Innovators of the Year

May 8, 2023 3:43 PM

Innovation is hard. Coming up with new ideas, making sure those ideas have practical value and executing on the ideas — and perhaps more importantly, getting other people on board to help with the execution — takes willpower, tenacity, long hours of hard work, smarts and an ability to communicate and work with others inside and outside an organization.

American Banker's editorial staff has chosen to honor 20 leaders who we believe are innovating in banking and in financial technology in 2023. Read on to see who we chose and what they are contributing to the industry.

Immad Akhund

Founder and CEO
Mercury

When Silicon Valley Bank failed in mid-March, many startups sought a new place to park their cash. Mercury, a neobank designed to serve startups, offered that new home, with quick account-opening and protection of up to $5 million in deposits through sweep networks.

CEO Immad Akhund, who co-founded Mercury in 2018, said that the neobank added thousands of new accounts in the week following SVB's failure. Mercury also expanded products in March to serve venture capital firms with entities in additional geographies. Akhund said the neobank was able to enhance its technology with a 150-person engineering team.

"Most of the banks in the U.S. rely on third parties to build anything, so they can't really build things for themselves," Akhund said. "Whereas we are continuously improving the existing experience, making it smoother, faster, automating it, but also building cool things. … We're just making continuous improvements all the time."

Akhund immigrated to the United States to join startup accelerator Y Combinator with his previous startup, a mobile ad network called Heyzap that was acquired in 2016. The idea for Mercury arose when Akhund had trouble obtaining a business banking account as an immigrant.

Mercury offers specific products and services for startups that are less common among banks, like venture debt, a network of venture capital and entrepreneurs, education materials and opportunities to gather investments. In its first year, Mercury's venture debt offering received 600 applications, signed 18 term sheets and loaned out $80.5 million.

The company has raised more than $163 million in funding at a $1.63 billion valuation. Mercury also said, going back to Akhund's roots, more than 40% of Y combinator companies use Mercury as a banking partner. —Catherine Leffert

Vanessa Angeles

Head of new product development (emerging solutions), global treasury management
U.S. Bank

As head of new product development for global treasury management at U.S. Bank, Vanessa Angeles has been on a tear of developing new products for her clients.

In 2021, she led her new product development team in creating a solution that automates the tasks and regulations related to escheatment, or the process by which unclaimed assets, including uncashed checks, are turned over to state custody. In a 2022 analysis, Aite-Novarica Group deemed the integrated offering and automated approach to handling unclaimed property to be unique to the Minneapolis-based U.S. Bank. Organizations that have high volumes of episodic checks, such as those in healthcare, commercial real estate, and utilities, are prime candidates for such a service.

Angeles is also launching U.S. Bank's Virtual Account Management product in 2023. Initially, it was considered a defensive product that would help clients ensure requests for payment would not be lost, but Angeles saw the potential for more.

"There are many use cases and industry applications for VAM, as it is a solution that meets the need for any business that requires intensive cash management, such as frequent account openings or closings, precise reporting and fluidity — like title and escrow companies, suppliers and construction," Angeles said in an interview for American Banker's Most Powerful Women to Watch program in 2022.

Her team also continues to develop application programming interfaces that developers can use to access treasury management and payment capabilities from U.S. Bank; existing ones include disbursements via Zelle and account validation.

In 2023, a cash forecasting solution tool that incorporates artificial intelligence and machine learning for commercial and corporate customers is under development. It will let corporate treasurers view their cash positions across all of their financial institutions.—Miriam Cross

Tom Brune

President
Ventures Lending Technology

After becoming president of Ventures Lending Technologies last year, Tom Brune led the organization to double its income, reach its first year of profitability and launch a product for building online loan applications.

"Our focus had been on streamlining internal lending operations for our customers, and it was clear the next step was to give our customers a better way to manage their application pipeline by managing their own borrower application process," Brune said. "Our vision is to allow Apply+ to be used for loan applications, grant applications and any other way to distribute capital to borrowers."

Brune said the organization that became Ventures recruited him as a co-founder in 2013 to help reinvent the lending process for the Small Business Administration 504 loan program. The company now dominates the space; 99.7% of loans approved through the program last year used the Ventures platform.

