Fireside Chat Interview with Lino Catana, Head of Digital Product Management, TD Bank

What's Now, What's Next – Insights into AI and the Future of Digital Banking A Conversation with Lino Catana, Head of Digital Product Management, TD Bank Discover how to accelerate customer empowerment while "rightsizing" your bank's omnichannel customer experience through retail, digital, and contact centers. Explore strategies for guiding customers to leverage all touchpoints effectively, empowering them to navigate their banking needs confidently. Gain insights into the behind-the-scenes data and tools that support this transformation—connecting the dots to empower customers at every touchpoint—and bridge the gap to ensure customers experience a truly integrated banking journey.


Transcription:


Mary Ellen Egan (00:11):

Hello everyone. I think my voice is better than it has been. I've been very froggy. Thank you. Thank you Raul, for the kind introduction and Lino. So let's talk a little bit first about how you came into banking and how you came to TD.

Lino Catana (00:27):

Yeah, good afternoon everyone. Thank you for having me today. And Mary Ellen, thank you for inviting us. I didn't grow up in financial services. I know a lot of people in this industry did. I grew up in digital since 99, but I was in hardware and software working for Dell Building. The Dell recommends configurator back in the early two thousands, evolved with software building online stores. We used to distribute software on tops of magazines, but built the first electronic software delivery mechanism for a software vendor called Corral. Some of you may remember Word perfect, but it doesn't exist much anymore. And then, yeah, I moved into financial services and been doing digital in financial services for 17 years. And I think that early experience really helped me understand in e-commerce, what do the customers expect and how does that translate into a financial service experience?

Mary Ellen Egan (01:24):

And you're originally Canadian and now you're a New Jersey native, so to speak.

Lino Catana (01:28):

I am. I've been in Jersey for 11 years. I love it. I dunno if anyone else is here from Jersey. Jersey, yes.

Mary Ellen Egan (01:33):

There we go. Yay.

Lino Catana (01:34):

There we go. Wawa forever. No more. Tim Hortons. Yeah, relocated for the bank. It was supposed to be two to three years, 11 years later it's home and we love it. We love it quite a bit.

Mary Ellen Egan (01:44):

Well, I'm a kind of fellow Canadian from Minnesota and every time I say Minnesota they're like, oh, that's where you're from. So I get that.

Lino Catana (01:52):

I said sorry

Mary Ellen Egan (01:55):

And a boot. Yes. So let's talk a little bit. So how did was it last? Oops, sorry. Thank you. My reading glasses. Thank you. So it was it last year that TD decided to combine digital banking and the contact centers and what was the impetus for that?

Lino Catana (02:13):

Yeah, it was about November of last year where we brought digital the contact center together. And I think it's a very important merger in the sense typically in larger organizations, teams like digital, a lot of them are in a centralized enterprise role. They sit in the middle, they support the businesses and distribution, whether that's a store network or branch network or a contact center. And when we decided to move digital into the business, it made sense to bring contact center with us because the contact center really informs our digital roadmap in the sense when we look at how we prioritize features, when we think about driving efficiencies, if you're going to drive something like making the basics brilliant from a standpoint of a feature and capability, it starts by getting the information out of the contact center. Why are customers calling? Our top three call drivers are things we can resolve easily in the channel in digital things like fraud disputes, just understanding transactions. By bringing the teams together, we were able to not only drive an efficiency of scaling the platform from digital into the phone channel. So for example, the digital onboarding platform is now leveraged in our contact centers and across our stores. TD, we don't call them branches, we call them stores, but branches for TD in Canada.

Mary Ellen Egan (03:33):

So then let's say a customer calls in and usually they aren't calling because they're happy, so they call a contact center and then say, let's say I think there might be some shady transaction on my account. How does that call or a similar call then help the digital banking aspect of it?

