An Inside Look at Zions Bank's Core Systems Modernization

Jim Marous (00:11):

Hey, everybody, nothing better than a post-lunch crowd. Everybody's trying to get to the rooms. First off, I want to thank you for being here and participating in this live podcast. We started this last year, it's kind of a fun thing to do. We're actually filming podcasts that we'll be producing and putting on our app in the next few weeks, several weeks.

Jim Marous (00:34):

And we appreciate Naehas who's sponsoring this whole series, both the live series and our post-production on YouTube and the podcast channel. So, you kind of see how this whole thing works, the dialogue that takes place.

Jim Marous (00:49):

And I think we have three really, really good people that are talking about extraordinarily pertinent items, from core technology transformation to segment marketing, and then talking to a FinTech leader about what's it like to try to gain scale in the FinTech world.

Jim Marous (01:06):

So, let's start with our first guests from Zions Bank. Jennifer, we are old friends and new friends. It depends on how we take that whole thing. Used to work with Zions Bank back in pre-financial brand days. And talk a little bit about your background, but also a little bit about who Zions Bank is for those that may not be familiar.

Jennifer Smith (01:31):

Sure. Well, I joined Zions Bank in 2006, and for the last 10 years have been the Chief Information Officer at the company.

Jennifer Smith (01:43):

Zions, we're a $90 billion financial services institution headquartered in Salt Lake City. We have brands across the Western United States. Our focus is in small business and the investments that businesses make in building communities.

Jim Marous (02:04):

Yeah, and what's interesting is you have a dynamic at your organization, both some very strong legacy history and leadership that is thought leadership. So, I'll give an example that resonates in my mind.

Jim Marous (02:20):

Back in the days that we were building financial institutions, online banking technologies to build deposit bases, you were one of the strongest organizations that generated deposits in the online space, outside your marketplaces and inside your marketplaces.

Jim Marous (02:38):

But to do something like that, because when you talk about risk reward, when we talk about regulation, compliance, that was an untouched space at the time. You had Wingspan doing it in a way in Arizona on behalf of I think it was Bank One at that point. So, everybody has to start somewhere.

Jim Marous (02:59):

Talk a little bit about how your leadership and your organization made the decision they had to change the core and modernize your banking platform.

Jennifer Smith (03:12):

So, thank you for recognizing the innovation of the company for many, many decades. We claim being the first for PC banking, being the first for … we champion Check 21 and remote deposit capture early on. But this was a change in terms of the breadth and depth that was not like anything we had ever imagined.

Jennifer Smith (03:38):

I'd like to set a little bit of context about core banking systems. I recognize that in community banks and credit unions, you may be using Jack Henry or Fiserv and Bank in a Box solutions — in our organization and larger regional banks and national banks, we have separate cores for every type of product deposit and the suite of products around the deposit system: consumer lending, construction lending, commercial lending, of course, business making.

Jennifer Smith (04:17):

So, each one of those was a separate vendor, separate data structure, and all of these systems (we are not unique as you know) were built on architectures coming out of the 1960s and the 1970s.

Jim Marous (04:36):

Back when I was a young banker.

Jennifer Smith (04:38):

And you worked on those dumb terminals probably. So, they were designed for a time where there's a dumb terminal in a branch that had a direct connection into a data center, and work was flown from branches overnight to regional processing centers. That's the base of what a lot of our core banking systems were built on.

Jennifer Smith (05:03):

And fortunately, our CEO as well as our board had the foresight to see that is not the kind of technology (even though this was many, many years ago) to move us forward, and understood even at that time that changing out the core was what was going to position us for future success. There aren't a lot of banks who have done that yet of our size or larger. And so, it was a real foresightful play on our CEO's part.

Jim Marous (05:40):

So, when did the process start?

Jim Marous (05:46):

Oh my gosh, sort of a sore subject.

Jim Marous (05:47):

You knew it was going to come at some point, but I think it's important because when you put in context, it makes sense in hindsight.

Jennifer Smith (05:54):

It sure does. So, we started the work after we signed our contract with our partner in 2013. There was so much research before that as well, and negotiations with multiple vendors around the world in choosing our partner.

