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April 22, 2025April 22, 2025

The Quarterly Review: Newline by Fifth Third’s GM Tom Bianco plans on strengthening products, client experiences, and brand equity

Notes from the desk: Welcome to this month’s Quarterly Review, a series where I dive into what executives from some of the best brands in financial services are focusing on in this quarter, as well as how they are planning to achieve their goals. It’s a chance for the industry to learn about what goes on behind an FI’s four walls and how leadership manages their priorities.

But that’s not all: a review implies no mandates, a check in. So stay tuned next quarter to learn whether the executive achieves his plans and translates theory into reality.

In this edition, we will focus on Tom Bianco, General Manager at Newline by Fifth Third.

Bianco runs Newline by Fifth Third, and has previous experience at J.P. Morgan Chase as Executive Director and Vice President of Payments Strategy. In the following quarters, Bianco’s plans span product development, improvement of client relationships, as well as creating a stronger image and recognition for the Newline by Fifth Third brand.

The focus: Products, client experiences, and brand awareness

Bianco: Our focus for the coming quarters is going to center around three main pillars:

Build brand awareness and recognition for Newline in the broader fintech ecosystem.
Continue delivering new and innovative solutions for our clients to build their end user value propositions.
Drive richer program manager experiences to unlock operating efficiencies.

1. Build new products and services for our clients:

We will see a lot of value propositions around account to account payments, leveraging what’s going on in Open Banking in the United States. We have an Open Banking groundswell of activity, plus real time payments like FedNow, which is a software-based payment method – those two things come together, and we see a total open market and opportunity for us to help our customers and our clients build their value propositions and take advantage of those two changes in the payments ecosystem in the US.

With real time payments and FedNow, we have two payment networks that are built for real time and have started to look more like card networks, as opposed to ACH. We have payment methodologies and technologies that can keep pace with the real time world, which is not historically how the banking and payment sector outside of the card networks have operated in the US. So we think those two things are going to create a massive opportunity in the US.

Drive richer program manager experiences

Often we get stuck in calling and emailing. But if you are building digital first payment experiences, you need a digital first relationship experience on the banking side for our program managers or our clients so they can leverage the power of software and the power of integration to support their business.

We need to even out the relationship experience with the digital experience so that our clients and our solutions.

Build better brand awareness and recognition

We need to just make sure everybody understands that Newline is a Fifth Third brand. We have Newline by Fifth Third because we have a separate client set that we’re going after. So we need to make sure that there’s brand uniqueness, but we can’t lose the identity of the strength, stability, and the power of one of the largest banks in the United States.

First, we need to make sure everybody understands Newline is a part of Fifth Third. Secondly, we need to make sure people understand that even though we are a part of Fifth Third, we can move at the pace that they expect a fintech to move at. That’s been one of the proudest moments we’ve had at Newline.

If you look at our clientele, we’re able to keep pace with them on product delivery, product development, and innovation. That’s one of those messages we want to get out to the market.

Plan of action

Strategy for product innovation and delivery

The way we’ve built and deployed the Newline solutions is that we like to have a single API endpoint for all payments, information, and accounts. Hence, we’ll continue to add functionality to those endpoints, and it’ll be one integration, and then you’ll have all the payment capabilities that exist through the Newline platform.

Our goal is to make sure that everything that is necessary is available on the Newline platform, and then build the easiest implementation and integration experience for our clients. We try to remove a lot of complexity, so you don’t have to be an expert level software engineer to figure out how to get the integration done.

Blueprint for improving program management and client experience

We need to have the right tools and technologies to allow the relationship and the partnerships team to really figure out what is that next thing that we’re doing together with our clients. Allow the technology and the automation to exist, and the day-to-day operational experiences to be as streamlined and as efficient as the end user value proposition that we’re helping build with our clients. We are looking to empower the people to do the creative, strategic work, and letting the software handle some of the day-to-day.

