Sometime in mid-March 2027, more than 200,000 Pinnacle Financial Partners customers will be moved onto a new banking app, whether they're ready or not. Liz Wolverton is the executive responsible for making sure it all works.
People may not know her name right now, she said. "But when [that date in] March happens, if things don't work, they will know it in a bad way afterwards." March 2027 is coming fast, she added.
Wolverton is Pinnacle's chief digital and product solutions officer, a role created in August 2025 as part of the leadership structure formed when Synovus Financial Corp. and Pinnacle Financial Partners closed their merger of equals on Jan. 2, 2026. A 23-year veteran of Synovus, Wolverton most recently ran its consumer banking division, and now reports to Pinnacle CEO Kevin Blair.
In her new role, she sets investment priorities across the bank's digital platforms, including mobile and online banking for consumers, as well as delivery platforms for the bankers who serve commercial clients. She also oversees how those platforms connect to the bank's product lineup.
It's a job with less formal power than her last one, by her own account. Before the deal, she ran a business line with a profit-and-loss statement and had more than 1,600 employees reporting up through her. But her current role carries no P&L and a headcount of 50. "The scorecard just got a lot easier," she said, with the same dry humor she uses to describe most of her career.
But the trade-off, she added, is that the things she's now responsible for, like digital platforms work and the merger conversion, will certainly show up in the P&L eventually. "If I'm not delivering well, you better believe it will affect the P&L," she said. "This is why I won't sleep beginning in January."
Tennessee-based Pinnacle is in the middle of stitching together two banks that took different paths to get where they are. Pinnacle grew by aggressively recruiting tenured bankers with their own client books; Synovus grew by investing in technology and product. The combined strategy, as Wolverton describes it, keeps Pinnacle's growth model and layers Synovus's systems underneath it — including the platform that will carry the combined bank's customers through the 2027 conversion.
"All your products have to be unified, all your technology has to be unified, and we are not merging with a small entity," she said.
So far, the merger has been paying off: In Q2 of 2026, adjusted net income for the combined banks—after stripping out the merger costs and other one-time charges—grew 4.4%.
Another decidedly non-technical victory for Wolverton's Synovus team in 2025 is fraud reduction, which fell by $5.7 million or 58% year-over-year. That achievement was driven less by any single piece of technology than by tightening the bank's own processes, scrutinizing new accounts as well as deposit and wire activity more closely.
Wolverton also credits an old-fashioned customer education campaign. She named it herself, a nod to Smokey the Bear: "stop, drop, and roll" became "stop, drop, and call." The instructions to customers: hang up on anyone who claims to be calling from the bank, no exceptions, and call back using a number you already have.
She said it required teaching an entire region to be a little less polite. "Here in the South, we have really polite people that don't like to hang up. So we literally had a campaign to teach people to hang up on people — and it's okay if it's your banker, they'll forgive you." The educational piece is just as important as anything else, she said, because if you give away your username and password, "it's extremely difficult for us to protect you."
Fraud, she can manage. The 2027 conversion is the bigger unknown. If it goes well, no one will notice. If it doesn't, she said, they'll know exactly whose name to remember.