Jennifer Smith (06:20):

And because the core transformations — it wasn't one core transformation, it was all of the cores I mentioned, we were moving to a common platform. And then on top of that, the transformations were … so you say transformation when you're changing business processes as well and tech upgrade when it's just replacing a piece of technology.

Jennifer Smith (06:46):

So, we consolidated all of our loan operation centers, all of our branch operations centers, and at the same time-

Jim Marous (06:53):

And by the way, you take it for granted, but you have seven affiliates, correct? So, you're not even converting one organization and multiple cores.

Jennifer Smith (07:04):

Yeah.

Jim Marous (07:04):

It's a whole multiplication issue there.

Jennifer Smith (07:10):

It felt exponential in terms of the issues we were managing through, and we had some starts and stops of learnings as we got started. So, that probably cost us at least 18 months and things we wish we could have done differently.

Jim Marous (07:26):

So, it's interesting, I am going to keep on trying to put this in reference, is that we look today at what it would take to do a complete core transformation or bank modernization process. And you can put a date and a time to this.

Jim Marous (07:40):

But when you go back 10 years, you number one didn't have many suppliers that offered this. Number two, virtually nobody in the U.S. had really achieved a complete core transformation. We'd seen some in Europe, but very infrequent.

Jim Marous (07:56):

Most would say, even back then, we'll try to take deposits. We'll take one element, one of the silos of many silos. But you decided to take it all on. What went into that decision to say — because we will get into the build versus buy. But when you're looking at, do I take a portion of this, or do I take it all: what went into the decision to say we're going to do it all?

Jennifer Smith (08:21):

Well, we chose a platform that did it all. So, we were thinking of an entire platform approach. And you're right, we weren't seeing the innovation in the U.S. marketplace, so we went to a global provider.

Jennifer Smith (08:38):

I came in as CIO after those decisions had been made. And it's a really good lesson in maybe I would've done something differently than the person who was in charge of making the decision. But we had committed as a company and as an organization to move forward, and it then became the strategy I needed to execute on and ensure we were successful along the way.

Jennifer Smith (09:09):

So, we don't always have the opportunity to craft from beginning to end how we want something to be, but I think in retrospect, it would've been wise even using the same platform to break it into more discreet initiatives.

Jim Marous (09:28):

So, that's one of the learnings-

Jennifer Smith (09:29):

That would be one

Jim Marous (09:29):

Because this question’s going to come up later on as well. But if you were to do it over again, you probably would've done pieces and parts, and built upon that.

Jennifer Smith (09:37):

With a very clear vision first of what we wanted to achieve.

Jim Marous (09:43):

Did you have that at the beginning? Did you have that?

Jennifer Smith (09:45):

We absolutely did have that. And then with that vision, I likely would have taken it in discreet projects as … we adopted agile midway through the initiative. But our vision, we hired a marketing company to help us set the vision.

Jennifer Smith (10:07):

So, it wasn't just the technologist setting the vision, because I can tell you after listening to those fabulous, fabulous speakers this morning that you probably don't want us creating the brand around what is going to evoke emotion from all of your employees. And so, we had this marketing agency engage with us to create that, which really helped us with the change process as well.

Jim Marous (10:39):

And this is kind of like revisionist history, but if you were to start the process today with you being in charge at the very beginning with no us versus them thing, how long in today's environment, in what you had to do, how long do you think it would take if you were starting … because technology vendors, the way people do things today are so much different.

Jim Marous (11:02):

If you were to start a new organization, same size, same dynamics, how long would that take in today's world roughly?

Jennifer Smith (11:10):

So, I'm going to assume the contract’s signed because everyone knows how hard it is to get through contracts. But I think we would take off 30 to 40% of the time that we took.

Jim Marous (11:22):

So, four to five years.

Jennifer Smith (11:23):

Yeah, I would say five to six-

Jim Marous (11:24):

That sounds like an immense amount, but that shows how much change has happened in the industry, and it was happening during your process.

Jennifer Smith (11:30):

It was.