To help with this, we do a lot of voice of customer exercises, to understand where some of those improvements can be delivered in the life cycle. We spend a lot of time meeting with our clients to understand the things that they’re trying to do and what information they need to get it done. We also ask how we can give them the information in the way they need and where can we automate certain process steps? So we spend a lot of time with our clients, just understanding what their expectations are, and then how we can drive a better experience on either side of the coin.

Plans for creating more awareness and recognition for Newline by Fifth Third

We will bring more of our software engineering leadership into industry events with us. One of the things that makes Newline unique is that we have our own dedicated revenue organization, run by Dan Dall’Asta who leads the distribution channel for us, which includes traditional bank relationship managers. We have our own product organization led by John Piazza. Christopher Tino runs our software engineering organization.

So within Newline, we have a dedicated group of professionals, and this is all we do all day long. We’re not bringing in a lead and then handing it off to a different product team or a different technology team. It’s all self-contained within Newline, the client targeting, relationship, onboarding, product development, servicing, support and implementation.

Last month we covered

The Quarterly Review: Current’s CTO Trevor Marshall reports on Model-Driven Success

April 1, 2025April 3, 2025

The story of Erica, Bank of America’s homegrown digital assistant

Banking digital assistants may be common now, but in 2017, Bank of America was one of the first to be thinking about how they make the firm’s customer experience more powerful. The answer was an in-house build of a digital assistant that required the firm to hire PhDs in linguistics and build a collaboration structure that could facilitate teams from different departments.

In 2024, BofA clients interacted with Erica 676 million times bringing its total interactions since its launch in 2018 to 2.5 billion.

On the show today, Hari Gopalkrishnan, who leads Bank of America’s Consumer, Business & Wealth Management Technology team, joins us to tell the tale of how the firm built its industry-leading digital assistant, Erica.

Hari shares how the firm has gradually expanded Erica’s remit beyond consumer banking to also include multiple lines of business and individual and corporate clients across the firm’s global footprint.

It’s a dive into what it takes to push the boundaries in this industry, how the firm thought about development, testing, expansion, and how Erica’s capabilities can be expanded with the recent innovations of Gen AI.

Listen to full episode

Tearsheet Podcast · The story of Erica, Bank of America’s homegrown digital assistant

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CX as the impetus behind Bank of America’s investment into building Erica

Back in 2017, Hari Gopalkrishnan’s team realized that despite the expanding remit of the BofA app, customers were still flocking to traditional channels like banks and call centers before they tried self-serving. A dissection of this behavior served as the catalyst for the Erica build.

“We were putting tons and tons of features into our app, a five inch screen, and our customers were still walking into the branch, calling into the call center … It’s hunting and pecking, and it was hard to navigate once you put more than 10 or 15 key features. And so our first insight was, you want to be able to have your customers interact with a platform in a way they choose, not the way you choose,” said Hari.

Why Bank of America decided on a DIY approach to build Erica

Although the industry is pretty well-versed in building, deploying, and improving chatbots now, the landscape was quite different in 2017, when BofA had first thought of developing Erica. There was no blueprint for what a banking digital assistant looked like and technology providers were few and far between. The slim pickings in the marketplace, as well as the limited applicability most software had in the financial services, fueled an internal build.

“There were a bunch of startups that were coming out, we spent a few weeks with them and either they disappeared or were going to get gobbled up. So it was a very volatile marketplace for acquiring software that did this. People were trying to play in this game, but weren’t quite getting it. The ones that understood some level of NLU (Natural Language Understanding) didn’t understand financial ontology,” he said.

“We did an assessment, and we looked at third parties, like we always do, but at the end of the day, it just wasn’t going to work out. At the same time, we found a couple of really good open source NLP engines. They were strong, solid, and very well regarded in the industry. We actually hired up a team. We always had good technical engineers. But we also actually hired people with PhDs in linguistics to work on this. Then we started to work with our teams to figure out: what is the digital experience going to look like?”.

How Bank of America structured teams across the org to build Erica

Building Erica required BofA to think across organizational silos, and really invest into creating a collaboration framework that would allow Erica to improve CX without compromising on risk tolerance.

