In this fireside chat moderated by Penny Crosman, Wells Fargo’s Michelle Moore (Head of Consumer Digital) and Sandra Nudelman (Head of Consumer Data and Engagement Platforms) discuss how they’re working together to drive transformational change for consumer customers across channels. Michelle and Sandra are leading the charge to reimagine and reinvent Wells Fargo’s consumer experiences. Learn how these leaders are shaping a new vision for Wells Fargo – and the industry – by teaming up to build next generation customer experiences for today’s customer and the customer of the future. How should companies be thinking about the customer experience of the future? These women have the answers.
Transcription:
00:00:07:03 - 00:00:32:18
Penny Crosman
Greetings and welcome to the session. I'm Penny Crossman, tech editor at American Banker. I am really pleased to be here with Michelle Moore, who is head of Consumer Digital at Wells Fargo, and Sandra Nudelman, who is head of consumer data and engagement platforms at Wells Fargo. And both have been in their current jobs for about a year.
00:00:33:17 - 00:01:07:08
Penny Crosman
They're not newbies by any stretch of the imagination. Michelle Moore led the development of Erica, Bank of America's digital assistant, when she was at that bank and Sandra did a lot of interesting work at Chase for many years. So they're new to their current roles. But definitely not new to this whole area. So I guess to start with, can you each tell me a little bit about your role and the kinds of projects you have been doing?
00:01:07:09 - 00:01:08:22
Penny Crosman
Let's start with you, Michelle.
00:01:09:18 - 00:01:41:08
Michelle Moore
Sure. Thank you. Penny, I'm excited to be here this morning. My new role at Wells Fargo consists of running all of the digital platforms for our consumer businesses, including consumer and small business banking, consumer lending and our wealth businesses. And what that means really is everything that our clients see, feel, touch, whether they're on desktop and online banking or in the mobile app, which of course, our mobile app is our most used channel here at Wells Fargo with nearly five billion logins so far here to date.
00:01:41:11 - 00:01:48:11
Michelle Moore
So a lot of focus on our mobility platforms and how we deliver a great experience for our clients.
00:01:49:18 - 00:01:52:08
Penny Crosman
How about you, Sandra? What does your role comprise?
00:01:53:01 - 00:02:23:27
Sandra Nudelman
So I work for Mary Mack, who's the CEO of our Consumer and Small Business Banking Group. Mike Weinbach, CEO, Consumer Lending, and my team also like Michelle, supports Barry Sommers in wealth management and the vision behind my function is to meet the consumer businesses together to create a seamless customer experience. So a lot of the things you need to do outside of digital like data analytics, modeling are marketing channels, execution, technology, CRM, customer experience, things as well as financial help are all part of my purview.
00:02:24:10 - 00:02:28:00
Sandra Nudelman
Clearly, there's a lot of adjacency with Michelle's team, and we partner a lot.
00:02:29:08 - 00:03:01:22
Penny Crosman
Okay, so there aren't a lot of women in roles like those that the two of you have. Do you think that having women like yourselves at the table making decisions in these areas adds a different perspective than if you just had men or you just have men in your development team or your leadership team? In, in these areas Go ahead.
00:03:03:25 - 00:03:22:17
Sandra Nudelman
I'll start that. I think especially from where I'm sitting, it's critical because a lot of our communications out to our customers come through the platforms that my team is managing. And so when you think about having to do that, we want to make sure we've got diverse perspectives at the table. So me being a woman is helpful because to be frank, there aren't a lot of women at the table.
00:03:22:26 - 00:03:37:04
Sandra Nudelman
But given how critical data and digital are for the future of banking and personalization, I think we need even more diversity in these roles, not just women, but all different types, to make sure those customer centric experiences are truly representative of the customers we serve.
00:03:38:21 - 00:04:08:17
Michelle Moore
And I agree with you, Sandra. I'm really excited to have Sandra as a partner in crime in this journey that we are embarking on. I'll start. It's great to have diversity of thought and perspective. It's great to have another female leader or many female leaders in positions like ours. Not very often do you see these very technical financially driven, technology driven positions held by women.
00:04:08:18 - 00:04:19:10
Michelle Moore
And so I hope that for the folks watching today, they see Sandra and I as opportunities of what is out there and what what we all can bring to the table.
00:04:20:18 - 00:04:26:13
Penny Crosman
And so, Sandra, can you tell us a little bit about some of the data analysis work that you have been doing?
00:04:27:21 - 00:04:51:22
Sandra Nudelman
We are making a lot of investment in our data foundation to be able to support analytics and actually beyond analytics, new customer experiences at scale at Wells Fargo. So a couple of examples is we've been building an analytical platform to support our consumer lines of business that takes down all of those products and channel silos. So we can answer questions about what is happening in a very customer-centric way.
00:04:52:08 - 00:05:11:09
Sandra Nudelman
Part of that is staging the data and putting tooling in place to dramatically scale our ability to model. We believe we're going to scale the number of models that we have for our consumer businesses by ten times next year and reduce the time it takes to build models by upwards of 50%, which is really exciting. Another area of focus is actually cross-channel analytics.
