Lindsay Sacknoff, president of consumer banking at Ally, has been honing her leadership skills since childhood.
"The way I think about performance is related to where I've come from," she explained. "I always tell people that I was born on a team — one with five brothers and sisters. Being a part of that family team was the foundation for my leadership philosophy."
And she's been putting that philosophy to work at Ally — the largest all-digital bank in the U.S., with $144 billion in deposits and $21 billion across retail banking and investing — since she joined in January 2025. Sacknoff oversees strategy and design for Ally's digital financial solutions, and also manages bank operations including fraud and financial crimes, consumer insights, and the customer care and experience group, which supports more than 3.5 million customers.
In Sacknoff's first year at Ally, customer growth rose 5% year over year; it increased 21% year over year in Q1 2026. Customer retention rose by 95% in 2025, paired with a satisfaction rate of 90%. Ally Invest assets rose 14%, while dual invest and deposits customers increased by around 3%, powering approximately $260 million in incremental balances.
Sacknoff was a part of several initiatives that helped land these results. Among them is the spending buckets tool, which allows customers to categorize and fund multiple buckets to organize their expenses. Along with the credit score tracker, spending buckets helped improve customer experience by 23%. And a recent partnership with Walmart allows customers to deposit money to their accounts at stores nationwide. From its launch in December 2025 to March 2026, 13,000 customers used the tool to deposit $8 million to their accounts.
Additionally, several payments and account management strategies – including a 50% reduction in identity fraud upon account opening – led to $1.5 million in savings in Q1 2026.
Preventing fraud is a key challenge for Ally – and for the industry as a whole, Sacknoff says.
"As soon as we find solutions, fraudsters get smarter and more sophisticated, more brazen, and the cycle continues," she said.
Every financial institution is managing this in its own way, she said, "but as an industry, we should come together to drive awareness of the issue, improve education among consumers and then implement best practices across the board to combat it."
Everything Sacknoff does at Ally is aimed first and foremost at improving the customer experience.
"In working alongside her, Lindsay made immediate impact on the business, and she's also thinking about five to 10 years from now to identify what consumers will want from their digital bank in the context of everyday life," said Ally CMO Andrea Brimmer. "She wants to create value for them and excitement about what's next in banking among all stakeholders."
