Perhaps the turning point in David Hijirida’s financial services career came when he (sort of) left it.
It was 2006, long before his current job as CEO of the fintech Simple. He worked at Washington Mutual and was fed up with what he saw as banking’s disregard for customers. He wanted a job devoted to improving the customer service experience, and he even considered an opportunity in China to get it.
Then he got a call from Amazon, which was expanding beyond its online-selling roots and offered him the chance to solve customer issues as he saw fit in a new part of the company.
“They told me how they liked these kind of ideas, especially focused around the customer, so here’s a whiteboard to try your ideas here,” he said in a recent interview.
Hijirida started in payments with Amazon and helped to launch the company’s private-label credit product at a time when the online retailer expanded its inventory to sell televisions. “We needed a way to allow consumers to finance big-ticket items,” he said.
After 11 years at Amazon, where he rose to director of advertising,
Despite its original intent to be a savings app focused on delivering a positive customer experience, complaints about account closings, unwanted cross-marketing and other issues dogged the online-only bank; former Simple CEO Josh Reich once said Simple moved away from focusing on its customers.
BBVA, which bought Simple in 2014 for $177 million, wrote down its value to $89.5 million in 2017. The company also faced a round of layoffs in 2017.
Observers describe Hijirida as passionate about putting customers at the center of digital experiences, and the right man to help Simple get back to its original intent.
The following is a transcript of the conversation with Hijirida, which has been edited for length and clarity.
How did your time at Amazon prepare you for this role?
DAVID HIJIRIDA: I left banking because I was tired of the way banks treated customers, especially the big banks. I was really looking for a whiteboard to test my own ideas on how to treat customers better. I thought maybe I would have to get out of the U.S., but Amazon called and said, why don’t you stay in Seattle?
At that time, people thought I was pretty crazy leaving WaMu. This was the end of 2006, in the industry’s heyday. People would ask me why would I want to go to a bookstore. My wife would say the same thing. I told people I don’t really care about the bookstore. I really care about the fact that they were giving me the chance to innovate.
What happened over time is that I kind of grew up there in the sense of maturing my leadership skills. Amazon is probably one of the best places to sharpen those leadership skills, to take ownership and accountability for your work.
I come from a science background and taught myself and my teams to think of ourselves not only as businesspeople, but as scientists searching for truths about the customer regarding how they use our products and taking that insight and really doubling down where you can.
Those are the things we’re really bringing into Simple. It’s those things that I’ve learned there. The other thing that I learned at Amazon is: How do you balance empathy? How do you balance execution? With all those things, I’ve had a lot of time to play with those things within Amazon by taking on teams that were in a lot of trouble with high attrition to turn them around. I’m fairly used to coming into those situations.
Simple is in the middle of a turnaround, and none of these problems are particularly new to me. I really love the fact that this is kind of a canvas to try these ideas around changing the culture in a way that preserves its core culture. It’s a high empathetic culture, and these are the things I love about Simple. What I want to add is execution, ownership and innovation.
Former CEO Josh Reich was candid upon his departure from the company that Simple failed to uphold its “product-driven” vision. How has Simple recaptured that vision since then, or does the company have new vision based off your experience?
There are a lot of ideas within Simple. I didn’t have to bring in anything brand new here. I think really it’s about execution, being agile and having a data-driven, customer-focused culture. It’s about having the muscles to execute on that as well.
There’s been a lot of churn as far as people within the company, and that churn causes distraction. I think we’ve had some time to bake those new people in and make sure we have some stability. We're building the muscles and pushing on ownership and accountability so that we can execute.
When Simple first started, the challenger bank industry was not what it is today. What does that mean for Simple as far as how you differentiate yourselves in the market?
One of the reasons why I came to Simple was because I was always thinking about what I would do with a startup bank. I was on sabbatical when I got the call from Simple and my wife was like, "You have to do this or stop talking about doing a startup." When I think about competitors, and I think this is one thing that I learned at Amazon, I would say that we try not to think about competitors and focus on customers.
When I see people that are focused on competitors, it’s often because they don’t know their customers. You use competitors as proxy for your customers when you don’t know your customers well enough. When you do this, you tend to copy your competitors because you think, customers must love that. But if you have that conviction of knowing exactly what your customers need, competitor comparisons kind of fade into the background. That said, I’m aware of the landscape. But I’m more worried about understanding our customers than our competitors.
What have you been finding so far with understanding Simple’s customers?
What we’ve been talking about with our customers is how they feel about money and helping them with their financial health and those are the bedrocks that we sit on. If you look at some of the features like Goals and Expenses and how we’re innovating on that front, I think we’re at 5 million-plus Goals that have been created. There is a lot of adoption that we’re seeing faster than we thought we would see. We’re hearing stories about customers getting out of debt, or saving for something. That’s what’s really heartening. We’re making sure that we press hard on those areas.
You worked for Amazon, a company that’s often referenced these days as for what banks need to strive for in a digital experience. Is that overblown, or is there validity to that?
You bring up a fair point in terms of, what is the new normal for digital experiences? What do customers expect as the new normal? That’s not to say branches aren’t going to be around. There’s always a segment of customers that want branches. Even if you’re a digital native that never uses a branch, for some people the presence of branch is an indicator of trust. That will never go away, but I do think this ability to do everything you can do in a physical environment on digital is our expectation now.
A lot of bank leaders press on the same issues: price, selection and convenience. These actions are something that everyone pushes on, whether it’s Amazon or Simple. The bigger question is, which one matters in your industry and what are the right levers to pull? I think especially in banking, I think customer trust can be applied to these areas. The customers are asking, am I working with a bank that has my back?
I think for us on the fintech/banking side, it’s about making sure that trust is valid and making sure the customer doesn’t have to worry if we have their back. That’s something we’re going to keep pushing on all the time.