00:05:11:15 - 00:05:36:22
Sandra Nudelman
We know it's important to understand customers as they traverse through multiple lines of business in multiple channels. So making sure we have a foundation in place to analyze those journeys, to be able to feed that information to Michelle and her team has been critical. And then I also mentioned operational data. So the ability to have assets that are fit for purpose and real time that empower these new customer experiences in both digital and physical channels to enable data-driven personalization.
00:05:36:27 - 00:05:42:29
Sandra Nudelman
Prioritization is all really important. So those are all investments that we're making.
00:05:42:29 - 00:05:53:14
Penny Crosman
Michelle, how does your team use some of the modeling and analysis that Sandra's team does?
00:05:54:09 - 00:06:22:17
Michelle Moore
Yes, to all of the above. We are massive consumers of the data that her team produces. We have a huge partnership as we build out of Wells Fargo and the data that will be used to power that and deliver personalized insights on an individual basis. To our customers and for many years. I've always believed that whichever institution can really capitalize on the data will be the ones that leapfrog ahead.
00:06:22:18 - 00:06:45:04
Michelle Moore
And it is awesome to see what Sandra is building and to be on the receiving end. I can tell you never in my career have I seen such a partnership and the way that Sandra really is pulling the data together in a consumable way. And then we win by delivering it back to our consumers in a way that helps them to be empowered to live their lives.
00:06:46:22 - 00:07:01:05
Penny Crosman
Sandra, are there any interesting conclusions that you've been able to draw from the work you've done so far at Wells Fargo? You've been able to feed into some of the digital tools that Michelle's team creates?
00:07:01:24 - 00:07:20:21
Sandra Nudelman
Yeah. I mean, I'd say that it's it's there's so much continuous learning that feeds into the process of how we're building the mobile app and how we're rebuilding. Also, the web page. The way it works actually is that we take all of this data, we crunch it, and we figure out where our customers having problems.
00:07:20:27 - 00:07:38:09
Sandra Nudelman
And so we'll see sometimes a customer showing up in a physical channel, for instance, and oftentimes people think, oh, we're showing up in that channel because they want to be in that channel. But when you have things like cross-channel analytics, you can see that customer ended up in the branch because they had a problem with an existing mobile capability.
00:07:38:16 - 00:08:03:12
Sandra Nudelman
So we're able to find those things and figure out where their scalable problems are opportunities and those things are actually what is going into Michelle's upgraded mobile app that I think you've reported on that's coming out very soon but many of the things that are going into the new mobile app were things that we recognized as breaks in the customer experience that resulted in physical channel movement for our customers that was unnecessary that they didn't actually want.
00:08:03:29 - 00:08:35:00
Sandra Nudelman
So I think that's a big focus area. The other area I think is also in the non-transactional space. We want to make sure that the mobile app especially is not just a utility, it's not just wallpaper, it's something that's engaging. So as we stand up the new app, what we're looking for is that engagement in different assets to make sure that we see that people are using it and figuring out ways to continue to use things, which is why financial help is also a big part of our joint vision for the future, because that is something that customers want and we think will be engaging for them.
00:08:35:00 - 00:08:37:08
Sandra Nudelman
So we're really looking for that data as we roll out.
00:08:38:22 - 00:08:45:15
Penny Crosman
So Michelle, you have been working on a new mobile app for Wells Fargo. Tell us a little bit about what you're creating.
00:08:46:19 - 00:09:13:17
Michelle Moore
We have. And it's been a journey this year. We're excited to launch the rebuilt app at the beginning of 2022, and we studied all of the data. So what were our client experience scores? They were not very good. What was driving those client experience scores, whether it was usability, findability or completely lacking capabilities in the mobile app that intuitively should be there.
00:09:14:02 - 00:09:41:09
Michelle Moore
So we basically said this is a rebuild and from the very first screen, the front porch, which we fondly call it, to the account summary page, when you land to your account details, we study the most highly trafficked pages. We have to get those correct first. So 20% of the screens in the mobile app do more than 80% of the volume. So we had to get those right.
00:09:41:09 - 00:10:11:24
Michelle Moore
So our transaction data is not very transparent in our mobile app today, which causes a lot of phone calls about what is this transaction? And filing of claims that may or may not have been a claim to be filed. So we had to be very transparent about what was this transaction in layman's terms. Right? So we have the ability when we know a merchant code that might be the corporate headquarters name, they have to translate that into what is the brand that the client would recognize a client set going to recognize the company name.
00:10:12:10 - 00:10:33:09
Michelle Moore
And we have a way of identifying where they made the purchase, the geolocation. So all of this stuff again to jog clients' memory, studying why did they call about this transaction? Did they not recognize the name?
00:10:33:09 - 00:10:56:15
Michelle Moore
Did they not recognize the location? Do they not recognize the amount? So being able to anticipate the questions and give that information upfront so that most clients want to be empowered to solve this themselves. They don't want to call and they want to drive through the branch. They want to solve it themselves. So you'll see a lot around a better information architecture in the app.
00:10:56:24 - 00:11:16:19
Michelle Moore
Things will be more intuitive as to where to find them and how easy to find them. And everything should be one to two clicks, not 34, five levels deep in the mobile app. We have created a payments hub today in the mobile app, our payments capabilities are scattered everywhere, but not easy to find. They're not intuitive yet.
