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The leadership team at U.S. Bank has been keenly focused on leveraging powerful innovation across a range of new and existing business units and enterprise platforms. The man at the center of a good part of that is Senior EVP and Chief Digital Officer Dominic Venturo, who is responsible for driving digital banking across consumer, small business, corporate and institutional banking, while also leading the enterprise platforms, experience design, agile delivery, and innovation groups. Under his leadership, U.S. Bank has had several "firsts," including the first bank on all three digital assistant platforms (Siri, Alexa, Google), the first on all three top mobile wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay) and also the first to sign on with Zelle.
When considering his work over the past year, Venturo cites the development of U.S. Bank's enterprise platform as a key differentiator and competitive advantage that allows the bank to develop products in months instead of years and do multiple releases per month. "We have built out an amazing set of capabilities leveraging common sets of tools and processes across the entire enterprise to deliver products and features to our customers," he said.
What makes the platform so powerful is that it is 80% reusable and refined continually. As a result, teams can assemble 80% of a new product or service using existing tools and processes and only need to build 20% afresh. "The beautiful thing is that we can then publish their creation back into the marketplace for somebody else to reuse. This process has been super-efficient and helps us deliver quickly," he said.
One specific initiative of his in 2025 was the establishment of a new digital assets and money movement organization to accelerate development of emerging digital products and services such as stablecoin issuance, cryptocurrency custody, asset tokenization and digital money movement. "All of those pieces of the business are in the process of either being implemented or have been implemented within the last year."
Part of Venturo's strategy to stay abreast of the latest technology developments has been the establishment a startup/fintech ecosystem practice, which allows U.S. Bank to be nimble and engage startups and other organizations to explore potential customer and client applications from idea to funding to commercialization.
Some startups definitely see themselves as competitors, he says. "We have new competitors that pop up every day and the speed at which that's happening is going to increase, especially with the introduction of concepts like vibe coding. We're competing with the best of the best, people who can raise capital to solve interesting problems in very elegant ways."
The good news, Venturo said, is that many startups are looking to partner with banks, knowing that the ability to scale in a regulated space is otherwise very challenging. "We have millions of customers, we've got great distribution, and we've got 100 million eyeballs in our app every month." And Venturo is happy to oblige those looking to partner when the right opportunities arise. "We pay a ton of attention to what's happening in both the traditional competitor space and the fintech space. And we partner actively." A recent example is a partnership with the Stellar network to test stablecoin issuance.
Perpetuating continuous innovation at U.S. Bank, whether organic or through partnerships, requires three elements, he said. First is cultural by signaling from the top that trying new things is good, and that "we understand some things will fail." Next you need the enterprise platform tools, which U.S. Bank has steadily implemented, to execute those ideas.
Finally, he said, you need constant training that educates and inspires, such as enterprise demo days. "We also have an innovator-in-residence program. It's hands-on learning with a real problem. How to get from 'I have an idea' to 'my idea is being implemented.' That could be a year-long journey for a group of people, but it's super powerful."