Lino Catana (03:52):

Yeah, what we started to realize is that we needed to enhance our transaction descriptions. A lot of customer disputes weren't actually because of fraudulent activity. The customers just didn't understand the transaction because it got jumbled up, it got truncated and it just didn't make sense. In the financial world, we sometimes forget that not everybody talks the way we talk. So you get a consumer that sees a weird transaction, first thing they do is they get anxious. Until we launched digital disputes, they'd have to call and it was a major call volume outside of either authentication issues or for whatever reason, Zelle money movement issues, disputes and fraud or transactions were very high. And the benefit there is when we create the ability to do a mobile dispute, we actually extended that into the contact center and into the stores. So now our agents, if a customer is there and for some reason didn't register that dispute digitally, they can actually give them that same customer experience in a face-to-face or over the phone experience and it just speeds up the process, it gets their claims right into the back office and it's digitally being managed and they're getting the communications that they typically would have to call back to find out what was going on.

Mary Ellen Egan (05:01):

So do most of your new customers come in through in store digital or how do they come to you?

Lino Catana (05:10):

Surprisingly, we still do a lot of digital enrollments through our store network. We are digitally right now about 33, 30 4% of digital acquisition for the bank. So a good 60, 65% of our acquisition still happens in the offline channels, predominantly in the stores. And we've done a really good job building that digital fluency and advocacy in the store network. From an omnichannel perspective, we built a thing called the Digital Academy for LMS. We built a digital gamification platform where we actually have stores that can compete against their region stores on digital fluency and modules. We wanted to make it fun while at the same time we need to empower our retail store associates with that knowledge because a lot of 'em are a little uncomfortable when it comes to digital. So that's from an enrollment perspective. By doing that, we're seeing those subscriptions into digital and being enabled substantially. Some months it's as high as 70% of our enrollments come from the stores in a given month.

Mary Ellen Egan (06:11):

So let's talk about, sorry, a little bit about what tools and technologies you're using. Nothing proprietary obviously, but just generally.

Lino Catana (06:22):

Yeah, no general, I mean there's lots of tools that an organization our size would be leveraging. There's two or three that I call out that I think have been the most productive for our teams. The newest one that we've been leveraging internally is Microsoft copilot. And we've leveraged this to about 2000 of our internal leaders to allow them to understand effectively in our day-to-day, we all use ChatGPT, we all cut corners. If you have kids like I do that are in college on taking notes and so forth, just bringing in something like Microsoft Copilot really allowed our senior leaders to get a little more comfortable with digital, get a little more comfortable with how they can become productive, and we're using that to demonstrate the power of AI and other tools that I would say our teams are relying on every single day. And they're not earth shattering tools, but confluence in Jira, which is how we organize from a product management perspective.

(07:19):

But how you organize your teams around products and features and how do you bring those MVPs to fruition? Breaking down epics into stories, JIRA has been an amazing tool. One of the things we pushed at the bank was we changed the operating model. We built these tools and capabilities so that we don't have to bring the work to the leaders. We want the leaders to come to the work. And believe it or not, we've got senior vice presidents, executive vice presidents that are much more comfortable going in and looking at a feature, understanding where we are in that MVP scenario, leveraging Confluence to see and attend sprint demos in retros and those tools, they're becoming much more common for our senior leaders. Empowering them with Microsoft copilot, getting them actually to go to the work was something that we built in our digital operating model that's starting to pay dividends.

Mary Ellen Egan (08:10):

And how are you using ChatGPT? Are you using it in the data centers? Are you using it or AI in general? Are you using it to train? Are you using it? I mean obviously you talked about note taking, which I found very useful because the old days I used to, I do record somebody and then for a half an hour interview and then I'd spend four hours retyping all of the words.