00:11:16:19 - 00:11:35:11
Michelle Moore
It's one of their most prominent activities that clients do in the mobile app. So right on the bottom navigation bar, there will be a button prominent that says payments and transfers. And when you open up everything that you want to do, whether it's bill pay, sell, transfer, or pay your credit card, pay your mortgage, it's all right there.
00:11:36:00 - 00:11:46:15
Michelle Moore
And you never have to think or hunt as to how to move your money. So those are some of the key things that will launch at the beginning of the year. And then there's clearly going to be more to come as we progress.
00:11:47:23 - 00:12:14:23
Penny Crosman
It sounds like a lot of it is about making it easier to use. Easier to understand where to go, what to do, where and and how to do things so that you have fewer questions, fewer customer service issues. I should have mentioned this in the beginning, but this session has been approved. It qualifies for a continuing education credit for the American bankers Association's professional certifications.
00:12:15:02 - 00:12:45:28
Penny Crosman
So for anyone who is doing continuing education with the ABA, if you fill out the poll questions that are linked in the session description box, this session will qualify toward your certification program. So continuing on, Michelle, you're also developing a virtual assistant called Fargo, which you mentioned earlier. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
00:12:47:11 - 00:13:13:17
Michelle Moore
I sure am very excited to talk about Fargo. So Fargo, again, is about engagement and empowerment, right? So using the data from Sandra to say, what are clients doing? Why are they what are they doing when they're in the app? When when they're online, when they come into a branch, when they come to the call center? What this platform can do different than any other platform is, for example, show you all of your transactions.
00:13:13:17 - 00:13:30:29
Michelle Moore
There is no place where you can go online or mobile today or even in the call center to say, show me all of my Amazon transactions, for example, whether you conducted them on your debit card or your credit card. Clearly, two different systems, but that's not relevant to the customer. They don't care. They don't care how many systems we have.
00:13:31:04 - 00:13:52:06
Michelle Moore
All they want to know is please show me all of my transaction information. So Fargo will have the ability to bring together multiple sources of data in a way that is intuitive and consumable by clients, and it will deliver personalized insights working with Sandra and team to understand what are those personalized insights, who is Michelle more?
00:13:52:14 - 00:14:16:00
Michelle Moore
What can we do to help her? What products or services will enable her to have a more empowered financial life? So Fargo is intended to be able to do everything that a human can do mostly.
00:14:16:19 - 00:14:40:05
Michelle Moore
Obviously, there will be lots of learning to do along the way, which we will be clear about that with our customers. But when clients call and they say, Well, why was I charged this? Or, Why is my deposit not available? Those are the things that, again, we studied with Sandra's team to say, okay, well, how do we answer that of the Fargo of the virtual system?
00:14:41:18 - 00:15:19:28
Penny Crosman
Yeah, that's great. I know personally I've spent many hours trying to track down specific transaction issues and you get passed from person to person. It's like a mystery. So you talked a little bit about personalization A lot of banks are trying to get to personalization. It's kind of like a Holy Grail these days. Can you say a little bit more about the kinds of personalization you might try to build into mobile banking, your virtual assistant and even other channels like starting with you, Michelle?
00:15:21:03 - 00:15:46:01
Michelle Moore
And again, this is, I think, the power of Sandra's team and my team working together. It's just the data. I think when you talk about companies and it's the Holy Grail, I think why this will work is because of the connectivity between Sandra's team and my team and the data. The data is where you will mine for the answers of what is to be personalized for a customer.
00:15:46:16 - 00:16:12:25
Michelle Moore
And if in your organization you're not working hand-in-hand with your data and analytics, that's why it seems like it's stalled, and why you can't move forward in terms of personalized insights. It could be anything from: We see that you're trying to save for a house. Can we help you with that? Like you can see the transaction data.
00:16:12:25 - 00:16:52:21
Michelle Moore
You can see where they're spending money. So how do we say, okay, and without being creepy, you know, that's not the intention at all. The intention is always to provide a way to say, hey, we're just trying to look out for you. We're trying to help you live a better financial life. And so here's something that may be a suggestion around what you could do better things in the data around subscriptions or things that we are recurring transactions to your account that we can give you a heads up to say we see this recurring transaction and maybe it's a reminder or a stickler to you to say, hey
00:16:52:21 - 00:17:18:00
Michelle Moore
okay, I'm meant to do something about that. Or we can monitor the recurring charges and if something changes, we can also let you know that normally the pattern has been, you know, some certain number, but now it has changed. And if you're busy and you're going about you don't pay attention to that stuff. But how great would it be if if your bank gave you the insight to say something has changed and that's what personalization means.
00:17:19:24 - 00:17:39:29
Sandra Nudelman
Yeah, no, I totally agree. And what I think is interesting, you mentioned people talk about personalization, but they don't start by defining it. Or they think about it as there's personalization of insights, this personalization of marketing, it offers this personalization of alerts, there's personalization of non-marketing or marketing that is non-acquisition or deepening or servicing.
00:17:40:17 - 00:18:06:02
Sandra Nudelman
So all of these different features that can be personalized both in digital channels but also in non-digital channels. And the interesting thing in most banks is that all of that underlying infrastructure be something four or five different types of personalization is often split, which then leads to dissonance from a customer perspective of different messages and in different channels or different ways that the bank is going after that personalization experience.
