Beth Johnson's love of math propelled her into a career in banking.
She grew up in Akron, Ohio, and was intrigued at a young age about the "how and why" of math equations. She credits her parents and public school teachers for being supportive and encouraging of her interest in math.
After graduating from high school, Johnson attended Northwestern University and graduated with a degree in math and economics. The self-described math geek's first job was at Goldman Sachs working as a global risk management analyst. "I like thinking about how you make decisions based on data and insight, and I think banking was a natural transition for that."
She spent two years at Goldman before heading to Stanford University to get an MBA. Following her graduation in 1997, she went back to Wall Street and worked in interest rate derivatives for JPMorgan for a year. "I wanted to work in banking but I also wanted to work on some kind of math-oriented modeling," she said.
Her husband got a job in Boston, so when they moved, Johnson took a job at Bain & Company. During her 15 years at Bain, Johnson served as a partner and leader of its customer strategy and marketing practice, specializing in financial services. She regularly co-authored Bain's annual "Customer Loyalty in Banking" study.
In 2013, Johnson got a call from CEO Bruce Van Saun, asking her to lead corporate strategy at Providence, Rhode Island-based Citizens. Two years later, after the spinoff of Citizens from Royal Bank of Scotland, Johnson was promoted to be the bank's chief marketing officer. As the CMO, she was responsible for corporate-wide marketing activities including the brand and customer experience; virtual channels including digital and the call-center; and for advancing consumer banking growth and profitability by leading and aligning the businesses' strategy, pricing and data-analytics efforts.
In 2020, Johnson said, Van Saun asked her to take a role that was about building capabilities horizontally across the bank. "It would hit every one of our businesses, whether it was commercial, consumer, private banking, and small business. The banking industry was changing, payments were changing, so how do we think about that holistically?" Van Saun let her choose her own title, and after some consideration, Johnson came up with "chief experience officer."
"I think it's easy to copy products. I think it's easy to copy pricing. But I really feel like this is an experience driven industry. And the reason we're building these capabilities is to provide those experiences to our customers. It's really the end customer that matters and that's how the title came to be," she said.
In the past six months, Johnson said that she's been spending a lot of time looking at data and analytics for the $222 billion-asset bank. She's been examining how the bank needs to be organized in order to leverage and protect its data, what new tools and technology it should be using, and how to build a structure only once that can be leveraged across multiple internal platforms.
She has also been focusing on payments, an area of banking she said is rapidly evolving. "How do we think about a holistic strategy for payments innovation? How do we think about how that's evolving? And then how do we take the new platform so the infrastructure is there for real time payments, in addition to ACH, wire, bill pay and Zelle," she queried.
At the same time, Johnson is cognizant of the importance of guarding the brand's reputation. "My role is to guide where we are going while also making sure we're good stewards of the brand across the board."
ESG
In July 2022, Johnson was appointed as the head of ESG for the bank. She said that Citizens has four strategic pillars it is pursuing for stakeholders and colleagues.
The first pillar is leading with robust governance. "Every bank should have strong governance. I think too often people forget that there is a G in ESG. So we work hard to make sure we continue to have a really strong governance process in the bank,'' she said.
The second pillar is positive climate impact. In addition to a $50 billion sustainable finance target Citizens announced last fall, Johnson said the bank is focused on training its commercial and small-business teams to have conversations with clients around climate related goals. "How they think about green enables us to do what we need to do as a bank," she said.
For Citizens, the "S" of ESG has two components: building the workforce of the future and fostering strong communities. Within the workforce pillar, Citizens focuses on creating partnerships to ensure that its colleagues and community members are developing the skills necessary to compete for the jobs of the future.
Internally, Johnson said that the bank is constantly training its employees to keep up with industry trends. Citizens is currently rolling out a pilot program to see if generative AI can provide easier search capabilities to its contact center employees. For example, she said, what happens when a customer calls in and doesn't know their account number and doesn't have a social security number? "How do I make sure you are who you say you are? It's complicated, and the customer probably gets frustrated as the contact center worker is trying to sift through our manuals trying to find the answer," Johnson said. Gen AI could make that process a lot easier and faster for both parties, she added.
