#17 Reetika Grewal is reshaping how digital innovation happens at Wells Fargo

Enjoy complimentary access to top ideas and insights — selected by our editors.
Want unlimited access to top ideas and insights? Subscribe Now

When Reetika Grewal took over as head of digital for Wells Fargo's commercial and corporate investment banking businesses, she set about reshaping how digital innovation happens inside the 174-year-old bank. Rather than building digital tools around individual banking products, she shifted to a client-centered innovation model designed to solve problems that align to how businesses operate.

The existing product-centered approach made sense to those who designed it, but to clients the result was a monolithic portal of 67 different applications, each with its own look and feel.

Grewal's response was "really deep listening," holding conversations with more than 500 clients. Insights from those discussions led to Wells Fargo Vantage, a unified portal built with modular and reusable components to ensure flexibility. The new look was an immediate hit with the bank's business client base: digital engagement jumped 222% over the prior year while resulting in 108,000 fewer service cases and a 13-point increase in customer satisfaction. Wells Fargo says the expansion of APIs and embedded finance capabilities led to $84 million in new revenue.

The approach to Vantage is the same one Grewal encourages her team to focus on every day: "How do we make the lives of the companies that we serve easier?" she said. The goal: make using Wells Fargo products "automagical"—easy and seamless to the end-user.

The user-centered ethos is one she established long before she entered financial services. Early in her career she helped brands reconnect with their customers as a user-design consultant: for one automaker client, for example, she followed people in their cars to help strategize the brand revamp.

Perhaps Grewal's most significant achievement at Wells Fargo isn't the software itself, but the velocity at which her 650-person team moves. In 2025, the group pushed out 495 platform releases. That's a pace typically seen at fast-moving fintech start-ups, not large, established banks.

"We build in a very start-up-type way: what is our minimum viable product? How do we keep building?" she said. "We have a very small company feel in a very big company."

In 2025 that start-up metabolism allowed Vantage Connect, Wells' service for enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions, to expand both its connectivity and client base by more than 50%. ERPs have expanded under her watch to include Oracle, NetSuite, Workday, among many others, with a low-code or no-code capability for clients to automate their tasks.

"The innovation platform has a user-centered design studio, emerging tech partnerships, enterprise partnerships—we can use all those levers to make sure we're building great software for our companies in the best way for our customers."