Lino Catana (08:31):

Yeah, I use copilot mostly for policies and procedures or assessment risk assessments, and they'll do a great summary of what I should be most scared about in that risk assessment. Yes, we are very excited. We've launched an AI pilot utilizing ChatGPT. It's built within our Microsoft Azure environment for our call center agents. And this is a knowledge management tool that we've built to empower them to actually have an interaction using plain English while on a call with a customer. Historically, agents would have to go in, do a knowledge search, maybe look up a policy or a procedure that they would have to follow. And if you never done call listening with an agent, I recommend you do it. It's humbling, especially when you're a digital product management at how ineffective your mobile app sometimes is because the customers just don't get what you thought they get. And this AI pilot that we've empowered, we've rolled it out to thousands of agents where they're now able to have an interaction with a bot about a certain policy or procedure and it's obviously ring fenced internally. It's combing all these procedure documents and giving them recommendations on how to have that interaction. So it provides the customer, or excuse me, the agent, the ability to have a normal conversation, talk to the customer in plain English by now understanding what those procedures really mean and they're actually much more accurate. Like many large organizations, there's some hesitation.

(09:58):

At TD for AI. We have three horizons that we want before we launch out to the public horizon one and is pretty much an internal solution. And what we wanted to measure to demonstrate the ability of AI was an agent on average was only about 60% accurate and the bank was slow to allow us to launch. And once we got the model to 80%, we're like, listen, we're substantially better than what our own agents are doing. They let us launch. And since then we've actually built, the AI bot is now up to 88% accuracy and the agents have remained flat at 60. Now what they're providing is now 88% more accurate. So that was a substantial win and it wasn't earth shattering. And this is why we're trying to push our leaders in the bank and across the enterprises to leverage AI more effectively. We do it for a lot. We do Microsoft copilot and development, we leverage it for QE and testing and now by bringing it to the executives, we're making the bank more comfortable with AI so we can start to accelerate some of horizon two and horizon three efforts that we have.

Mary Ellen Egan (11:06):

I think about, I mean, being anybody who's been in customer service, we was in restaurants for a very long time, understands how stressful it is to deal interface with the public at times. Some people are lovely, some people are not so lovely and it can be a high turnover job. So I would think that one of the benefits is going to be if you make their job easier for them, that you have information that they need at their fingertips instead of like, oh, I have to put you on hold, which some people get really testy about that. And to give them that kind of more immediacy must be really helpful to the agents themselves.

Lino Catana (11:43):

It is, it is. And if you're a contact center executive or leader, you're measured on your average handle time, and that is how you drive efficiencies is how you drive savings. Anything you could do to reduce your AHT or reduce the amount of time that call has to be transferred is important. And what we've done to not only improve the colleague experience through those tools is we built capabilities like td ASAP. If you actually go into our mobile app and your customer and you've authenticated and you're having a friction situations happening, maybe your MRDC is not working, maybe your fund transfer's not working, you can actually go to T-D-S-A-P and because you've authenticated the mobile app, we actually put you right into the contact center fully authenticated, and you jump the queue and you're there and the customer picks up that call and they know exactly where you were, exactly what you were doing and can start that call with, Hey, how can I help you today with your MRDC? It's a much better experience for the customer and it allows the agent to kind of get ahead of the game because they're authenticated, they know where they were, and they can start that service call right away.

Mary Ellen Egan (12:50):

So with some banks closing branches, and as you said, you call TD calls 'EM stores, are they still important to the customer journey and if so, how?

Lino Catana (13:00):

Yeah, stores I think is a competitive advantage. I don't think, I know it's a competitive advantage for TD. We just want JD Powers for the state of Florida this year for our stores. And the advice that they provide, number one in service, and I think the importance of the stores is that it brings our customers, our colleagues, and our communities together. It was how TD was built it. We're technically 165 year-old company. Our operations in the US are over 25 years now. And the reality there is we're taking the digital capabilities and have now extended them into the stores and testing new technology. So we use DVS document verification, so customer can go into the mobile app, upload their license, take a picture selfie, and they're authenticated as let's say, new to bank. I can extend that now into the store network. So when you can take your capabilities from a digital perspective and bring them across channel and drive that efficiency and that experience, it's pretty unique.

