“For me, this is not a job or a career. This is a calling,” says Dontá L. Wilson, chief digital and client experience officer at Truist Financial, the amalgamation of SunTrust and BB&T. “I'm very sure about why I'm in this business.”
Wilson, who oversees a team of thousands at the $522 billion-asset bank, is in this business to help people achieve what he calls “financial peace.”
Financial peace starts with the customer’s experience. Wilson has been overseeing the development and gradual rollout of an all-new mobile banking app and the construction of a 100,000-square-foot innovation center, the setting up of “customer journey rooms” (more on that later) and the adoption of cloud computing and application programming interfaces that make quick new releases and fintech partnerships possible.
For these efforts and more, American Banker has chosen Wilson to be its Digital Banker of the Year for 2021.
During Truist’s third-quarter earnings call, the company’s president and CEO, William H. Rogers, nodded to the importance of this work.
“We continue to experience robust demand for digital banking services as our clients look for more convenient and more effective ways to transact and manage their finances,” Rogers said. “The pace of digital adoption has been especially rapid in mobile.” He pointed out that since the second quarter of 2020, the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank’s active mobile app user base has increased by 9% to over 4.1 million active clients.
Rogers also noted that Truist is rolling out its new app ahead of the physical conversion of the SunTrust and BB&T platforms into one. The app is rolling out in stages throughout the rest of the year.
The decision to create a new mobile banking experience from scratch while going through a merger was unusual. Often banks that are merging choose technology from one of the legacy banks.
“In a true merger of equals where the two companies are really close in size, the best practice is that they look at all their applications and choose which one is best,” said Sam Kilmer, senior director at Cornerstone Advisors. He couldn’t think of another example of where two organizations merged and decided to build a new digital experience as part of that process.
“It would have been so much easier for us to choose the ecosystem of one bank or the other, because you could quickly do the conversion,” Wilson said. “But when we decided to do this merger of equals, both executive teams sat down and said, all right, why are we doing this? One reason was to try to achieve a greater purpose together than we could have done separately. The second reason was to be a leader in client-centric innovation, so we can transform and build the future of finance.”
That led to the decision to take the best of both apps and create something better.
One fresh element of the new Truist app is AI-driven advice Wilson calls “Truist Insights,” financial tips that customers receive throughout the day, based on analyses of their cash flow and purchases.
For instance, if a customer has $500 in savings and an automated payment on a car loan scheduled for Nov. 30, the app might recommend that the customer transfer money from savings to cover it. Or if a customer signed up for a 90-day trial for a service and forgot about it, the app may remind the client when the 90 days is up, and ask if they want to continue.
“We are able to provide automated guidance based on clients’ transaction activity to help them spend money, save money, or live their life better,” Wilson said. “They’re just helpful reminders, so clients can live their personal life and we take care of their financial life. “
Another technology Wilson’s team developed recently is a robo-advisor called Truist Invest.
It creates diversified portfolios personalized for a client's risk tolerance and monitors those investments according to the given strategy, he said. It’s for people who have recently become wealthy and don’t yet have a human advisor.
A tech project Wilson is leading on the commercial side is called Truist One View. This gives business clients a new portal through which they can access all their critical information. Before this, clients would have to sign in separately for cash management, merchant services and card activity using different usernames and passwords.
“Now we have the opportunity for them to go through one front door to be able to access all the needed information,” Wilson said.
‘Journey rooms’
Wilson says his product development teams start with the concept of empathy and then create products in collaboration with customers.
To facilitate this, he has set up “client journey rooms.” Here, clients work with designers, architects, engineers and business risk and compliance people to develop new products and services.
The rooms will exist within Truist’s innovation and tech center, a new space within the bank’s headquarters that was just recently completed. Putting the innovation center in the company’s headquarters rather than at some offsite location was no accident, Wilson said.
“Most banks put their innovation center across town or on the other side of the country because they want all these innovative thinkers not to be contained by corporate,” Wilson said. “We decided that we want it to be a part of our DNA. We needed to put it where everybody was.”