Since then, the company has pivoted to a broader audience of lenders with its flagship product, Ventures+, which provides lenders with loan processing and portfolio management functions. – Carter Pape

Marc Butterfield

Senior vice president
First National Bank of Omaha

Marc Butterfield proved his innovator mindset several years ago, when he became one of the first bankers to start using alternative data in lending decisions.

More recently, Butterfield, who is senior vice president at First National Bank of Omaha, has become an earlyish adopter of embedded banking. His team launched a credit-card-as-a-service solution called Bend by FNBO.

The bank, which has $26 billion of assets, has been in the co-branded card issuing business for decades and has clients that include MGM Resorts and Ford.

"We started hearing more and more from our customers that they wanted more and more control over their digital experience with those customers," Butterfield said. They wanted to embed their cards deeper into their digital ecosystems, he said.

"So how could you navigate that with offering a regulated product like a credit card, but still give them the feeling that they have total control of that user experience?"

The bank built a way for co-brand card clients to pick and choose card-related activities and embed them in their own digital channels, in partnership with Marqeta, which provides software hosted in Amazon Web Services.

"Marqeta has a very robust set of credit card APIs that our partners use and consume as services," Butterfield said. "They're enabling a capability that otherwise would've taken us months or even years and a lot of money to develop."

The first client to go for this was Greenlight, a challenger bank for families.

The digital experience around the card looks and feels like a Greenlight experience, Butterfield said. Greenlight controls how users manage their credit cards, for instance, by letting them add authorized users. Greenlight also designed its own statement, though FNBO made sure it met compliance requirements. Behind the scenes, Greenlight is picking and choosing options FNBO is providing to give Greenlight an illusion of control. — Penny Crosman

Vincent Delie

Chairman, president and CEO
F.N.B. Corp.

F.N.B. Corp.'s "eStore" takes shopping around for financial products to the next level.

The platform lets users of the website, app or in-branch kiosk browse an array of deposit accounts, loan types, business products, financial education content and more, add selected items to a "shopping cart," and "check out" — that is, apply or learn more. (Users of the in-branch kiosk can send their cart to their email address or inform the branch that they'd like to check out there.) The digital platform was first unveiled in November 2021 in the app and in select branches, and was installed in all branches by September 2022.

The eStore project was chairman, president and CEO Vincent Delie Jr.'s idea. He collaborated with the digital technology team from concept to eStore's current state. It's also part of his "Clicks-to-Bricks" vision, which involves weaving digital and traditional channels together for a consistent user experience. The next step for eStore is a unified application that will let people purchase multiple products simultaneously without repeatedly filling in the same fields. For this, the bank is drawing on capabilities it learned from expediting its online Paycheck Protection Program portal, particularly related to the secure upload of documents and efficient back-end processing.

Engagement with eStore, or interactions as measured by page views, grew 104% between 2021 and 2022. The Pittsburgh bank sees eStore as a key part of its digital banking strategy and notes that the number of mobile banking users grew by 13% in 2022 compared with 2021. The number of online applications increased by 17% in the same period. The bank also credits eStore infrastructure with speeding up the launch of Physicians First, a bundle of specialized products for physicians, including mortgages, loans and private banking services. The Physicians First program accounted for 25% of retail mortgage production for FNB in 2022.

Innovation also goes beyond technology at F.N.B Corp. Its new office building, currently under construction, is in a predominantly minority area in Pittsburgh. To support the neighborhood, the development team, including F.N.B., awarded nearly $30 million in contracts to minority-owned businesses and more than $7 million to women-owned businesses to help construct the building. —Miriam Cross

Misha Esipov

CEO and co-founder
Nova Credit

As the CEO and co-founder of Nova Credit, Misha Esipov has been helping people deemed "credit invisible", like immigrants and thin/no file consumers, leverage alternative data to prove their creditworthiness, enabling lenders to gain a more accurate picture of consumers financial history to inform a more risk-averse underwriting process.

Nova Credit's flagship product, Credit Passport, helps immigrants establish creditworthiness by leveraging the credit history from their home country and translating it into a local-equivalent score.

Last year, Nova Credit launched Cash Atlas, which allows consumers to connect their bank accounts to its platform, giving its clients a direct view into consumers' bank statement history. This allows consumers with little to no credit history to prove they have a consistent income and history of bill payments, all in compliance with the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

An immigrant himself, Esipov moved here from the Soviet Union in 1990, when he was three. He later graduated from New York University and joined Goldman Sachs. In 2016, he co-founded Nova Credit.