Jim Marous (11:31):

And as you said, you came in after it started, and some of it was, I would've done it differently. But part of it is going, the world has changed since they started that process and the contract and everything like that. When you look at what you did, what was the hardest part of the core transformation?

Jennifer Smith (11:54):

The hardest part was sustaining the hearts and minds of the organization towards what we're trying to accomplish. Because on any large initiative, in the middle, it gets hard, and the wins aren't as apparent yet because we may not have delivered anything. There's diversion of resources to this major initiative compared to others.

Jennifer Smith (12:21):

So, the hardest part is to remind people this is what we're going to achieve, and we are going to achieve it. And this is what it will mean to our organization, to the industry, and just keep painting that story.

Jim Marous (12:37):

It's interesting because we did a session almost on your kickoff day at your offices, and the one thing that really resonated with me was you are a visionist. Somehow, you took on other roles besides the core transformation at the same time. You built new offices, you built beautiful area and everything you did, but part of what you did was setting the vision for what you wanted to be at the end. That North Star issue.

Jim Marous (13:07):

How important is that communication throughout the organization to get people excited, to keep them excited, and to keep people from bailing? Because the whole element, if any of you are in the process now, part of the negative to all this is that anything you're changing is going to impact the legacy employees that have been in place forever.

Jim Marous (13:28):

And they are going to, in their minds, position this as worst-case scenario saying, “This is going to be replacing my job.” How did you deal with the human aspect internally of making this vision stay alive and people get excited about it?

Jennifer Smith (13:43):

We were really fortunate to have a CEO who spoke about this in every single quarterly, all-employee meeting, and what we were trying to achieve. That didn't happen by accident. We were really intentional about having our entire executive committee engaged us. This is our very first priority.

Jennifer Smith (14:09):

And they always spoke about what we were trying to achieve, and my job was to make sure that we were putting that forward and always talking about it. And what then became really incumbent upon me was for those people who were in the legacy programmers in the mainframe space, for example, who were worried about what happens to my job?

Jennifer Smith (14:39):

And they traditionally were working behind the scenes, behind that black curtain anyhow. And so, always finding the small wins for them and celebrating and lifting them up became more important than it ever had been.

Jennifer Smith (14:56):

And that part wasn't as visible to the rest of the organization because it wasn't the glamorous work that was happening. So, we always had to lift others up. Interestingly, on the program itself, because of the recognition and the celebrations of wins, our turnover rate on that program was 3%, which was extraordinary.

Jim Marous (15:23):

Your turnover employees?

Jennifer Smith (15:24):

Of employees, mm-hmm.

Jim Marous (15:26):

Lower than the organization as a whole?

Jennifer Smith (15:27):

As a whole, yep.

Jim Marous (15:30):

They couldn't get out. The fact they were locked in probably had something to do with that, right?

Jennifer Smith (15:34):

COVID helped, no one was going anywhere for a while. But they saw a purpose in what they were doing, and the way in which that team operated created purpose on an ongoing basis. So, they knew they were contributing to something special for the whole duration.

Jim Marous (15:58):

You mentioned COVID as a side note, but the reality is during this period, you went not only through COVID, but through a mini financial crisis that the world around us did not stay the same. When you're working on a core transformation, you obviously have to have … as you've mentioned more than a couple of times, the CEO that backs the process.

Jim Marous (16:20):

But how do you not get distracted by what the world around us may change, what this core has to do? Or was that part of the vision overall?

Jennifer Smith (16:30):

Well, we always knew what the core was going to have to … that vision never changed around what we had to deliver, but there were some pivots along the way. So, during the regional banking crisis of 2023, with the failure of SVB and First Republic, it impacted us.

Jennifer Smith (16:58):

We were on route to go to market with our first release, and we thought if there's so much as a hiccup in our delivery, customers are going to get spooked. So, it delayed us by about six months. We had earlier on the most fantastic pieces of technology around new core solutions, native cloud solutions were coming on market, and we had to ask ourselves, do we still have … because our solution’s cloud-enabled, but it wasn't native cloud.

Jennifer Smith (17:41):

And we had to ask ourselves, are we still on the right track? And so, we did a full-on case study and debate about what was the right path, and we chose the right path, which was to stay the course. And then during COVID, we lost another six to nine months because we had people who were not able to work.