00:18:06:07 - 00:18:26:13
Sandra Nudelman
What's unique, I think here about this situation is all of those things are part of my organization shells partnering together, and so we can build it as a single ecosystem that is building all of those different types of content, whether it is marketing offers that need to go on to our website. And by the way, we're working to also even more target and personalize and enhance the offers that we're able to give our customers.
00:18:26:20 - 00:19:00:07
Sandra Nudelman
We can use that data to improve insights and push that into Fargo, but building that ecosystem is not easy. You need essentially what we call it, a campaign workflow, but a capability to be able to generate the content, whether it's for marketing offers or for insights at scale and at speed. So having that plus a personalization engine that can connect to all of these different channels with models that run in that engine to optimize what we're showing where, when and why that's responsive to data real time about what the customer's thinking, all of that is, is what needs to be built.
00:19:00:15 - 00:19:19:09
Sandra Nudelman
The good news is when I arrived, I found a lot more than I expected already in place but doesn't mean there isn't more work to do to improve some of the basic rails to us at this point. My big focus is getting more content because personalization, by the way, people often forget they think the big Holy Grail is building the engine of personalization with no content.
00:19:19:20 - 00:19:31:28
Sandra Nudelman
That's not very valuable. You need personalization and a massive inventory to optimize against to actually get the leverage from personalization of customer experience. So there is a lot of work to be done, but it's it's really fun.
00:19:33:08 - 00:19:39:25
Penny Crosman
And when you say content do you mean things like, like articles and like educational articles and videos and things of that nature?
00:19:40:12 - 00:20:03:08
Sandra Nudelman
You can do all sorts of I'm using in a much more generic term so content can be an ad unit that we're figuring out what content piece to put in a marketing ad slot on digital marketing. It can be the combination of a creative piece or a drawing and graph with numbers in it that are personalized that show up in front of real time about my spending, for instance.
00:20:03:17 - 00:20:20:09
Sandra Nudelman
So the content is depending on where you're putting it, something different. It could be what article we serve up on a financial help hub. It could be the latest card offer that we put on the website that we because we know it's you coming in. It could be the insight we pop in Fargo based on your most recent spending.
00:20:20:19 - 00:20:33:28
Sandra Nudelman
All of that actually what we put and then how we put it in there can be personalized at another level. So the actual content itself, maybe I call that dynamic as opposed to personalized the content can be dynamic per person in addition to being personalized.
00:20:35:14 - 00:21:06:25
Penny Crosman
So Michelle, you mentioned not being creepy, which I think is interesting. In the last session we were talking a little bit about the the line between personalization and privacy. And I think we saw in the research that we had done that younger people are pretty willing to give up a lot of personal information with very little qualms. And then older people, baby boomers and such we're much more concerned about protecting their their information.
00:21:07:04 - 00:21:31:09
Penny Crosman
How do you look at that? Michelle, where do you see do you see a line, is there a line you wouldn't cross? How do you try to determine what people's appetite for for monitoring their transactions and giving them little alerts and such?
00:21:33:11 - 00:22:06:29
Michelle Moore
So first, I wanna at your first part of your question around where do you draw the line? It's their data, right? And our responsibility is to protect our clients to make sure they understand where their data is being used, how it is being used. So another partnership with Sandra's team in the mobile app. Next year, sometime we will have a security and privacy center where we show and deliver to customers everywhere that their data has been shared at their consent.
00:22:07:24 - 00:22:29:15
Michelle Moore
We make sure and make sure that they understand what they're consenting to in common. Language and who they're sharing their data with and for what purposes, and then give them the control to adjust those preferences all along the way. And so obviously, put that in the mobile app in a intuitive place called Security and Privacy Center, where they have that.
00:22:29:15 - 00:22:52:00
Michelle Moore
But I believe that our customers, it's their data and we have to protect them and educate them as to how it's being used as far as creepy. But what insights we deliver to our customers need to be driven based on the voice of the customer and the phone calls and everything else that we study. So it shouldn't be anyone just thinking, Oh, let's put this marketing offer out there. That's not what we would do. We would be very thoughtful around customers, data, customers, transactions, customers, phone calls, customer feedback. And we would spend a lot of time doing research so that we understand where it is appropriate to engage and where it it's not, to be honest with you.
00:23:14:08 - 00:23:28:21
Michelle Moore
So it's never it's not a clear black and white answer think because we have to spend a lot of time every time studying it, researching it, and making sure that obviously in our industry we're compliant. So that's that's what I would say.
00:23:30:00 - 00:23:53:27
Penny Crosman
There's that famous example years ago of Target sending I think a letter or a mailing piece to a young girl's home congratulating her on her pregnancy based on the purchases that she had made. And she had not told her family about this. That's the famous crossing of the line. Sandra, do you have any thoughts on that?
00:23:53:27 - 00:24:03:29
Penny Crosman
Like what data you wouldn't try to analyze or is there something you wouldn't you know, do you see a line that you wouldn't cross?
00:24:05:15 - 00:24:21:14
Sandra Nudelman
There are a lot of different lines, and I think a lot of it's gray. So what I'd say is that a big part of my job is to figure out what data we can use for what purposes, by the way, both for customer face experiences and internally for analysis. And I think I agree with Michelle.