(14:01):

We actually have a patent where we eventually you could opt in to say, yes, I'm comfortable with that. If I walk into a store, our cameras can pick up that Lino just walked in and they can actually authenticate me in real time so that by the time I speak to an agent, there's like, hello Mr. Catana, how can I help you? I think that is kind of where we've been going to acquire customers, making that more seamless in the store network. And at the end of the day, stores are where customers want to go when they need advice. And if we can take away the regular transactions like a deposit, a transfer to allow our agents to be more advice driven, that's also a better experience. Because typically what we want is we don't want the store to be a destination that you go to. We want the digital and the store experience to be something that follows you. So if you've come from digital, if you were in the phone channel and now you visit a store, we can connect all of those interactions and present that to the agent either in the store or in the phone channel so they know what journey you've been on as a customer to remediate your issues.

Mary Ellen Egan (15:04):

Are you still giving away dog biscuits at the TD location?

Lino Catana (15:07):

Yeah, we actually have a dog, ATM. It's in our new campaign. It's cute. Yeah, dog biscuits, pens and umbrellas. That's what we're known for.

Mary Ellen Egan (15:15):

I love it. My dog drags me there. So in store, the contact center, then how do you drive them increasingly to digital? Because obviously there's some, if they can't get to a store, they need help and somebody who might not be comfortable, typically older people aren't as comfortable, so how do you kind of make that journey or help them connect that way?

Lino Catana (15:36):

Yeah, it goes back to the digital fluency that we built, this what we call the digital academy. You have to make the agents feel comfortable because the regulations in the us, a lot of us work at major banks. Your employees actually don't have to have their primary account with you. It's different. If you're in Canada for example, and you work for td, your check's going to get deposited to a TD account, so you're going to open one. Most banking organizations in the contact center or in the rep branch network only have about 50% penetration with their own product. So how do you make that individual feel comfortable is the biggest opportunity you have to then drive your digital fluency. So we made those investments in gamifying, we made those investments in LMS where we've built this academy platform and allowed them to interact. What also, we've made some major investments.

(16:25):

We're just about to launch the new version in July of an actual full-blown prototype that they can actually interact with and feel comfortable because a lot of times, and I sat, I was in Greenville, South Carolina two weeks ago, sitting side by side with their agents and they're actually just picking up their regular phone and they're going, okay, just go here. Okay, when you get to this page, click here. When you get to this page, click here, great that they know how to use it. I love that they know how to use it, but what about that agent that doesn't? What about that agent that doesn't have it installed? And by building these modules that allow them to leverage it and I can update them in real time. Every release that we put out, which are biweekly, those tools are getting automatically updated now. It's an actual beneficial tool for the agent. It's not stagnant.

Mary Ellen Egan (17:11):

How are you thinking about future use cases?

Lino Catana (17:15):

Again, we follow the customer. For example, we've identified five servicing challenges that exist today. So our use cases are based on where do we see customer irritants, where do we see the friction? We've prioritized the customer journey across all three channels being stores, phone and digital. And what we've decided is that our use cases are going to go after the most areas that we've had friction. And you can measure that through customer irritants into the contact center or through store visits. And we've reprioritized and we just want to make our basic transactions brilliant. So the five areas are no surprise around money transfer, money movement, deposits, so MRDC by reprioritizing those features that are in market and just enhancing them a little bit. So we've got this capability where if you're stagnant in the mobile deposit for more than 20 seconds, we can pop you a nudge that says, Hey, you're having trouble to click here to watch a video to finish that transaction.

(18:14):

Right. Explain your limits to customers. Explain when funds availabilities are going to be available and why are they different between digital or store? So we've been using those use cases. We've identified 10, but the five that we've primarily focused on has been around money movement and a little bit around authentication. I think a lot of banks still struggle with OTP, customer authentication, pass keys, bringing in DVS. There's so many ways to do things that you don't have to force it on the customer. There's backend technologies that allow you to actually authenticate customers so that you can push them along in that transaction.