"My family experienced firsthand the financial obstacles that come with being an immigrant, so I approached the problem with a personal connection," Esipov said.

As a graduate student, Esipov realized just how many of his peers were international students who experienced some version of the problem that migrants' credit histories do not follow them across borders.

"We believe that once consumers have access to their data, it's up to them to determine what they want to do with it," Esipov said. "That served as the philosophical approach behind Nova Credit, and after seven years of partnership building, meeting regulators, building data integration, standardizing information, we now have connectivity into two billion consumers all around the globe." – Carter Pape

Ashish Garg

Co-founder and CEO
Eltropy

Ashish Garg, co-founder and CEO of digital communications platform Eltropy, was inspired to start a company that supported credit unions and community banks based on personal experience. He and his wife had high-paying jobs but no credit history when they moved from India to California, and found a credit union in Redwood City willing to extend them a loan so they could buy their first home. Garg later used a cash refinance of his home to start Eltropy in 2013. The company bills itself as a digital conversations platform for credit unions and community banks.

Garg describes 2022 as the most remarkable year in his company's 10-year history. For one, it acquired two companies: video banking firm POPi/o and Marsview AI, which uses artificial intelligence to help contact center agents decode customer intent in text, voice and more. Eltropy also added about 250 new credit union and community bank clients, bringing its total up to 550. It introduced new capabilities, including video notary services, appointment management, co-browsing and more.

One client, InTouch Credit Union in Plano, Texas, finds that Eltropy helps smooth over staffing gaps. "The exciting part about partnering with Eltropy is the ability to shift from one communication platform to another within the same call, the same chat, the same text, seamlessly, keeping all of the authentication and security in place," said Kent Lugrand, president and CEO of InTouch, in a case study on Eltropy's website. "I think that's going to make a big difference for us." —Miriam Cross

Kathy Grigg

Head of decision sciences group
Fifth Third Bank

As banks rethink the way they make credit decisions with the use of artificial intelligence and so-called alternative data, Kathy Grigg, head of the decision sciences group at Fifth Third Bank in Cincinnati, has developed a model for credit card origination that is expected to increase approvals at the $207 billion-asset bank by 10%. Instead of relying on credit scores, it uses other data, such as deposit history.

"We have information, obviously, on how our customers are already using our products and services, particularly in the deposit space," Grigg said. "We're able to leverage that information to infer how customers might perform in credit in a way that maybe isn't being captured by bureau data alone. We can see positive deposit history and approve additional customers who might not otherwise qualify, without taking out an additional risk."

The deposit data is never used to decline a credit application, only to approve, she said.

Some credit score executives say the best way to predict whether someone will repay debt is to look at their past repayment of debt.

But this is insufficient, Grigg said.

"We still continue to look at past repayment of debt," she said. "[T]here are times when people have limited experience with credit or their credit score may not be as high, but that doesn't mean they are risky, it's just that the credit bureau wouldn't have access to that information."

Grigg's group also builds machine learning models that are used for marketing emails and direct mail, making suggestions to customers based on their past behavior. — Penny Crosman

David Hales

Chairman and CEO
Global Innovations Bank

David Hales has been growing a tiny community bank in Kiester, Minnesota to partner with fintechs that store, exchange and transmit money. Hales bought Global Innovations Bank in 2018, then named First State Bank, and has since grown assets from $18 million to $50 million. The bank has also been hiring for the past 18 months, and now has a staff of 17.

As chairman and CEO, Hales sets direction for the bank's strategy, operations and compliance, including initiatives to expand fintech offerings.

Global Innovations Bank hasn't stopped serving its surrounding community, where it was founded in 1899, with commercial and agricultural lending, and plans to expand loan offerings in southern Minnesota and northern Iowa by using deposits from its fintech banking program, the bank's main growth driver.

Hales also served for more than two decades in the United States Air Force, including 14 years in active duty and 11 years in the reserves. He started as a nuclear forensics scientist and became a cyberspace operations officer, retiring in 2019 as a colonel. Global Innovations Bank offers a free, interest-bearing checking account for active or retired U.S. military service members and their families, with discounts on G.I. Bill Pay services.

