The all-digital Ally Bank depends on its website and mobile app to bring in and retain its customers. Recently, in the culmination of a multiyear project known as One Ally, the bank's online platforms just got a major overhaul.
"The thematic push for One Ally was to bring our auto and banking platform experiences together from a consumer lens," Carrie Sumlin, Ally's executive director of Digital Product and Experience, told American Banker. "We used to have one for auto lending and one for banking. Now we have one for both."
Ally's Digital Product and Experience (DPX) team, which Sumlin leads, oversees the customer interface and user experiences for Ally's 10 million customers and 22,000 auto dealers. Their role within the organization has three main responsibilities according to Sumlin: understanding what the business needs of the company are, how customers interact with its digital platforms and the capabilities of the bank's tech stack.
Ally's digital consumer platform was originally fragmented across multiple apps, with auto customers having a different experience than deposit account holders. The DPX team's One Ally project, started in 2022, worked to unify both the front and back ends of the bank's mobile app and website so customers could use a single login to manage either or all of their Ally products in one place.
"Over the past five years, we've seen our consumers shift drastically into the mobile app environment," Sumlin said. "Over 80% of our logins are now happening in our mobile apps. We do have a mobile-first mindset, but we don't ever like to think, 'I could launch this on mobile but not on the web.' We want to bring these experiences together so customers have the choice, and we can do that because we're efficiently managing those teams as a singular product team."
Since the completion of the One Ally project in the first half of 2025, the bank reported 10.5% net deposit growth from customers who initially were not deposit holders while reducing their development cost by 30% and reducing unnecessary clicks for consumers by 27%.
"As an all digital bank, the efforts that we make to touch our customers and dealers come through our digital channels," Sumlin said. "The impact of changes that drive efficiency in delivering that are pretty significant to our bottom line. I've been at Ally for a little over 17 years, and this has been a culmination of many years of strategy."
Sumlin's team also collaborated with Ally's data team to enable the use of personalized messaging for consumer action alerts. The automated personalization-language, according to the bank, has driven a 49% improvement in assisting customers past due on payments.
"A lot of what we were able to do was collaborate throughout the organization to drive results," Sumlin said. "Sometimes collaboration is something that is a trade off for results. I think, in this case, we bring those two things together. The strength of the women on our team was foundational to doing that."
One key component of the One Ally program was building a new experience for prospective customers downloading the Ally app to open an account. Despite limited marketing, prospects who downloaded the app started the account opening flow three times more often than prospects on the digital bank's other platforms, according to the company.
"Our goal has always been to build the future of banking, and One Ally was a big step toward that," said Stephanie Thuemen, senior director of digital product for Ally. "This will serve as a strategic foundation for all future work. Our ability to see around corners will benefit us for years to come, not just for Ally but for our customers, too."
The Team
Carrie Sumlin, Executive Director, Digital Product & Experience
Stephanie Thuemen, Sr. Director, Digital Product
Erika McKeogh, Principle, Digital Product
Katie Aman, Director, DigitalProduct Lead
Kristina Bain, Director, Digital Product
Mansi Malpani, Principle, Tech Analysis
Katie Aman, Director, Digital Product Lead
Jessica Rimler Pennell, Director, UX Design Lead
Aidis Suever Executive Director, Customer Care
Zina Janabi, Director, Software Engineering Lead
Susan Nord, Manager, Tech Delivery Management
Sujata Avutu, Manager, Software Testing
Allison Velzke, Senior Director, Digital Product
Janelle Kennedy, Executive Director, Consumer Asset Management
Carey Bzdok, Senior Director, Software Engineering
Angela Ramsammy, Director, Technical Operations Lead
Angilyn Wright, Principle, Tech Delivery Management
Rachel Balon, Senior Analyst, Advanced Business Analytics