00:24:21:14 - 00:24:39:21
Sandra Nudelman
What I've always done in my prior roles as well as here, is to rely on research with the customer to understand what is their expectations because the letter of the law is actually the lowest bar. Just staying compliant is is the minimum we can do when you actually understand what customers expectations are with respect to how their data is being used.
00:24:40:02 - 00:24:58:16
Sandra Nudelman
If you contravene that, it presents considerable risk to your reputation. And we are in the business at the moment of continuing to build and rebuild our trust with our customers. So it's not something that we want to ever go after. And so what I'd say is there's always data in transactions that you don't want to go after.
00:24:58:16 - 00:25:17:03
Sandra Nudelman
There's certain industry codes or types of transactions that we just wouldn't track because we don't want to know what sensitive transactions are in that area at scale because that's not of use to us in any specific way. So there's things like that that we can sort of put a brake on and say, nope, that's never an insight we would build or exposed to customers.
00:25:17:24 - 00:25:35:23
Sandra Nudelman
I think in a way, or currently, since we're still so at the early stages of building these insights, it's much more proactive. We're saying, what do we want to build and expose so we can be extremely intentional. Many of the things we're working on with Michelle for the first order for Fargo are financial health oriented or to help customers avoid fees.
00:25:36:04 - 00:25:54:09
Sandra Nudelman
All very, very, very positive we're not at a place yet here or I don't think anywhere in the industry where we're allowing the algorithms to self-discover insights, which is where I think you would get a little bit more dangerous, where things that we don't necessarily want exposed to our customers would get creepy would emerge. We're not there yet, nor do I think we may ever want to be there.
00:25:55:17 - 00:26:01:24
Penny Crosman
That makes sense. So you mentioned work you're doing on financial health. What are some of the things you're doing there?
00:26:03:02 - 00:26:21:12
Sandra Nudelman
So it's it's an interesting thing. I mentioned customer research. We've been doing a lot of customer research. And unfortunately, customers still see us as very transactional. And we want to be in a position where we do better when our customers do better. So financial health and paving the way for them to achieve financial wellness is a big part of our strategy.
00:26:21:27 - 00:26:41:06
Sandra Nudelman
You might wonder why this is something that I am working on and falls under my purview while in reality, if you're trying to make someone financially healthy, it's not just about content. You can't give someone a website full of articles and expect them to do better. You need to use data to understand their needs and then give data driven recommendations about how they can improve.
00:26:41:15 - 00:27:13:01
Sandra Nudelman
And so we have an entire strategy around doing that through insights and exposing them to things like Fargo, but also creating tools and widgets that help customers give us additional data or self discover additional needs to be able to then be fulfilled. And so a good example of that, which I'm excited to announce, is that starting with our employees, we're rolling out a new employee financial health portal which will give our employees the first stop in being able to see all of the tools that we're building for our customers in the mobile app.
00:27:13:20 - 00:27:37:22
Sandra Nudelman
And so we get a broad set of financial help content with the big one that we're introducing. First is something called Credit Close Up. So it is going live next month for our employees and will be my customer shortly thereafter. But it's a new digital credit score service that is going to really enhance our customers experience and be able to understand their FICO score and be able to know what it means for them and how to improve it.
00:27:38:10 - 00:27:39:15
Sandra Nudelman
So we're very excited about that.
00:27:41:00 - 00:28:03:14
Penny Crosman
And will this be based on sort of general information about sort of tranches of FICO scores or will it be much more in-depth looking at their specific credit worthiness pros and cons and trying to help them remediate any any sort of black marks they might have in their credit history?
00:28:04:11 - 00:28:28:25
Sandra Nudelman
Much more personalized and recommendation oriented. So it's going to be their personal FICO 9 score, understanding of the underlying attributes that score, access to their full extent Experian credit bureau, as well as different alerts and recommendations related to how to continue to improve or maintain that score if they're already in good standing. So it's meant to be a pretty holistic experience just around the credit score.
00:28:29:03 - 00:28:37:19
Sandra Nudelman
And this is just the first step of a number of different tools that we're going to be announcing to help our customers across the financial health spectrum, both credit and noncredit related.
00:28:38:27 - 00:28:46:11
Penny Crosman
I know you're going to actually give them like action steps that they could take to to fix certain success.
00:28:46:16 - 00:29:03:00
Sandra Nudelman
Like you will be able to tell them, for instance, that you are over-utilizing your credit line and therefore you need to bring it back down. And that will improve your score. And there will be scenario planning, I think not in this first way, but in our next wave later this year where you can actually see what that does for your credit score.
00:29:05:17 - 00:29:14:08
Penny Crosman
Michelle, how do you look at financial health? And I imagine financial health will be a part of the mobile app and of Fargo going forward.
00:29:15:27 - 00:29:43:06
Michelle Moore
Similar to Sandra. So Sandra and I actually were just discussing credit close up yesterday and how it reveals itself to customers in a little app and making sure that they understand that it's broader than an addition to their FICO score. And it is. And it's wonderful everything that Sandra and her team have built. And we give them extra steps and all that has to be delivered in the mobile app in a way that is consumable, useful and optimized for the smaller screens. I still think our industry hasn't really gotten financial health right yet, but think we need to pull it back to its simplest layers and make it so simple that sometimes I feel like we're so close to it, we've got to be able to step away and look outside in and make sure we really, really have that perspective, constant research with our customers and the entire scale on it, on the demographic scales from younger generations to older generations.