Global Innovations Bank also partnered with Ncontracts, a risk management technology vendor, for infrastructure and compliance oversight as its fintech business grows. As regulatory scrutiny on bank-fintech partnerships increases, the bank wanted to ensure that fintech partners meet oversight and reporting requirements. —Catherine Leffert

Jack Ingram

CIO
WECU

In the "buy, build or partner" debate, WECU is leaning hard into partnerships.

This strategy dates back to 2019, when member displeasure was high and NPS relationship scores were tanking after the Bellingham, Washington, credit union converted to a Fiserv DNA core and Fiserv's Architect digital banking solution. For instance, mobile app functionality was cumbersome and the app was essentially a shrunken version of the desktop site. Ingram had joined as chief information officer ten months before the core conversion in 2018. "I asked to have the digital lift reassigned to me," he said. "It was a sink or swim kind of moment."

The credit union concluded that no single vendor would deliver the experiences it and its members wanted. It used software-as-a-service platform Influitive to build YouX, an online program that encourages customer feedback and engagement. It teamed up with BankingOn to improve the mobile app and Technivation to upgrade the desktop experience. Posh Technologies is behind the digital assistant, which feeds directly into live chat at the contact center.

One enhancement that Ingram is most proud of is what he calls the Marketplace within the WECU app, which the credit union launched last year. "There is this tendency to throw a laundry list of stuff under the 'More' menu," he said. Instead, the app now curates checking, savings, card and loan products in a simple and visually appealing way. Ingram and his digital products team chose Mantl and Alloy to enable speedy account opening and know-your-customer checks, respectively, and CreditSnap to prequalify customers for loans. The next steps are developing a friend referral mechanism, considering the credit union recently branched out into another county, and upgrading the debit card round-up process.

These choices have made an impact in the NPS relationship scores that once dipped to 27. By the end of 2022, WECU's score sat at 73.—Miriam Cross

Imran Khan

Head of global innovation
TD Bank Group

Getting good at personalization — in other words, being able to give customers useful recommendations or warnings in a timely manner using real-time information — has been a Holy Grail for banks for the past several years. Under Imran Khan's leadership, TD Bank Group seems to be making progress.

One example of an insight Khan, who is head of innovation at the $1.9 trillion-asset Toronto bank, has spearheaded is the ability to predict a customer's future balance in a way that could help them.

Many banks can provide an alert when, say, an account balance drops below $100.

"What we said was, everybody has varying needs and different ways that they look at their balance," Khan said. "So for one customer, a balance dipping under a hundred dollars may not even matter. They just manage things to the penny and they're not worried about that. But for somebody else, if it dips below a thousand dollars, that might be a cause for worry. So there isn't really that one size fits all."

His team uses artificial intelligence to predict the customer's balance and then look at the customer's historical patterns to determine if this is something they should be worried about based on what is going to happen in the next couple of weeks.

"We are able to help the customer understand that there might be a default, for example, in a bill payment or credit card payment," Khan said. "But it's fine tuned to that individual customer, because some customers might have credit card bills that get to the tens of thousands, whereas others might only go into the hundreds."

Rather than alarm customers that they might not be able to pay an upcoming bill, TD offers customers a preview of coming bills based on what the AI predicts and what customers have scheduled, then gives them options to help them pay it.

Personalization has been launched in the branches so that staff can also make well-informed suggestions, in a manner consistent with the digital channels.

TD Bank Group has also been experimenting with having a presence in the metaverse. It recently used it in the onboarding of interns.

"We got fantastic feedback," Khan said. "They saw us as a really innovative organization and they're very active on social media, so it helped tell our story. And it helped them build networks across North America." The bank is also testing the use of training in the metaverse.

TD Bank runs a platform called iD8 through which TD Bank staff have submitted nearly 63,000 ideas since 2019, and 6,350 of these ideas have been executed. — Penny Crosman

Trevor Lain

Founder and CEO
LexAlign

Trevor Lain and his regulatory tech company, LexAlign, help banks manage the risks associated with small- and medium-sized business customers that they would otherwise struggle to measure. This year, they added payments security to the portfolio of risks they help banks and businesses manage.

