Fifth Third's Melissa Stevens on leadership, technology, and why regional banks are important

Melissa Stevens created her own role at Ohio regional Fifth Third Bank, taking on new responsibilities and adding them to her portfolio. She sat down with Chana Schoenberger, American Banker's editor-in-chief, on the set of the Most Powerful Women in Banking magazine cover photoshoot to discuss how she leads and why regional banks are important to customers.

Transcription:

Chana Schoenberger:
Hello, I'm Chana Schoenberger. I'm the Editor-in-Chief of American Banker, and I have with me here Melissa Stevens, who is the Chief Marketing Officer of Fifth Third Bank. Welcome.

Melissa Stevens:
Thank you. Wonderful to be here.

Chana Schoenberger (00:12):
So I had a couple questions about, you've talked about how you sort of created your own job, the role you have now. You stepped up, you took over adjacent areas. How did that work?

Melissa Stevens:
Well, I found areas where I was succeeding or where things are going in the direction that I had set out from a strategy and vision standpoint, and then found how those were connected to in other areas. So let's take an example. In the marketing organization and in the digital organization, we're doing a lot of creative work. We're doing a lot of how do we design things so that customers can have the easiest, the best experience, and seamlessly do their banking. That is something you can apply into the employee workforce and the way that they experience their environments and into the physical branch or client experiences. And so bringing together marketing design and our workplace services where we are designing our environments for employees and building the branches that we have and the client engagement centers is an easy adjacency that allows us to actually bring things together.

Chana Schoenberger:
So you've worked at big banks, now you've work at a big regional bank. What differences do you see?

Melissa Stevens:
I'd say the biggest difference is the connectivity across the entire company. We had that when I was at big banks, but it was more within the line of business that you worked in. Just because the organization is so large. In this area, we're able to connect together as what we call the one bank model, bringing people from a variety of functions, a variety of businesses. You really are only a couple calls away from almost any department or function that you need to get ahold of.

Chana Schoenberger:
Six degrees of banking.

Melissa Stevens:
You got it.

Chana Schoenberger:
What's the best advice anyone ever gave you about leadership?

Melissa Stevens:
Number one, make sure that you speak up. Sitting there silently and taking notes is not going to get anybody to notice what might be in your brain or what might be in your heart. And so recognizing that you are an expert at something and that you are in the room for a reason, you need to bring that opinion. You need to bring that point of view and you need to voice it there. That's one of the biggest things that I think's been important. The second thing from an overall leadership standpoint is that it's never about one. It's always about all. It's always about we and the idea that's taking that moment to thank somebody, to show your gratitude for whatever part they've played in the journey that you've been on in the work that you group is doing, the project that you're getting over the line, the communication that you're writing can go a really, really long way for anybody.

Chana Schoenberger:
I've seen you do that on social media. You tend to do a lot of shout outs for people on your team who are getting promoted or even it seems like competitors at other banks if you know them. But the speaking up, do you have an example of a time that you spoke up maybe in an unpopular way?

Melissa Stevens:
There's probably more of them than I could count, but I'd say maybe a good example of that is sitting in a room where, especially in the earlier days of digital where people didn't really know what it was like. Is it a channel? Is it a product? Is it fighting against the physical world? What's happening here? Recognizing that as I was gaining expertise in customer experience, user experience and the interfaces that we were bringing to life and the way that we could really connect them to the human experience that we were having and seen in a room that you have business leaders from a lot of different areas that don't know what you're talking about and sign to find the language that's accessible to them that can translate into the way they're talking about the business. That's probably the best example that I have is I would sit and go, oh, well I'm just the digital person, or I'm just the one that's doing this other thing over here. They're doing things that are like each other and I'm doing something different. So recognizing that it's important to speak up and to share how this is supporting what's going on in the business, why this is important for us to focus on, and what difference it's going to make in the future is probably the best example I have.

Chana Schoenberger:
That's a good one. Okay. So after the 2023 banking crisis, which really hit regional banks harder, what is the argument for why people should bank at a regional instead of at a mega bank?

Melissa Stevens:
Number one, I think that people should bank where it's best and easiest for them to get their everyday banking done, right? What's interesting is as the crisis happened, it really was concentration risk. It wasn't necessarily the size of the bank or the type of bank it was, how were they concentrated? And so I think importantly, helping people understand that without getting into too many technical complications is a thing. Why bank with a regional bank versus a mega bank versus a FinTech versus whatever? You need to go where they have the solutions that you need and you need to go to the place where you feel that you can have the relationship that is necessary. Because most of the time, finances are something people don't like to talk about. It's not necessarily a salient category when it comes to everyday banking. And in business banking, it's often about where I get the best deal, the best price. But when it gets to big deals, when it gets to the M&A activity you're doing, or the best way to hedge, you're looking for a relationship with somebody who's going to always be looking out for you. It's similar in your personal life. You might choose not to talk to somebody, but you want to know that they're there when you need them for whatever the ups and downs are. And so finding a place that fits, and in a regional bank like mine, we focus a lot on that relationship and on that human connection.

Chana Schoenberger:
So what's different now for young bankers than it was for your cohort when you started out?

Melissa Stevens:
Well, we didn't have the internet in the same way.

Chana Schoenberger:
Smartphones.

Melissa Stevens:
Smartphones weren't a thing, that's for sure. I'd say one of the biggest differences is I'd say one of the biggest differences is the technology, but not just technology. We have it. It's the application of the technology to help us be more valuable in what we do every day. Right? Frankly, we had to do a lot of things that were more manual, that were more time consuming, that weren't necessarily value add. They were just things that needed to get done. Now you have information at your fingertips. You have ways that you can automatically process things so that you can spend time on more higher order things, more strategic items. That said, I think there's a challenge with the amount of information, the amount of content that's out there, and how do you as a younger banker curate that and determine how do I learn?

What do I get information from? What are the sources that I should use to actually make my way forward? And I'd say also, as we see in a lot of the younger generations, especially my kids' age, are still in school, they can get distracted from it, right? Social media can be telling the story to you and you can be learning things that might or might not be fact. And so teaching people that fact check, that understanding regulations, that understanding customer needs comes down to actual looking at the information and talking to people is something I think we have to still sort through.

Chana Schoenberger:
Great. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate you coming in.

Melissa Stevens:
Thanks for the time.