One solution that has already come out of the client journey room work is the concept of “the toggle,” Wilson said. As it was, the online interface required small-business clients to sign in with their unique small-business credentials to look at those business accounts. If they wanted to look at their personal checking accounts, they would need to log out and log back in with their personal credentials. With the toggle, the person signs in once and toggles back and forth between small-business and personal accounts.
“Customers were saying, we love your apps, but wouldn't it be great if we could just have it all in one place?” Wilson said.
Wilson’s emphasis on empathy for the customer stems from early in his career, when he was an intern at BB&T. He later worked in operations, retail banking, and commercial banking. He was a regional president for 11 years and led sales teams across all lines of businesses and in a variety of markets.
“What I saw in those experiences is that when you start with empathy and try to understand what the client's ultimate goals are — their highest-level goal being financial happiness or financial peace, and the thing they need to accomplish to get there, which is financial security — none of them need a financial product,” Wilson said. “The product is a means to something else: being able to have shelter, being able to put their children through school.”
Teamwork
The organization Wilson leads encompasses operations across the bank, the digital banking group, digital sales, the intelligent automation team, the client insights analytics team, the sales optimization team, all of marketing including digital marketing, experience designers for digital and nondigital design, and Truist Ventures, the bank’s venture capital arm. It contains centers of excellence that work alongside all the lines of business.
“We structured ourselves that way because we want to work in an integrated fashion,” he said.
When hiring tech talent, Wilson looks for people who “have a heart towards the client, that love the client more than they love products and services,” he said. “They're just absolutely obsessed with helping clients achieve financial peace and they start with a place of empathy.” He also looks for curiosity and an openness to collaboration.
“You have to enjoy giving credit more than receiving it,” Wilson said. “I played point guard when I played sports, and that's what you do — you help other people score. So they have to be in love with helping other people they work with score, and not look to try to score themselves, because then you can really do really, really magical work.”
Wilson made a point to ensure that his team shared in his recognition — he insisted that his team be recognized for its collective work, and not just him personally.
“This isn’t a Dontá recognition,” he said. “This is a Truist team. All the teammates partner well, and I'm excited to see them get this recognition.”
Cloud computing and APIs
To effect change quickly, Wilson and his team have embraced what he calls a “fit for purpose cloud strategy.”
“Before it was, I wouldn't call it a cloud-last strategy, but it was, let's try to stay out of the cloud as much as we can,” Wilson said.
Now, because the new mobile app is hosted in the cloud, instead of six releases a year, Wilson could do releases every day if he wanted to.
Wilson is also using APIs to connect into clients’ ecosystems and let them link directly to the bank through other platforms they’re already using. The bank will be seeking out partners for this, such as homeowners’ associations that manage payments from homeowners.
Wilson said he doesn’t worry about competition from tech and fintech companies.
“We worry about our clients, because our clients ultimately pay us,” he said. “Our clients ultimately bank with us, our clients ultimately tell us what they need and that's why we talk about co-creation. So we spend way more time talking to clients than we do worrying about the competitive landscape.”
He does keep tabs on the competition, of course.
“I think it’s great to see everybody innovating, because that ultimately drives better solutions for clients as a whole in the world, which is a good, positive thing,” Wilson said. “We're about trying to help people get to financial happiness, and we think we're the best at it, but everybody's pushing each other to do better.”
He also looks at fintechs as partners. “There are things they do really well. There are things that we do really well,” Wilson said. “There's a lot of times we can partner and do things really well together. And we're doing that and we will continue to do that.”
For instance, Truist Ventures invested in the challenger bank Greenwood, which focuses on serving Black and Hispanic people.
“We got other banks to invest with us and other partners because there is a wealth gap out there,” Wilson said. “We said, hey, let's support this initiative. They’ve got a great, innovative solution that they're going to take digital. We're going to invest in it and help lead the rounds.”