The product, Security for Electronic Banking Self-Assessment, allows banks to automate onsite audit functions that would otherwise be conducted by an expert. The self-assessment walks business users through an interview about how they handle the relevant aspects of a high-risk, highly regulated activity to help banks determine where there are gaps in their processes and in their knowledge.

"We're exposing to the bank what is otherwise hidden within the four walls of the customer, but which information the bank reasonably needs in order to comply with fraud and other operational risk management requirements but can't otherwise obtain at scale," Lain said. "It is in some respects the soft information about the client and their risk posture that complements the hard information on transactions that the banks already have."

LexAlign's differentiator is how it views the relationship between banks and their SMB customers, according to Lain.

"We start from the premise that the customer that controls non-cash deposits and payment originations does not have anything near a bank-level understanding of the relevant rules, risks and responsibilities, but does know how they're handling their operations," Lain said.

The diagnostics LexAlign creates not only reduces compliance costs for banks by providing valuable insights about risk to banks; they also sensitize SMB customers to the relevant rules, risks and responsibilities associated with their payments, educate them on the gaps in their processes and how to remediate them, and provide customized audit reports and training materials that promulgate better security practices and empower them to manage the risk in their payments activities. – Carter Pape

Caitlin Long

Founder and CEO
Custodia Bank

Caitlin Long got into bitcoin in 2012 and never looked back. More than a decade later, she's still working to create a bridge between traditional finance and digital assets.

"I'm just a kid from Wyoming who went to New York after school to pay off my student loans," Long said. "I ended up staying on Wall Street for 22 years, and then retired back to work on passion projects. I got into bitcoin in 2012, and I knew it was going to be significant because it was the first time that internet-native money had been created."

Long began focusing on digital assets full-time in 2016, and worked in Wyoming to expand legislation and acceptance of digital currencies and blockchain technology.

Now, she serves as founder and CEO of digital asset-focused Custodia Bank. For the last year, Custodia has been embroiled in a legal battle with federal regulators, who in January rejected the bank's application to become a state member bank and obtain a master account.

Long said she never expected to get so deep in tug-of-war with regulators.

"We actually viewed our business plan, as proposed to the Fed, as very friendly to the traditional banks," Long said. "We were going to be a new breed of bankers' bank that was going to bring technology to the traditional banking world, especially to those banks that don't have technologists on staff to be able to build it."

Long said that although regulators have made it more challenging for Custodia, the bank still plans to operate this year with a Wyoming state charter.

Throughout Custodia's legal and regulatory challenges, Long had also publicly warned regulators of bank-run risks and potential failure and fraud of major crypto companies like FTX. She said that digital assets also pose increased risks to the traditional banking sector, which is why she thinks companies like Custodia, which is focused on digital assets, should be accepted.

"The whole concept of online banking, much less digital assets that move at the speed of light, has massively changed risk management for the banking industry," Long said. "This has to be bridged very carefully for that reason, so that digital assets don't trigger bank runs in the traditional banking system." –Catherine Leffert

Matthew Maxey

Chief innovation officer
Synovus Bank

Under Chief Innovation Officer Matthew Maxey's watch, Synovus Bank recently began offering embedded finance under a new brand called Maast.

It created application programming interfaces for its merchant acquiring payments, business checking and business lending functions and now offers them to small and medium sized businesses through some business clients' technology stacks. An example of this might be a company like Toast, which provides technology for restaurants including human resources, payroll and inventory and fixed asset management.

"As a starting point, we decided to take what we do best, which is payments and deposit instruments and lending, and repackage that into an API delivery model that we plan to do in a full digital onboarding experience under the Maast brand, but it's powered by Synovus Bank and it leverages our balance sheet," Maxey said. "We used a separate tech stack to make that happen."

Maast has its own CEO, executive team, operating structure and technology. The idea behind this is to let Maast move quickly the way fintechs do.

Maxey also set up an innovation incubation lab at Synovus, which has about $60 billion of assets and is based in Columbus, Georgia.

"The intent of that lab was to pull testing capabilities out of the bank so we could lower our risk and speed up decisions," he said. The lab uses test data powered by a series of partners.