00:30:25:03 - 00:30:50:01
Michelle Moore
And not everyone has the same need for financial health and making sure it's customized and personalized. So to our conversation earlier it will evolve. It should evolve. How could a close up and financial health appear to someone in their twenties and thirties should be different than how it appears to others in older generations. So I'm being very wise and thoughtful around.
00:30:50:20 - 00:31:07:13
Michelle Moore
Everyone is different. Everywhere you are in your life. Journey is different. And making sure that it's customizable is the right way to go. That it's not a one size fits all. I think that that's where the industry may have stumbled a bit. We have to make sure that we recognize that.
00:31:08:11 - 00:31:28:26
Penny Crosman
That makes sense in. And for both of you, would you and maybe you're doing this today, would you consider trying to aggregate all of a customer's accounts, even the ones that are not at Wells Fargo so that you can get that really complete picture of everything that a person is doing in their financial life?
00:31:28:28 - 00:32:04:16
Sandra Nudelman
Yeah, that's something we're actively working on, actually, with Michelle's team. Not a coincidence. We're working on aggregation, but we want to make sure aggregation is meaningful. I think there's a lot of financial aggregator sites out there, and once customers aggregate their data, they kind of look at it and they go away. So the point isn't just to build aggregation for aggregation's sake, it's to tie it in with the other tools that we're building to make sure that having that complete financial picture is useful to the customer because we're able to provide insights about what they should be doing to get even more financially healthy along the way.
00:32:04:23 - 00:32:09:25
Sandra Nudelman
And so it's part of that bigger picture of how do we make sure that data is useful for the customer.
00:32:11:19 - 00:32:28:17
Penny Crosman
And what's kind of the top thing that people might do if their credit score is low? I probably should know this. What would be a key piece of advice to somebody who for one reason or another has a terrible credit score.
00:32:29:06 - 00:32:49:23
Sandra Nudelman
If it's really terrible, it really depends. If someone is still in the rebuilding phase, they need to start out by getting probably a secured credit card and rebuilding their credit history and showing on-time payment. I think we're at an exciting time from an industry perspective. We're starting to see allowances come in from regulators to think about using nontraditional data for credit scores.
00:32:49:23 - 00:33:16:05
Sandra Nudelman
Where eventually people like that, we should be able to look at things like their telephone bills and utility bills and rental payments. If they're doing all of those things on time, that should count towards credit history and help them rebuild faster. But we're not quite there yet at scale. But I think starting to rebuild with a secure credit card, if you already have credit being really responsible with it, making sure you're paying on time, making sure that from a utilization perspective, you're not going over.
00:33:16:11 - 00:33:29:24
Sandra Nudelman
And then sometimes, to be honest, when young people start out, you don't have a high credit score because you need a longer history. So sometimes patience is key and just making sure that you're responsible over a long period of time. But a lot of it is rebuilding and it's not easy.
00:33:30:27 - 00:34:04:25
Michelle Moore
No. And I would add to what Sandra has said in terms of the value of credit close up and the financial information that we're delivering to our clients is to pay attention to it. To pay attention to variations in your FICO score, make sure you know why it's happening, make sure that there hasn't been any security breaches on your identity, making sure that if there are hits on when people are checking your security or your credit history, making sure you understand that and you're aware of it because there's so many variables and too much to let it go for six months.
00:34:04:26 - 00:34:16:21
Michelle Moore
And then the next thing you know, you're like, oh my gosh, how did my credit score become bad? That's a big hole to dig out of versus just, you know, the constant check in once a month. You know, it's it just helps you along the way as well.
00:34:18:00 - 00:34:34:08
Penny Crosman
That's quite a good discipline. So shifting gears a little bit, I think you both work on Agile or you use Agile methods in your work. Can you tell us a little bit about that, Sandra? How do you use concepts of Agile methodologies?
00:34:34:28 - 00:34:54:28
Sandra Nudelman
So I'm a huge fan of Agile first and foremost, because I think it makes it very clear who is doing what and how do you create a really good operating model between teams. So that's sort of step one. And so we've actually been moving towards Agile in my team.
00:34:54:28 - 00:35:20:01
Sandra Nudelman
I started a year ago. These things take time, but I believe we'll be fully productized up working in Agile in January across all of the different technologies my team is building, whether it's our CRM systems, marketing personalization stacks, the data set, all of those will be operating in Agile. So what's exciting for me is actually now starting to think about having all of these teams at scale how do we integrate and make sure they coordinate in their regular two weeks.
00:35:20:07 - 00:35:37:20
Sandra Nudelman
And so not just my team, but also like we've mentioned, like there's a lot of things going on between Michelle's team and my team. How our teams also coordinate on that biweekly basis autonomously at the team level. So it isn't just necessarily only me. Michelle, topping that coordination and that integration is happening at every level of the organization.