Mary Ellen Egan (18:51):

What kind of trends are you seeing in digital, both on a product side or just in request or demands from your customers, whether it's a retail customer or a business, a business, right?

Lino Catana (19:04):

Returns?

Mary Ellen Egan (19:05):

No, no,

Lino Catana (19:06):

Sorry,

Mary Ellen Egan (19:06):

I'm sorry. No, what kind of either products that you might be developing or trends or might be what you're hearing in the marketplace for demands? I mean, I think there's been some discussion always about predictive where it's like, oh, oh, you're running low, you're running low on funds and you might not realize it. And then you get a warning saying you might want to pay attention, you're going to get an overdraft.

Lino Catana (19:32):

Yeah, no, that's a great thing. We call it the DDR, the digital data repository. It drives all of our personalization. It also drives how we can take the information that the customers are transacting with and then offer them that advice, whether it's through a nudge where you can say, Hey, do you want to sign up for alerts? You're about to hit your low balance to avoid a $35 fee. We can nudge that. We could see where if they're transacting, we could actually nudge a C-L-I, a credit line increase. Or at times we've actually nudged credit line decreases because they're not utilizing, let's say a level of credit. The personalization of the data is what's driving the opportunities to dictate which product. Right now, I would tell you from what's hot and where we are, I would say a lot of it is around payments. And payments is key because not only do you have Zelle, you've got internal transfers, you've got wires, but you've got competing products.

(20:25):

We've all used Venmo, we've all used other ways to transfer money. And that experience is very, Facebook asks, it's very social, it's simple, you can't screw it up. How do we build that same capability? How do we get that trust to that customer? I could tell you that at least at td, we've seen payments almost quadruple in the years over the last two years in digital transactions. And that is where our customers come. Our main bottom nav middle icon is payments and transfers. So we're spending a lot of time on improving that, getting it down to that basic brilliant so that we can go beyond transactional. And our goal is eventually to be a financial companion.

Mary Ellen Egan (21:06):

Yeah, because my unnamed bank that I bank with sends me like, oh, do you want to split up this payment? It's the buy now pay later, which I haven't used, but I thought in my younger days when I was always poor because I was a waitress, that would've been so helpful to me. And so is that the kind of things you're seeing customer driven? It's like this would be helpful to me, and then when do you say, oh, I don't want this anymore and quit serving me this?

Lino Catana (21:37):

Yeah. We look at the utilization of any feature that we bring into the market, things like buy now, pay later was very successful and it's a table stake at this point in the industry. Things where we've started to really bring some focus in a digital perspective is anticipating that customer's next need, we call them ghost accounts. You go into your mobile app today, you could see all the products that you have today. We could see that maybe this customer actually meets a lot of our wealth criteria. We could pop an account that looks like it's an account for them that they can actually click and take advantage of that offer. It could be an existing deposit customer that maybe now needs a credit card. So this ghost account where we're pre-populating a new account into their account summary page for them to take an action on is something that we've been testing and looking to launch later this year.

(22:30):

And I think that is something where you've got all this data, you want to personalize that experience. How do you do that in a way that just seamless to the customer instead of doing the typical e-marketing and a text banner or nudge, put it into where they're spending time, our mobile customers are opening up the app at least 20 times a month and they're spending a significant amount of time doing transactions, or excuse me, they're doing a significant amount of transactions in less time. So your attention with that customer is minimal, but go to where they go to, and that's where we're seeing a lot of good opportunities.

Mary Ellen Egan (23:06):

So for instance then, so let's say, I mean somebody was talking about this, they could follow life cycles where it's like, oh look, we just know you just graduated from college. Maybe you're not ready for a house yet or you just got married. Maybe you're thinking about mortgages and kind of anticipating that part of the product cycle.

