In just one week last May, Fifth Third Bank acquired Rize Money and Big Data Healthcare, greatly expanding Bridgit Chayt's role and responsibilities.
"That was quite a week," said Chayt, who heads Fifth Third's treasury management and commercial payments division. "We closed Rize on Monday and Big Data Healthcare on Friday." The bank did not disclose the terms of the deals and declined to say how many employees it will be retaining from the acquired companies.
Chayt said the new additions will enable her team to achieve its mission: to help the bank's business customers better automate payments and manage cash flow.
Rize's technology, for instance, helps clients to securely accept and process consumer payments on their websites and apps. According to Chayt, Arlington, Virginia-based Rize has built a dashboard that will work seamlessly with Fifth Third's in-house tools. That technology has allowed Fifth Third to create an embedded finance platform called Newline, which lets clients use the bank's payment, deposit and lending services when doing business via their mobile apps and websites.
"Integrating this platform will be our next evolutionary turn," Chayt said.
Big Data Healthcare, which is based in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, focuses on helping health care providers collect payments from patients and insurers. "Providers still have a lot of pain points around the reconciliation of payments from insurance companies and other payers," Chayt said. "They want to make sure they are collecting that money as fast as possible so they can reinvest in their business."
Chayt has been running Fifth Third's commercial payments division for seven years. The group generated $672 million in revenue and $643 million in total fee income in 2022, with fee income growing at a 3.6% compound annual rate.
Chayt said she is proud that many of Fifth Third's commercial clients not only use the payment services offered by her 430-person division, but also call on her team to talk strategy.
"We definitely play an advisory role. We hope to whiteboard before we Power Point," Chayt said.
Fifth Third's automated payment solutions, for example, allowed one Los Angeles-based client to so greatly reduce its paper footprint that it sought to downsize its physical space, Chayt said. As a result, the company moved into a "more desirable" Century City office.
Prior to Fifth Third, Chayt spent 18 years at Dallas-based Comerica Bank, where she led the firm's treasury management division.
Since moving to Cincinnati in 2016, Chayt has been involved with several charitable and cultural organizations. She volunteers with Women Helping Women, an anti-violence agency that has trained thousands of community members in combating abuse and empowering survivors. Chayt is also a board member of Cincinnati's Mercantile Library, a 190-year-old organization that serves as a local center for book clubs and poetry society meetings.
The banking executive also led Fifth Third's campaign to raise more than $1 million for ArtsWave, a nonprofit that funds the arts in Cincinnati.
Chayt said she has been passionate about the arts since childhood. "The arts engage the mind to think and look at the world differently," she stated. "We're inspired to solve problems and there are many problems to solve today."