“We actually took the Agile construct to the next level. We had teams set up in [different] regions which were actually in the room. It was the engineering team, the UX team, the appropriate legal team, all opining day in, day out, on all aspects of the platform. The sprints were not just engineers running off and UX coming in weeks later. It had UX teams embedded. In fact, when I used to visit the teams, it was sometimes hard to tell who was in the design team and who was in the engineering team. That was actually the power of how this came together,” Hari shared.

The fork in the road: User testing proved presumptions wrong

Designers and developers have a conceptual map of the software they are building and they also spend time trying to understand their users’ behaviors and pain points. But there is no silver bullet for getting everything right, right off the bat. Hari shares how testing motivated a major pivot in Erica before it launched.

“We thought we would have to invest just as much in voice as in text -– that people would half the time talk into the app, and half the time they would type into the app. Then we go to a small group of customers, and we get more feedback from this. And the feedback we got there was people were just typing in text 90% of the time. They were rarely using voice.”

Gen AI potentialities for Erica

Bank of America is not sleeping on Gen AI – it’s just chosen to stay quieter than most. “As we look at the emergence of Generative AI, we actually see that classification can actually get a lot better. You can actually talk even more naturally in a natural language. So that is just a natural sort of expansion of where we go with Erica. We have about 25 different proof of concepts right now, many of them are actually about to get into production, which use a Large Language Model in some way, shape or form, to continue to enhance the work that we’ve been doing,”.

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The following excerpts were edited for clarity

BofA’s blueprint for Erica’s expansion into multiple lines of business

Some of it actually is using fit for purpose language models that are pre-trained on certain things. So, for example, for employees there are available technologies that actually are trained on things like integration into your HR system and integrating into your help desk system. We don’t want to go build a whole bunch of things that actually have been built by somebody before.

The reason we built what we built is because nobody was building that before. When it came to employees, we realized that we can leverage all the goodness we have on NLU (Natural Language Understanding) and User Experience. We also found that there are available models that actually do a really good job of NLU to service intent and to calling of existing HR platforms.

We had to figure out case by case, do we start a native build? Do we integrate with existing models when it comes to Erica for business banking there? We had to go to a different set of data sources. You had to make sure those sources were clean. You had to make sure, in some cases, that there was an API available to make that interaction happen … in some cases, many of the services in the past may have been built for a specific User Experience or a specific application, we had to make sure that they get rebuilt or reimagined to be invoked by a chat bot, because sometimes you may need clarifying steps. You may have a multi-step process before you actually call an interaction. That also helped us become better in our core platforms, because that helps us now be ready for the future.

How BofA is balancing ROI, risk, and innovation when it comes to Gen AI

We have an AI Council. Even though we’re obviously a very large company, we try to work in a very integrated fashion and look to learn from everything that’s going on across the company. There are lots of parts of this company, and we come together. You could say it slows us down, but we’re okay with that. We ask, what are the pilots and POCs you want to run? And why do we want to run those POCs and pilots? The people involved in that council involve senior business leaders, senior strategy leaders, senior risk leaders. We’re asking, does this thing align with our risk framework? We have a risk framework that has 16 points of risk. You can imagine bias, intellectual property, transparency, and explainability, in there.

Is the work you’re going to do, going to abide by those risk frameworks? Is there an adequate human in the loop so that you can make sure that the thing doesn’t run away? How do you measure the performance? What guardrails are you going to implement? Those are the things we look at as we implement any of these proof of concepts and eventually take them to commercial use.

The second part is we also look at, what is the mindset you have on the ROI generation of doing this work, because none of this stuff is cheap. This is something everybody is wrestling with. There’s so much hype out there that people are throwing out, I’m going to spend a billion dollars. I’m going to spend $5 billion and when you ask the question, tell me what your bottom line is going to be, what are you going to get in return? The answers are a little bit more diffused.

So we’re taking an approach of saying, we want to understand how work gets done. We want to understand activities, jobs, tasks. We want to understand what part of those tasks cost, what money. And then, when you implement solutions like this, what’s the ROI?