After noticing a shortage of qualified port workers in Philadelphia, Citizens partnered with the Collegiate Consortium for Workforce and Economic Development, PhilaPort and Philadelphia Works to create the Citizens Bank Regional Maritime Training Center. The first-of-its-kind workforce development initiative that provides formal, enhanced training in such things as forklift certification and recertification, yard jockey training and OSHA safety training. As a result, 200 new and existing workers received specialized training during the center's first year of operations.
Fostering strong communities is another key component of Citizen's ESG strategy. The bank works to close the wealth and opportunity gap by financing affordable housing, supporting small businesses and developing partnerships to help low-to-moderate income communities.
Thoughts on leadership
As a leader, Johnson said that she thinks it is important to create an environment where people can thrive, take chances and have ownership over their careers. "It can be pushing them when they need to be pushed, but making sure that they have the opportunities to really thrive over time," she said. And it's a two-way street, she added. "They have to have your back as much as you have their back."
As Johnson's teams get larger and she's become more focused on where the overall industry is heading, she said it's important to keep people focused on what really matters. "You have to think about bringing the outside in, and there's an inspirational storytelling component to it. You can do that in lots of different ways, but you have to be able to engage and inspire," she said.
And a good leader creates followers, she said. "At the end of the day, do people want to continue to work with you, to want you to be their leader and be on their team?" Good leaders know they've succeeded when their employees follow them within an organization, to another job or will go back to them after an employee has left to ask for their advice, she said.
On being a woman in banking
When she started her career in the early 1990s, there weren't a lot of women in the industry. Johnson said she felt lucky she worked in Bain's Boston office because 30% of the staff were women. "I had great role models there. But that wasn't true in every office that they were in, and that certainly wasn't true for many of the financial services firms I worked with," she said.
In the mid-2000s, Johnson said that some men in the industry appeared to have a "lightbulb" moment. "People began to realize that talent is scarce, and it was becoming increasingly hard to attract talent. And you didn't start thinking about women as a major source of talent, they were actually going to prohibit growth," she recalled. "And I think that's really important because then it doesn't become about well, this is the right thing to do, or because people are leaving; it becomes a business imperative. And that shift was really, really important within the industry."
And while there were more women coming into the industry, Johnson said that change wasn't immediate. When she was in sales and trading, one of her male colleagues said they were going to take a client to a strip club. "Fortunately, the client turned them down so I didn't have to decide whether I was going to go," she said.
That type of situation wouldn't happen today, but she said that there are still unconscious biases that women face. "People at the most senior levels need to continue to move women throughout the organization and proactively push them into new roles," she said. "I do think you've got to be proactive as an individual but you also have to have the companies you're working with be proactive."
As a female leader in the industry, Johnson said that it's important for her to speak up and share her experiences with younger colleagues. She recounted a recent meeting the head of software engineering held that included a session called "Ask me anything." Johnson had agreed to participate and one of her colleagues asked how she handled her career over time while also being the mother of two girls. Johnson responded that her daughters could name an event such as a concert or a soccer game as "non-negotiable."
She recalled the time when one of her daughters pulled the "non-negotiable" card for an eighth grade concert. "Now the funny thing is she can't sing. She's a terrible singer. So my husband and I were like, "Why do we have to show up? Like if there's anything we didn't want to go to is an eighth grade choir concert.' But it was her non-negotiable, so we both showed up," Johnson said.
After the meeting, two women reached out and told her that as working mothers, they never thought you could have non-negotiables to help manage their work and home lives. "And so it was a reminder that by sharing things like that, people see a path earlier on in their career. And they were at new manager levels and had young kids, and by hearing my story they thought, 'hey, I can do this.' And it's a reminder to us [leaders] that it's important to share these kinds of things," she said.