Jim Marous (18:03):

Now, it’s interesting too because you have a dynamic that you have all these moving parts, you're testing things at the same time, but you also have existing partners. How do you work in a core transformation? You did not pick a partner that was already an existing partner of yours-

Jennifer Smith (18:23):

Correct.

Jim Marous (18:23):

That had any of these technologies. How do you keep your current or existing partners on track as opposed to them mailing it in once they realize that at some point, they're going to be outplaced?

Jennifer Smith (18:37):

Well, that was actually part of the reason we were shifting, is because the investments that the providers we had at the time (and they're not the industry leaders right now), they weren't investing in the product itself. And so, we had customized those solutions for decades.

Jennifer Smith (19:05):

And so, even if they wanted to help us, they wouldn't have been able to help us. And there were a couple that were making a play to deliver a different solution to you, but those particular partners were not seeing core solutions as their primary go forward product strategy.

Jim Marous (19:27):

You referenced the fact that you had customized these things. You're an organization that doesn't buy out of the box. I know that from personal … and you get involved and make it something better than that.

Jim Marous (19:39):

When I met with you and your core provider and talked about the process, your core provider said, “Zion has made us a better company. They took us along for the ride,” and this is important. As you're meeting all the people in the exhibit hall, these partners today expect their financial institution partners to bring ideas to the table that are outside the box.

Jim Marous (20:03):

And most, if not all, will customize based on that because they realize that I could delay what's going to happen, but I cannot do it. How did that work? How did the dialogue between you and your core provider work where you would bring ideas to them saying, “We want this to do this in this way?”

Jennifer Smith (20:26):

The smartest decision we made was choosing the right partner because they were not just providing us a new technology with a company that was going to be sold because they had a really cool technology, and it ends up getting sold in a few years.

Jennifer Smith (20:43):

We knew they were going to be around for decades, and we knew they were investing in that product. Now, we were an early partner for them to the United States, and so even though they're a very large company, we had the support of the most senior people, the executive leaders in that organization.

Jennifer Smith (21:11):

And when we brought something, they incorporated it in. So, we didn't have customizations, they just incorporated it in to their code base. I mean, we have a little bit of customizations of course, but that partnership was one of the keys to our success.

Jim Marous (21:30):

Did you do live testing using real data and real files in the cloud in a way that made you comfortable that when you flipped the switch things were going to work the way they were supposed to?

Jennifer Smith (21:40):

Yeah. We started with synthetic data, and that got us along so far. And then we used real data, and our synthetic data to match our real data. So, it was so important for us to be able to use it. And then we had arrangements where they could use the data as well. It was obfuscated so that they could use real data during the process. Data was the most tricky part of making the conversion successful.

Jim Marous (22:21):

So, during this whole process, you have to meet with regulators, you have to deal with compliance. This is something that not many regulators had seen because there aren't that many examples in the marketplace, certainly during the time you did it.

Jim Marous (22:36):

How did you work with the regulators and compliance to make sure that what you were doing was understood? Because you have to still do your call reports and everything else. How do you work with them?

Jennifer Smith (22:48):

Having compliance at the table from that … so, half my career was in risk and audit roles before I moved into technology and operations. And so, I embrace risk compliance to be right at the seat, have a seat at the table as we went along, and we requested the very best compliance and risk experts to participate.

Jennifer Smith (23:13):

So, they were very skilled in their thinking and discerning risk. So, they were right there with us, and we didn't have any issues around first in market for this provider in the U.S. from a compliance standpoint because we partnered so strongly with our solution provider.

Jennifer Smith (23:39):

Regulators was a little bit of a different story because it was … we're considered a mid-size bank within the regulatory structure with OCC, and for us, the regulators hadn't seen partnerships with a global provider. So, that made them nervous as well, and we had to work through that with them.

Jennifer Smith (24:07):

I mean, now, it'd be no big deal, but then it was a big deal. And then because it's an enormous amount of time and resources it requires a large mind share of your executive team. And so, they were concerned about the amount of change we were taking on, but we still had sub regulators saying, “You've got to address your cores.”