February 18, 2025February 19, 2025

The Quarterly Review: Chase’s Chief Design Officer Miki Van Cleave is digging into discovery and building better experiences

But that’s not all: a review implies no mandates, a check in. So stay tuned next quarter to learn whether the executive achieves her plans and translates theory into reality.

In this edition we will
focus on Miki Van Cleave,
Chief Design Officer
at Chase.

The bigger an organization, the harder it is to ensure that customer and employee experiences speak the same language. One of Chase’s Chief Design Officer Miki Van Cleave’s key objectives is to ensure there is harmony between the firm’s customer and employee experiences.

Van Cleave assumed the role seven months ago after spending five years as Head of Design for the firm’s CI&A (Customer Identity & Authentication) and Consumer Banking, where she built multiple design teams and worked on creating interconnected experiences.

Before Chase, Miki held several leadership roles at USAA Federal Savings Bank. She ran the bank’s innovation team and designed its auto experience product.

Today she is here to share how she is strategizing for growth in her new role by breaking silos, digging into Chase’s backend processes, and building more confidence in product delivery and design processes of the firm.

The focus: Growth, codifying discovery processes, and improving employee experiences

I stepped into the role of Chief Design Officer in August 2024, and since then my goal has been to learn as much as I can and hit the ground running, picking up where my predecessor left off. The team achieved so much in 2024, and my goal is to keep up the team’s awesome momentum in delivering great experiences and products to our customers in Q1 2025 and beyond. Some of the key achievements in 2024 include increasing our investment in our teams in India, which has been a multi-year focus, and gaining clarity on our body of work (BOW) and improved team allocations to enable us to work more efficiently.

Something I am really proud of is that we started a Challenge Coin recognition program in Design & Customer Experience. Inspired by military coins, I hand out Challenge Coins in person to those employees who have been nominated as showing up and willing to help.

1. Enhancing employee experiences: Customer-centric design continues to be at the forefront of our design strategy and we’re constantly working on new ways to enhance experiences for our customers and employees. Employees in our branches and answering our customers’ calls are the lifeblood of Chase, and it’s crucial we equip them with the right tools and resources to do their jobs. The team is so good at their craft, they know the space and know how to deliver great products. The next level of maturity for us will be to raise our business acumen and continue elevating our presence and profile within the design, product, tech, and data teams and business partners.

2. Building up: We’re currently focused on continuing our overall growth, building on what we accomplished in 2024. This includes ongoing conversations to align on a detailed BOW (Body of Work) and broader awareness across the organization’s leadership on driving efficiencies as we grow and evolve the team.

3. Discovery processes: I also want to codify our approach to discovery, which will help to raise our confidence on new product delivery and get alignment with our partners on the ROI of design. We’ve seen success in formalizing other processes and problem-solving approaches, like our “Customer Why Template,” and know there is value in continuing to standardize processes for better collaboration.

Plan of action

It’s important for us to stay focused on our objectives, while continuing to cultivate new ideas.

The key is to avoid being distracted in a fast-moving environment and stay the course.

1. Working beyond silos: It’s critical that we look beyond our own team to solve problems and come up with new ideas. We want to avoid silos and collaborate with other teams to help us understand and better solve a customer issue. A design challenge isn’t always going to be solved by the design team alone; sometimes we need to enlist the support and ideas of people from product, data and other teams from our Product and Experience and Technology (PXT) organization, as well as customer-facing businesses from Chase’s consumer bank, to help us find the right solution.

2. Understanding the whole experience: Beyond designing new features that help solve a customer pain point, we also want to ensure we’re providing the best overall multichannel experience. This means looking at the customer experience holistically — not just at visible experiences like the mobile app, web or branch — to ensure there are no gaps. We employ Service Design Blueprints to understand how less-visible factors, like how back-end systems, call center policies and scripts, and more may be impacting the customer experience.