"We can try things and throw them away much faster," Maxey said. "You're picking up rocks, looking under the rock, if it doesn't meet a need, doesn't align with our strategy, we put it back down and move on to the next thing. The goal is to have a small pile of rocks that are highly valuable that we can move up to the front of our investment pipeline at the executive level." — Penny Crosman

Laura Merling

Chief transformation and operations officer
Arvest Bank

Laura Merling devised a framework for transformation when she was at AT&T. Now she is putting that five-pillar approach — which includes a multi-year business vision and customer understanding — to work at Arvest Bank.

Since Merling joined Arvest in 2021 as chief transformation and operations officer, she has found concrete ways to solve customer problems. From late 2021 to early 2022, she conducted a vulnerability study that uncovered seven categories of frustration among customers and subtler but still present annoyances she dubs "rocks in their shoes."

"In aggregate, those would add up to potentially driving a customer to leave," she said.

Last May, the bank put action plans into place to address these issues big and small; several wrapped up last year while others are ongoing. One example is adding functionality to the mobile app so customers can upgrade a certificate of deposit at maturity themselves rather than walking into a branch or making a call.

Under Merling's watch, the Fayetteville, Arkansas bank also started migrating its data centers to Google Cloud in the summer of 2022. The bank is on track to finish this year. The Google partnership coincided with another initiative by Merling: Me@Arvest, a re-skilling and up-skilling program that will help people rise within the company.

Finally, Merling spearheaded the adoption of a new core system by Thought Machine, which lets the bank construct its own products at its own pace. Arvest rolled out equipment finance lending on Thought Machine last October, which it built from the ground up in less than nine months, and expects all commercial loans will go through Thought Machine by early 2024. — Miriam Cross

Scott Nathan

Global head of anti-money laundering detection and customer insights
Citigroup

In a field dominated by regulatory concerns, Scott Nathan is an innovator. As the global head of AML risk detection and customer insights at Citi, Nathan often hosts demonstrations with regulators and other banks to help them understand novel technologies that allow the financial sector to help keep the country safe by fighting financial crimes.

During the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, Nathan was working for FleetBoston Financial (later purchased by Bank of America in 2004) as a commercial loan specialist, but the event soon thrust him into a role as a senior compliance officer. Under the tutelage of Jim Richards, a Bank Secrecy Act officer and director of the financial intelligence unit for FleetBoston, Nathan learned an appreciation for using transaction monitoring technology to advance national security aims.

Prior to Google's initial public offering in 2004, Richards sent Nathan to a search engine strategies conference sponsored by Google, putting him in a room with the company's co-founder Sergey Brin. Nathan got to explain how FleetBoston was using open source intelligence gleaned from the internet to satisfy regulatory mandates on fighting financial crimes, and he took from the conference a greater appreciation for thinking outside the box in his own work.

Today, Nathan is leading Citi on a multiyear effort to overhaul the bank's AML transaction monitoring system, which turns the petabytes of data the bank processes into actionable insights on customers that go beyond AML risk assessment into cybersecurity and fraud risk assessments, as well.

Citi needed a more modern capability that would not only support its compliance obligations, but also allow it to improve the bank's client experience, according to Nathan. As part of those efforts, Nathan is also looking to break down silos within the institution in a compliant manner. — Carter Pape

Thomas Novak

Chief digital officer
Visions Federal Credit Union

Thomas Novak runs a nontraditional digital banking experience at Visions Federal Credit Union, which this year began offering members the ability to buy and sell bitcoin alongside checking and savings accounts.

Visions also entered a series of fintech partnerships last year to bolster the digital member experience. A partnership with Givio allows members to make charitable donations through their digital banking portal, and a partnership with IDnotify provides them with free identity theft and credit monitoring.

As vice president and chief digital officer of Visions, Novak has also led the credit union's launch of real-time payments receiving, and helped drive a 44% increase to the institution's credit union card program interchange income, thanks, in part, to the launch of a Elite Visa Signature credit card offering 2% cash back.

After partnering with personalization platform Finalytics.ai, Ventures drove a 200% increase in membership applications.

Partnerships such as these are often the product of Visions's Digital Advisory Board, a forum Novak runs that allows frontline employees to pitch features, functionality and fintech partnerships. The sixth such partnership to come out of this effort is expected to be announced this year — a partnership with South Africa-based Entersekt, which provides mobile-based authentication and app security software. — Carter Pape

Jackie Reses

Chair and CEO
Lead Bank

Jackie Reses' latest project is ramping up a community bank to be a leader in payments and banking-as-a-service products to serve small businesses and fintechs. The 30-year industry veteran acquired the Kansas City, Missouri-based bank, fittingly called Lead Bank, last year.