Jennifer Smith (24:40):

And we're like, “We're the only ones who are addressing our cores like you're suggesting.” And then you'd have someone else come, “You have too much change running through your environment.” And so, we were in this constant dance with them, but we kept the regulators very well-informed with what we were doing along the time.

Jim Marous (25:01):

It's something that I think the industry takes for granted, but I think they're finding out more as they're doing digital transformation: the importance of communication.

Jennifer Smith (25:11):

Yeah.

Jim Marous (25:12):

We talk about that, everybody go, “Yeah, sure. We know you got to communicate,” but your organization really took it upon yourselves to make it front and forward to make sure that there was nobody in the organization or outside the organization that had doubt.

Jennifer Smith (25:27):

That's right.

Jim Marous (25:28):

That's important because it keeps the path going forward. What surprises (positive or negative) did you find in that whole communication process with any of the internal or external partners you had to communicate with?

Jennifer Smith (25:44):

Some of the surprises that would pop up during the communication, I start where we failed early on in terms of from the onset, we probably had about 75% full commitment of our executive committee, and didn't recognize there's a couple of places where we didn't have alignment at.

Jennifer Smith (26:11):

And so, that slowed us down some from a communication to our company. So, we had to correct that. That's first and foremost the most critical. That was a really critical partnership because we were also talking to our investors, presenting to our investors during this entire period of what we were doing. So, that messaging always had to be clear and crisp to them.

Jennifer Smith (26:43):

We had to repeat our story, which I shouldn't be surprised, but we had to repeat it so frequently that that could be somewhat surprising. But in terms of misses, major misses in communication because we were so intentional about it, we hit other big potholes, but that wasn't one of them.

Jim Marous (27:09):

So, you mentioned that there were certain areas that were not as onboard at the beginning.

Jennifer Smith (27:15):

Yeah.

Jim Marous (27:16):

Was it something with something that was a Zions-based dynamic or was it an area of financial institution that other organizations are going through core may find you've got to spend extra time with this division?

Jennifer Smith (27:29):

Well, what I would say, spend a lot of time with your CFO. And we've had some changes in our CFO, this was two or three CFOs ago. But because it's so expensive and there will be needs there, unexpressed needs or things may be approved, but there could be some doubts of how the numbers are going to look like over time — I should have invested more time in going much deeper than any other initiative we've ever done with our CFO.

Jennifer Smith (28:08):

And that was short-lived. People shifted their roles and that all sorted itself out. But that's an underappreciated partnership that needs to be one of the strongest.

Jim Marous (28:27):

Interesting because it's one of those, look back, I would've done it differently, but you don't know that because it's not like the budget is going to stay where it is. It keeps on expanding and it was such a long process. Somebody takes a personal interest in the fact that this may be my career online more than anything else.

Jim Marous (28:45):

One thing that really impressed me when I met with you and your team was your team. How did you select who your lieutenants were, the people that were at the key components? And what were you looking for? What made them special?

Jennifer Smith (29:02):

When we started out on the initiative, because we said it was the company's top priority, it required us to act like it was. We took people who are known as being the very best talent from anywhere in the organization that had some expertise that we needed, perhaps in lending, perhaps in deposits, and we put them on the project because we wanted new thinking about how we could solve, reimagine our business processes to make sure we didn't implement what we had before in these new systems. So, first, we had the very best talent in our organization.

Jennifer Smith (29:42):

We hired some people from the outside who were really fantastic as well early on, but we also found that we weren't having the communication within the culture of our organization that we needed. So, we had to make some changes there. So, acting quickly, and it's hard when you have really extraordinary people technically to make some shifts. We had to do that as well.

Jennifer Smith (30:13):

So, the first couple of years were a bit bumpy. Then we brought in people who we had seen perform, we had seen their results from outside of the company into our organization. Talent, the best talent allowed us to move more quickly, address problems before that we hadn't seen.