We’ve seen success in formalizing other processes and problem-solving approaches, like our “Customer Why Template,” which was an early tool in our discovery processes. We are now creating a more standardized practice for discovery which will help create consistency across the organization. Some of the key objectives are:

Create a common understanding around what discovery means
Establish timelines for how long discovery should take to complete
Increase confidence in a design/product solution on the path to execution
Mitigate risk

Last month we covered

The Quarterly Review: How Zelle’s GM Denise Leonhard plans on leading the firm to $1 trillion a year and beyond

October 30, 2024November 4, 2024

How U.S. Bank is reinventing itself for the digital age with Chief Product Officer of Digital Platforms, Gareth Gaston

In an evolving financial landscape, US Bank has emerged as a leader in digital transformation. It has reshaped the way customers interact with their finances. Today’s episode of the Tearsheet podcast features Gareth Gaston, Chief Product Officer of Digital Platforms at U.S. Bank. He discusses the bank’s decade-long journey of innovation and customer-centric development.

“We’ve been on a multi-year journey on digital transformation across all facets that you can think of digital,” Gaston explains. This transformation has been more than just a technological upgrade. It’s been a cultural shift that has positioned U.S. Bank at the forefront of banking innovation.

The journey began with the recognition that customers were using more than just physical branches. “When we started this journey, we were renting all our digital tools,” Gaston recalls. “We didn’t have a mobile app. We were kind of renting our online banking and bill pay.”

From these humble beginnings, U.S. Bank has built its own digital platform and in doing so, laid the groundwork for successful future product development. In doing so, it has created award-winning apps and platforms that serve millions of customers.

Here’s my conversation with U.S. Bank’s Gareth Gaston.

Evolution of U.S. Bank’s Digital Transformation

U.S. Bank’s initial move was to shift from renting digital tools to creating their own. This allowed them to develop in-house products tailored to their needs. This shift allowed for greater control over the customer experience. It resulted in faster innovation cycles.

“We rebuilt our app from the ground up, below the glass and above the glass, as we call it,” Gaston shares. This effort paid off. The app got the recognition for “the best app in banking” shortly after its launch.

Expanding Digital Services

The bank did not stop at mobile apps. They expanded their digital offerings to include:

A voice assistant, now recognized as a leader in financial services

Spanish language conversational experiences

End-to-end digital mortgage applications

Same-day business loan approvals and funding

Gaston emphasizes the importance of these developments. He highlights, “Our mortgage experience has won awards and it’s fully end-to-end. Most of our applications and processes are done digitally.”

Enterprise-Wide Digital Transformation

U.S. Bank is now expanding its digital capabilities across the entire company. This phase aims to enhance digital services throughout the enterprise. “Having had great success in consumer and business banking, let’s take that across the whole enterprise,” Gaston explains.

This expansion includes creating foundational capabilities. They can be used across all divisions. From payments to wealth management and commercial banking.

Embracing Open Banking and Connected Finance

US Bank has embraced the concept of “connected finance.” It has created APIs that enable various use cases. These include embedded payments and partnerships with other financial institutions.

“We offer both real-time payments and FedNow as one API,” Gaston notes. He highlights the bank’s commitment to staying at the forefront of payment technology.

Leveraging AI and Machine Learning

The bank recognizes the potential of artificial intelligence. U.S. Bank has recently welcomed a new Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer. This move underscores their commitment to integrating AI across their operations. From personal productivity tools to enhancing the product development lifecycle.

The Big Ideas

Digital transformation is a continuous journey that requires both technological and cultural changes. Gareth says, “We’ve been on a multi-year journey on digital transformation across all facets that you can think of digital.”

Developing in-house digital tools enables more innovation and control. This improves the customer experience. Gareth says, “We rebuilt our app from the ground up, below the glass and above the glass, as we call it.”

The reusability of digital platforms across the enterprise accelerates product development and ensures consistency. “The whole idea of reuse is that we were very intentional around creating these seven different platform groups”, explains Gareth.

Open banking and connected finance are key to meeting evolving customer needs and expectations. “We embraced, uh, you know, we call it connected finance. But open banking, from the start of the journey in the U.S.”, Gareth says.

AI and machine learning will play a crucial role in the future of banking. This requires dedicated leadership and governance. “It’s so important. We, this week, just welcomed our new chief artificial intelligence officer”, Gareth highlights.