00:35:41:28 - 00:36:07:18
Michelle Moore
This is one of my favorite topics because I'm a firm believer and a firm user of Agile. We have been fully agile on mobile and Fargo and digital capabilities here at Wells Fargo. If you think about the way we did things in the past, it was like an assembly line. It starts here and it goes down along the way and there's no circling back and constant iteration of the products.
00:36:07:18 - 00:36:31:05
Michelle Moore
And you can get all the way down the assembly line and have to go back. Whereas if you're constantly sprinting in circles and two week sprints and you're there side by side with the product owners and technology teams and the developers and the coders, you're making changes together simultaneously. It tremendously increases time to market, cuts it by a significant amount of months.
00:36:31:15 - 00:36:51:04
Michelle Moore
So it varies based on project or whatever, but the time to market is a huge benefit of working in an Agile. In addition to the fact that you're with the team, everyone is aware of what's going on in the project versus the person at the front of the assembly line might not know the person at the end of the assembly line.
00:36:51:04 - 00:36:53:29
Michelle Moore
That's just too archaic and ancient.
00:36:56:16 - 00:37:18:02
Penny Crosman
So we talked a lot about the work both of you have been doing. Is there anything we haven't talked about that's on your drawing board for the coming year? Maybe it's maybe it's a priority or maybe it's just some sort of new feature or something that we haven't already covered? Michelle.
00:37:18:15 - 00:37:49:01
Michelle Moore
Yeah, so I think we talked a lot about like the the very prominent features and capabilities that customers use a lot. But there's a lot to be said for how digital can be used to drive efficiencies in an organization. And it's not always the most sexy and cool thing to talk about. But it has implications on client satisfaction, right?
00:37:49:07 - 00:38:16:04
Michelle Moore
Gone are the days where someone should be printing something, faxing something, mailing something, there's a huge push around digitization of all of our paper, but it should never be the case. That customer has to handle anything. There's a lot of efficiencies to be had around using technology related to. I think if COVID has taught us anything, while yes, it is great to be side by side, sometimes this forum works fine as well.
00:38:16:04 - 00:38:44:26
Michelle Moore
And how great would it be to implement those kinds of technologies to be able to Zoom or Facetime with a banker. So again, I think that we have to look at efficiencies and ways of interacting. Those are very important things that behind the scenes enable efficiency and enable the client satisfaction.
00:38:46:05 - 00:39:16:03
Penny Crosman
Sure. So I wanted to ask you both about what you think the customer experience of the future might look like. And so one thing that that I've been thinking about is the idea of open banking or open finance What do you guys do? You guys see that or I shouldn't say guys, do you both see that as a part of the future and something you are thinking about as you build out these products?
00:39:16:17 - 00:39:17:14
Penny Crosman
Let's start with you, Michelle.
00:39:18:13 - 00:39:43:14
Michelle Moore
Yes. 100% open banking is the way of the future. So we need to embrace it. We need to again, like I mentioned earlier. The second is how a client wants to live their life. We would like to be part of that. And we as a reliable, trusted partner, our customers would keep us as part of their open banking ecosystem.
00:39:43:26 - 00:40:08:10
Michelle Moore
It comes back to the aggregation concept discussion that we had around sharing data, making sure that we do it in a way that is protective of our clients and being meeting our clients where they are. That's open banking versus us expecting clients to come in and do things our way. That's just not even in my thought process.
00:40:08:10 - 00:40:21:28
Michelle Moore
Our process is all about, we understand where the puck is headed. We know where clients are going, and we want to be part of it as a partner in that journey. And that's how I see open banking evolving in the future.
00:40:24:05 - 00:40:25:18
Penny Crosman
Sandra, I'm sure you agree.
00:40:26:17 - 00:40:48:19
Sandra Nudelman
I totally agree. I think it's something that is coming and we need to embrace it. And to be honest, we need to continue no matter what, to earn the right to work with our clients and our customers, both from a general product perspective, as well as to be stewards of their data. I think open banking means that there will be more competition and maybe the plane of competition shifts from product to data.
00:40:49:08 - 00:41:10:17
Sandra Nudelman
And as we think about what that means, we need to be even better users of data, even more savvy, create real engagement for our customers, using that data, being insightful for our customers. And so I think it just changes how we think about what it means to serve customers and how we can keep going forward. But everything we're doing is to prepare for that eventuality.
00:41:12:07 - 00:41:39:20
Penny Crosman
Sure. So another angle, I suppose, of the customer experience of the future is where people will bank. We recently spoke to Jeremy Balkin at Chase, who is very high on in-car payments and some people talk about in-car banking there, there was kind of a wave of Alexa banking or efforts to get people to bank over Alexa.
00:41:40:20 - 00:42:16:26
Penny Crosman
What devices do you think people are likely to gravitate toward in the future? And I know it's hard to say, but do you think that the smartphone will continue to be the the primary platform that people want to use or do you think we'll start banking from our glasses as smart glasses come back out again or from rings or cars or voice assistants or anything else? Michelle.
00:42:18:02 - 00:42:43:17
Michelle Moore
So I do think that's kind of like the concept of making payments in the car. Sure. I mean, we've got to enable that. I do think the smartphone is going to be for the foreseeable future where banking is done. I think some of the things that we do in the mobile app, like virtual assistants that are different, the virtual assistant, Fargo is meant to be like the Alexa, Siris of the world.