Jennifer Smith (30:35):

And Jim, you know this, but I am just so proud of it. This team, a technology transformation was over 50% female, and highly unusual. But I think by having that equal parody, we actually had different types of thinking. We had divergent thinkers, we had convergent thinkers. We had people who were really good at rallying the troops and recognizing others and collaborating.

Jennifer Smith (31:12):

And we had others who were like, “We need to do this right now.” Sorry if I offended anyone with how I said that, but they could be really abrupt. But because of the relationships of everyone having a different skill, it resulted in, I think in that low turnover, that commitment around purpose and the outcomes.

Jim Marous (31:31):

The energy.

Jennifer Smith (31:32):

The energy.

Jim Marous (31:34):

If you had asked me how many were female, I would've said 75% from the ones I met, but they were the most rallying, the most enthusiastic. And it's interesting because you look at the whole gender issue, we scuff over that sometimes and we can go, that's a whole topic in of itself.

Jim Marous (31:51):

But I think the empathy, the difference between male and female in the business place, the emotion, you need that in something that could get too technical. I mean, the reality is it's the personality as much as there’s technical skills because personality will keep you going, which is important.

Jim Marous (32:11):

When you look at where you are today, what has that transformation done for Zions Bank that positions you for tomorrow?

Jennifer Smith (32:25):

So, one, we are now entering growth markets where we expect that we're going to be able to acquire banks at a rate that we haven't seen in, okay, well over a decade. And so, we have the ability to move those banks into our environment a lot faster than we did before. We just completed the conversions of an acquisition we announced in September of last year. That's been completed. We've been able to-

Jim Marous (33:00):

Wait, what? September of last year and it’s completed?

Jennifer Smith (33:03):

It's completed, yeah.

Jim Marous (33:05):

Kudos to that.

Jennifer Smith (33:05):

Yeah, we were able to move pretty quickly on that, and we're going to move more quickly on the next one because we had to learn a lot because we hadn't done a conversion for a while. So, we're going to move faster next time. That has helped us.

Jennifer Smith (33:19):

We also … because we have a real-time processing capabilities, now we have our data in a state that … I mean, we migrated over 140 million records, so we had to normalize all that data, and it's in our data warehouses, and so it's in such a great state. That positions us well for AI, gen AI, and then we can deliver to new features and functionalities about 40% faster.

Jim Marous (33:52):

What's interesting is a lot of organizations look at resilience being a risk and fraud issue, which is all that important. However, in meeting with your team, the resilience is much broader than that. It's the ability to acquire a firm very quickly at a time when that gives you a strategic and financial advantage. It's the ability to completely transform your organization as generative AI happened at really the tail end of this whole transformation.

Jim Marous (34:22):

But you built it in such a way that while other organizations may struggle to bring the aspects, the potential of generative AI, but I thought one thing that was really interesting: your testing capabilities where in the past, if you test anything broader than one product, it would be very difficult. But now, you could actually create a product almost in an instant.

Jim Marous (34:46):

What does that mean going forward for an organization? And is this transformation a continuous evolution where you're rolling upon yourselves as opposed to you're keeping it as it is?

Jennifer Smith (35:00):

Yeah, we're in this continuum because there’s transformation that's ongoing now because part of the vision was to be a lot more agile, and it's hard to be agile with a mainframe that's a core that sits on a mainframe.

Jennifer Smith (35:16):

And so, our ability to be highly relevant in the marketplace, no one would really think that your core plays that type of role. But we can get new products out to market if we desire like new deposit products within a few weeks. If this was a direction, we’re going to test it and come back — no, we haven't done that, but those are the things that we could do versus investing a year to bring something to market, we can move a lot more quickly.

Jennifer Smith (35:51):

So, there's a test and learn capability at play. The other element that's at play is because we have a partner that invests so heavily in R&D, they're bringing gen AI capabilities into the core, which is unusual and some of the benefits that we see on the horizon.

Jim Marous (36:13):

So, the end game: when you look at the financial impact and all of it hasn't played out yet — but how do you foresee this impacting the financial bottom line of Zion Bank as you look forward from what you’re used to invest in, what you're doing now, how you're positioning new products, things of this nature.

