkami the Easiest to Use Digital Banking Platform in 2022
Read More about Nearly 40% Rate This Most Important in Their Banking Journey
When financial institutions provide benefits that help cover rising vet expenses and increase financial well-being, consumer retention rises.
Read More about As Pet Ownership Rises, Consumers Look For More Financial Protection
Borrowers and financial institutions alike are experiencing the Kasasa Loan difference. See why it’s truly a loan that works for everyone.
Read More about Ever Heard Someone Say They Love Their Loan?
