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Nikki Katz calls 2025 "a big year of scale" for
As head of digital since 2018, Katz oversees over 500 direct reports and digital experiences across mobile, online banking, and employee channels at the bank.
"We had a lot of capabilities, and we were able to put them together," Katz said in an interview. "We've been really focusing on shifting our sales operations to leverage digital more heavily, so we were able to go from 55% of our sales coming in through digital in 2024 to 66% in 2025."
Katz started out as a web developer at Yahoo, eventually transitioning to product management roles, most recently leading Disney's consumer products, gaming and publishing tech before joining
Last year, her team supported $800 million in digital transformation initiatives, bringing together mobile apps into a single platform spanning banking, investments and retirement. Erica, the AI-powered assistant is evolving as well. It's now become a more fully embedded agent, serving 21 million users and 3.2 billion interactions.
Her team's 2025 consolidation and modernization of mobile capabilities reduced annual development costs by $10 million, according to data provided by the bank. Erica now handles the workload of 11,000 people, saving 67,000 hours and cutting internal service desk calls by 55%.
One of the developments that surprised Katz the most last year among all of her team's initiatives was that the clients weren't only asking Erica questions — they were also interested in Erica's insights.
"Most of Erica's usage came from those insights – much more useful for our clients than we ever could have expected," she said. The unified app has also become a stronger referral source, driving 270,000 new accounts and $27 billion in new assets.
Katz, who holds 25 patents, has an optimistic view of AI and its impact on the workforce. She views AI fluency as a part of the bank's talent strategy without resorting to layoffs. Instead the bank is focused on reskilling employees and rethinking processes to position them for tomorrow's roles.
"Our focus is not on eliminating jobs," she said. "It's on reskilling and rethinking every process so we put people where the workforce of the future is going."
The popularity of Erica's insights and further embedding of AI products signal the direction her team is headed.
"We would love to get to a place where, when you call us, we already know what you're going to ask us based on what we've seen in your account, or when you open the app, and then we can proactively show you the right information," Katz noted. "And that's the direction that we're moving overall."