Jim Marous (36:32):

Has there been any projection as to … and I'm not asking you for specific numbers, we can't go there. But the reality is, do you see this as a strong positive? Because a lot of the things that happened during your transformation impacted your organization more than organizations that were smaller and larger. It wasn't a Zions issue, the middle market got killed.

Jim Marous (36:53):

Is this positioned so that future uncertain situations that are out of our realm of comprehension right now, it's going to put you in a better position financially to be resilient that way?

Jennifer Smith (37:06):

It's a good question, and one our CFO would tell me not to answer. So, I'll answer it in a little bit a way that I hope is helpful. One is that we see a competitive advantage for us going forward in that every bank is going to have to do this at some point. You just can't live in these mainframe centric worlds.

Jennifer Smith (37:31):

And as our story demonstrates, they'll go a lot faster, I'm sure. But it is a huge investment of time, of attention, and we don't have that burden on us anymore. We were running about 50% of our investments technology, new investments were in this space — that's freed up now for us to bring new innovations to the marketplace where our competitors may be kicking the can down the trail sum or they're investing in this. And so, it positions us in a different way than our competitors.

Jim Marous (38:16):

I think it's interesting because the disadvantage that I see of middle market financial institutions, even some small, it's number one, leadership. You had that in place, that helped tremendously. More importantly, though, you've done the hardest job that there is out there, that you won't have to do it again in the concept of what you did.

Jim Marous (38:39):

I think what's also important when you look at an industry that's going to have to continually leverage the financial capabilities and build into a bigger number because you need to have the efficiency, but also be able to do things in a way that allows you to change immediately.

Jim Marous (38:56):

When we talk about financial wellness, if you talk just about a consumer product, you can create those types of products so much quicker and support them in a way that rolls up to the whole organization.

Jim Marous (39:09):

I think it's interesting, again, as an observer, you had the hardest road because of the size of the organization. I think there's all kinds of challenges that even small organizations can work faster and all kinds of different issues. When you look back, what would you have done differently?

Jennifer Smith (39:29):

So, I mentioned a few of them already, but the other more specific changes I would have made is I would've ensured some of our practices were more mature going into it. Our automated testing, we learned how to be really good at automated testing throughout the journey. We would've gone a lot faster if we had that capability upfront.

Jennifer Smith (39:57):

Enterprise architecture is another area that we found ourselves maturing a lot as we went along. We would've been in a better position had we had that capability up front. There were other types of changes looking forward, being able to say, “This could be a bottleneck in a couple of years if we don't address this now.”

Jennifer Smith (40:24):

So, we had to assume some technical debt that I would rather have not have assumed just in order to keep us moving forward at the pace that we wanted to. But with more foresight, we would've caught that. So, mature technology management practices as a foundation will really help organizations move at a nice speed, keep their risk down.

Jim Marous (40:51):

And finally, we have people here that are probably in the room because they're going through core transformation. There will be a lot of people listening to the podcasts in the same reason.

Jennifer Smith (41:02):

Yeah.

Jim Marous (41:03):

One suggestion that you would give to people that are going to start the process, or if we took Jennifer out and put her in a new institution, what's the suggestion you’d give to people saying, “Make sure you get this right?”

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Jennifer Smith (41:19):

Vision of why are we doing this? And the buy-in from every single stakeholder, and being able for that vision to touch the hearts and the minds of all employees, and do not all have the very best talent.

Jennifer Smith (41:43):

People who have done this kind of work before, it is unlike anything that we had ever experienced. And so, having people who had thought through problems differently was something that I would highly suggest for anyone who's attempting this.

Jim Marous (42:05):

Jennifer, thank you again. We've done this in a very short version before, but I really appreciate your energy, your time, and your experience. And I think a lot of organizations can learn from you, but I think you don't do it to yourself — but I think who you are as a leader is something that we might underestimate too, because I think the vision, the personality, the passion for what you are going to achieve against pretty insane odds because every day you're getting hit by another wave, and yet you got to do that ropes course, get to the next rope every day. But thank you so much for being on the show. Appreciate that.

Jennifer Smith (42:45):

Thank you, Jim. Appreciate it.

Jim Marous (42:45):

Thank you.

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