Evolution of design: Banks are helping customers build healthy financial habits by adding budgeting features in their apps. At Bank of America, these efforts are being driven by Michelle Moore, head of digital banking. “Designs have evolved so much over the last two years,” she said. The bank is also preparing to launch its chatbot erica. “All of these technologies will eventually merge together as they are launched,” Moore said.
What matters more than money: Money shouldn't be the driving factor for a career move, according to Joanne Bradford, chief operating officer of online lender SoFi. Accepting a job for the money without being personally invested in it could hurt your career. "I don't think that always getting paid more is the answer, there's a lot of things that go into the equation — timing, skill set, the health of the organization, the growth of the organization," she said. "I've taken some pretty big salary cuts to join organizations with upside potential. Some of it has paid out and some of it hasn't. I'm probably batting 50/50 on that. But in the end, the value to my overall career has more than paid itself off.”
Say yes: TSB chief operating officer Helen Rose talked this week about her experiences with women and as a woman in the male-dominated field of banking. One of the first ways women can own their equality with men: be more bold. “I tell them the story of when I was offered the chief operating officer job at TSB and was given 24 hours to make up my mind,” she said. “You have to just say yes and think later about how to make it work. Often women don’t get as far as saying yes, because they’ve already thought about what would be difficult. Women need to be bolder, because if you’re not, you’ll find that one of your peers — often of the male variety — beats you to the top.”
Female central bankers: Women account for more than half of managers in Southeast Asian central banks, accounting for almost two thirds of managerial staff in the Philippines and at least half in Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia. Meanwhile, in the European Central Bank, 27% of managers are women and less than a third of the Reserve Bank of Australia's managers are female. In the U.S., though Janet Yellen runs the Federal Reserve Board, only two of the 12 Federal Reserve Bank presidents are women.
Role call
Cooperative Bank of Cape Cod in Hyannis, Mass., has hired Lisa Oliver to be the first female CEO in its 95-year history. The former KeyCorp executive will also become president in March.
Opus Bank has hired Scarlett Sieber, the former senior vice president in global business development at BBVA, to be its chief innovation officer.
USAA announced it opened a user experience design studio in Austin and hired a chief design officer, Meriah Garrett, to lead the 120-employee operation.
Bank of America operations and technology chief Cathy Bessant will be elected to the board of Zurich Insurance Group in March.
Carolyn Schaefer, managing director of specialized banking at York Traditions Bank in York, Penn., will retire in July.
Beyond banking
A Harvard Business Review study shows women are less likely to put themselves up for jobs or promotions if they were rejected for a similar role in the past than men would be. The behavior was 1.5 times more common among women, according to the research. The differences seem trivial, but “to reach the top of the organization, people need to keep playing the game, over and over again, even after repeated disappointments. So even small differences between how men and women respond to rejection could lead to big differences over time,” the study stated.
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