00:42:43:17 - 00:43:07:23
Michelle Moore
And very easy, conversational. You feel like you're interacting with a human. There is always going to be, in my mind, a place for branches. Maybe that the branch will look like it looks today or be where it is today. But there there is no substitute for human interaction. And so we we will have that as well. I mean, there's so many connected devices you have here, Rosh.
00:43:07:23 - 00:43:32:07
Michelle Moore
There's a lot that we need to be cognizant of and be partners in the ecosystem of payments, whether it's Apple Pay, Google Pay, all of that. Again, it's all about open banking partnerships, an ecosystem of moving money, that it's all about making it easier for our customers. So I don't know if I have any like insightful, like will it be glasses or not?
00:43:32:07 - 00:43:44:09
Michelle Moore
I think that's super cool, but I'm not sure that for the foreseeable few years it's still on this. The mobile app really is the starting point integrated with all of our channels.
00:43:45:29 - 00:43:49:00
Penny Crosman
How about you, Sandra? Any any thoughts on that device?
00:43:49:02 - 00:44:08:05
Sandra Nudelman
Totally agree. I mean, I'm an early adopter of all sorts of things. I have 72 connected devices in my house right now, and it is still really hard to get Alexa to turn on my television the way I was. The integration, I think some some of that stuff is still taking a while. So none of that is going to overtake mobile any time soon.
00:44:08:05 - 00:44:26:13
Sandra Nudelman
That is still going to be he form factor of choice. But I think how Michelle is building the app and thinking about Fargo in the app, I think that is going to be the way for the next couple of years. Clearly, the watch is also something especially for quick payments, and transit may gain a little bit of traction.
00:44:26:13 - 00:44:45:27
Sandra Nudelman
But I agree, it's banking on mobile for the moment is the right place to go. But but we can also build our underlying systems in a way that's agnostic. And that's again, why we build these things not as monoliths we build it as underlying utilities that then feed into our channels so that we can be a bit more flexible as we think about what new channels emerge.
00:44:48:11 - 00:45:04:02
Penny Crosman
Michelle, is there anything else on your wish list for the customer experience of the future and what you would like to be able to to let people do on their phones or on their on their virtual assistant with the virtual assistant?
00:45:05:03 - 00:45:32:10
Michelle Moore
That's a great question. But look, as I study the customer, I just wish that what we can satisfy in a way that our clients trust us. They want to bank with us, they want to deepen their relationships with us. And it's not a one size fits all answer.
00:45:32:13 - 00:45:49:24
Michelle Moore
So for me, my wish is that our clients are so satisfied that they they stay here, they do more with us, and they deepen their relationships here because they want to not because they have to.
00:45:51:22 - 00:45:54:18
Penny Crosman
And how about you, Sandra? What's on your wish list for the future?
00:45:55:13 - 00:46:20:18
Sandra Nudelman
I think my big wish is that we can start to help people automate more of their finance in a way that works for them. I think we're still in a phase where we're personalizing recommendations and we've got basic automations like auto saved autopay. But I think there's more we can do to make those algorithms more sophisticated, to make the bank work for the customer on behalf of the customer in the way they choose.
00:46:21:04 - 00:46:35:28
Sandra Nudelman
But there's a lot of infrastructure that needs to be built in order to enable that and build trust with customers that that is the way they want to manage their finances. But I think that would be a really interesting next step for us as an industry to be able to enable customers to do that.
00:46:38:02 - 00:47:17:07
Penny Crosman
And who do you guys look to for either inspiration or, you know, competitive nudge like are there certain digital brands that you look up to and would like to be, like people used to say they want to be the Uber of banking? Are there certain leaders like that that that you look to or do you really rely more on your internal data, as you were saying, the customer feedback and the analysis of what customers are actually doing that?
00:47:18:12 - 00:47:45:12
Michelle Moore
For me, it's a combination of a number of places where I look for inspiration as a heavy consumer of Amazon. Like, I like the seamlessness of that. I like how easy it is to like put something in a cart and it shows at my house potentially on the same day. I do like being able to track where my purchases are or where my Uber is or where my claims are.
00:47:45:12 - 00:48:20:12
Michelle Moore
Like the ability to stay informed and take away that anxiety. So there's there's lots of apps that do that. I get a lot of inspiration reading the App Store feedback from our clients, feeling firsthand their emotion around it. That's very inspiring to me to hear firsthand from our clients what it is that they want. And then obviously I have a bunch of friends and families that I always like who, if you can explain it to someone outside of our industry, then you know you're on the right path and you always have to go check yourself that way, too.
00:48:20:12 - 00:48:23:20
Michelle Moore
So that's where I draw inspiration from those sources.
00:48:24:14 - 00:48:29:00
Penny Crosman
All right. Great Well, unfortunately, we're out of time. Michelle and Sandra, thank you so much for joining us today.
00:48:29:20 - 00:48:31:04
Michelle Moore
Thank you, Penny. Thank you.
00:48:31:20 - 00:48:32:01
Penny Crosman
Thanks.
How the newest leaders are rethinking consumer CX to transform banking
March 25, 2022 10:57 AM
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