Reses, who serves as chair and CEO of Lead Bank, is a known powerhouse in the fintech and finance world. She's served in leadership roles at giants like Goldman Sachs, Yahoo! and Square, where she helped the payment company obtain an industrial loan company charter from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation in 2020. Reses was named one of American Banker's Most Powerful Women in Finance in 2020 for leading the charter initiative.

Reses acquired Lead with a group of investors and other "ex-Squares" to serve entrepreneurs and founders and be a bank that "bridges innovation and finance." Baas can offer higher fee income, return on assets, lower customer acquisition costs and national reach, but as fintech funding drops and regulatory scrutiny rises, it's not a simple path forward in the space.

Still, Lead Bank has been in the business since 2018, when it first partnered with credit-building fintech Self. Reses also said small businesses and entrepreneurs need options for funding and partners.

In 2020, when Reses worked in a unit at Square focused on small business lending, the company delivered more than $820 million in Paycheck Protection Program loans.

"One of the top takeaways from this crisis is also something we've known for a long time: Small businesses are routinely overlooked and underserved by the traditional finance system," Reses said in an interview with American Banker at the time.

The $850-million-asset bank has brought on leaders from companies like Square, Stripe and Yahoo!. — Catherine Leffert

Paul Richards

Head of mortgage technology
Citizens Financial Group

Paul Richards has been the head of mortgage technology at Citizens Bank since 2020, and in that time has helped overhaul the bank's home equity line of credit (HELOC) process. While traditional HELOC loans can take several weeks to process, the bank's product, Citizens FastLine, aims to originate those loans in seven days.

Richards came to the Providence, Rhode Island-based Citizens from Charles Schwab, where he oversaw IT for Schwab Compliance Solutions Group, designing and executing engineering plans and IT operations. Richards also helped advise on technology strategy and coding practices at Charles Schwab. Richards also spent two years at Fiserv, where he worked on the company's technical software development strategy for bill payment applications and systems.

FastLine was built on a cloud-native platform that uses automated income verification and credit decision software to cut time and manual labor in the underwriting process. The system also uses digital data platforms to assess property valuations. More than 70% of HELOC applicants are eligible to apply on Citizens' FastLine portal, which the bank says takes as little as three minutes.

Citizens' HELOC originations have increased from $4.7 billion in 2020 to $8 billion in 2021 and $10 billion in 2022.

Last fall, CEO Bruce Van Saun said on an earnings call that the $222.3-billion-asset bank was looking to double down on consumer digital banking initiatives. While overall loan levels have dropped across the banking sector, home equity has been a strong lending segment for the Citizens. — Catherine Leffert

Christian Ruppe

Chief innovation officer
Colony Bank

Christian Ruppe, chief innovation officer at Colony Bank in Fitzgerald, Georgia, has worked on several data initiatives over the past year. One is the creation of APIs through which the $2.8 billion-asset bank can provide customer account data to fintechs. Others include the installation of a new data warehouse and Tableau data visualization software.

"Basically, we wanted portability and we wanted flexibility," Ruppe said. "The one thing that we can be sure of is that we can't be sure of what's going to happen in the industry. So being able to move quickly to get access to data and give access to our data to the fintechs we want to work with is going to allow us to be extremely flexible and move quickly."

The data warehouse took about two months to set up and deploy, Ruppe said. It feeds Salesforce, Tableau and other applications.

"The data warehouse allows us to move data quicker and have more data in one place rather than only calling the core," he said. It will help the bank obtain the full picture of the customer.

Eventually, one of his goals is to give branch staff better tools and data, so that tasks that today take 10 minutes to do in the core system, like ordering a debit card, can be done with a quick API call.

"A lot of people focus on improving the front end for the customers, but then the technology that the bankers are using is so out of date that the customer has a terrible experience when they come into the branch because they wait 30 minutes to do something that's really not that complicated," Ruppe said.

With Tableau, Ruppe will set up dashboards and reports to support business decisions toward improving profitability and customer acquisition. — Penny Crosman