Lino Catana (23:23):

Yeah, I mean that's where we are trying to build customers for life. How do we follow that customer? How do we bring them advice and the right products at the right time? And that is something that an ecosystem driven by data allows us to do that. So another example of something that we're able to do is we're able to send wealth leads directly to the stores so that if a customer has come in, done some product research, we've identified them in the mobile app that they qualify, we could send that same offer through radar and that next time they're in that store, we're able to have that conversation and we're able to pass the most recent data to that agent about that customer and what they're doing so they can have a more present day conversation with them. What's going on in just the heads that we're getting our four minute warning?

Mary Ellen Egan (24:07):

We have a few minutes for questions. If anyone would like to ask a question, I can run over the mic to use. Sorry about my coughing fit earlier. I have what other people have had, unfortunately.

Audience Member 2 (24:23):

Hi Lino. My name's Tom Hesson, CEO of 9Lenses. What are you doing in digital regarding small business banking or commercial banking? It seems like a lot of what you've discussed so far is around consumer or retail.

Lino Catana (24:36):

Yes. I won't speak too deep on commercial. I do have a counterpart, Paul Marguerites, who manages our commercial digital product management. I work closely with them on the small business side. It's something that we actually do hold close to the same platform for consumer. So the small business customers today actually take advantage. We have one mobile app you authenticate based on your credentials you could toggle as well between your consumer profile and your small business profile. So our focus really on small business has been actually bringing those consumer capabilities to that segment. They were always underfunded under capacitized. So by building a unified platform that we launched, we're able to accelerate those features for small business in particular. I know on the commercial side we've just upgraded our platform, took an enterprise solution that Canada had and brought it down and have connected our treasury and all of our other third party applications to do integrations with Autobook and provide that customer kind of that one entry point on, it's called BI Central Business Central. And it's proven to be very effective. The customers are really enjoying it and we're seeing a lot more opportunities to build out that commercial space over time.

Mary Ellen Egan (25:49):

Any other questions? Esther has the mic. I was going to climb down, but

Lino Catana (25:55):

You came back up.

Mary Ellen Egan (25:57):

She was there, right, Esther, on this call.

Audience Member Tom Hesson (26:00):

So my question is obviously a lot of those use cases you discussed for ai, like the agent assist sort of knowledge base are really interesting and really exciting. But as you get closer and closer to customer facing AI use case, I think one of the big things that I think about is third party risk management. So my question is, especially with AI and the rapid pace of innovation with that technology, do you feel like your bank's approach to third party risk management has had to change compared to when you were launching cloud and other things previously?

Lino Catana (26:31):

Sorry, the question is do I think it'll have a bigger impact and change from that perspective?

Audience Member Tom Hesson (26:36):

I'm just curious if you've had to change any of your policies, how you approach it more generally, or if you're still following all the same procedures that you used to.

Lino Catana (26:45):

I would tell you I wish the bank was a little further along in that journey. I think there's some still falling back, but we have identified some use cases and credit risk is a great example where we at times want to have the perfect amount of information to make a decision on, let's say a new to bank credit card customer when the reality is there's third party abilities for us to actually know who you are. All we're really looking for is your income. We don't even need your social security anymore technically until we want to make an offer of product. So I do think from a credit risk perspective, we've been looking at some of those use cases. And then internally from a risk perspective, like the policy procedures, we're doing that for the agents upfront. How do we think about leveraging it for remediation AML or CFPB remediations? You could imagine there's some potential concerns there like leveraging AI to do a regulatory risk assessment, but it does help the teams identify and organize to then put something, a new procedure perhaps in play. So I tell you, it's probably a little early in our world right now, would like to see us start to accelerate that and bringing those things like Microsoft copilot to executives, bringing the knowledge management tool, I think is that momentum we need to continually show to get the enterprise I think a little more comfortable. Great question.

Mary Ellen Egan (28:04):

Lino, thank you so much for your time and your insight and your knowledge. I appreciate it. And thank you everyone for attending.

Lino Catana (28:09):

Thanks everyone.