Ali Mattera considers her professional journey in banking to be a "Cinderella story."
"I started, like most amazing success stories, in college as a teller," Mattera told American Banker.
Her initial jobs at smaller banks gave her the opportunity to experience multiple facets of banking operations early on in her career.
"I had the ability to have my hand in a little bit of everything, so I had exposure to retail, compliance, BSA and technology," she said. "For me, taking a natural interest in all things technology, I definitely saw that as the fastest path for me to have a seat at the table."
After climbing up the bank technology and management ranks for nearly 20 years, she reached the C-suite in 2023 by joining the Englewood Cliffs-based digital bank ConnectOne as chief digital officer.
ConnectOne didn't have a formal project management office when Mattera first joined, but due to her prior experience, that changed once she took the helm.
"I came in with a small, mighty team of just myself," she said. "In the last two years I've taken on technology operations, deposit operations, project management and digital operations."
The many hats she wears at the company meant that when ConnectOne decided to acquire the First National Bank of Long Island, Mattera faced the challenge of leading the banks through their core integration head-on and deployed her new project managers to the task.
"The experience and exposure you get to so many different areas is unique to doing a merger," she said. "How often is every single person in an organization working on the same thing? [There's] so much cross collaboration."
Mattera's biggest takeaway from bringing together the different tech stacks as part of ConnectOne's recent deal was how involved the process of determining what to keep and what to remove is for everyone involved.
"The most important stand I've taken is that it can't be technology for technology's sake," she said. "Differentiating that and understanding where the organization is going is important. Is this something that is going to grow and scale with us, that is worth living through the pain of getting it to integrate?"
In order to make that happen, however, Mattera emphasized the need for aligning teams and executives in a unified approach toward tech integration.
"It's not just my job to come in and say, 'Here's what they have, here's what we have, this is what we're keeping,'" she said. "We're also bringing in our stakeholders, having these conversations and bringing everyone on the same page in terms of what is important and what we should be retaining. Driving that alignment across the top of the house makes a difference."
The acquisition, completed in a compressed timeline of six months over the first half of this year, expanded ConnectOne's reach across the Tri-State area. Mattera has spent the last decade living in New York City after growing up "four miles from Manhattan" in her home state of New Jersey and getting her college degree from Rutgers Business School.
Her attachment to the region has been strengthened throughout her professional pursuits. Mattera has worked at six different banks in total over her career, all based in the Garden State.
"With New Jersey banks, every single one has felt both different and the same," she said. "We're competing with some of the largest, most well-known mega-banks, regional banks and super-community banks. We're at the crossroads of the financial industry. Where else would I go, staying in the banking world?"
