How Ally Bank is Using AI to Reshape Financial Services

[Music Playing]

Jim Marous (00:12):

This is the first of this year's Executive Leadership series. Last year we interviewed six different individuals from the financial services industry about their transformation. Very candid, very unscripted, very dialogue-based. This year's going to be the same except we have eight guests.

Jim Marous (00:32):

Our first guest from Ally, one of the most progressive financial institutions in the banking industry, also, one of the first that I really saw integrating AI and generative AI within their banking system. They built a very early relationship with Microsoft, which gave them a little bit of a head start.

Jim Marous (00:53):

Our guest today was on my podcast about a year ago and talked about that partnership, we're going to take it to the next level now and talk about what's next. So, I’d like to introduce my guest today, Sathish.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (01:14):

I love it.

Jim Marous (01:16):

Very good.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (01:19):

Right after Kevin O'Leary.

Jim Marous (01:21):

It's a hard act to follow, exactly.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (01:23):

What a great presentation.

Jim Marous (01:25):

I do like the kicks. I was coming close to wearing my red, black, and white ones today, but I couldn't get into the change room quick enough.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (01:32):

Thank you.

Jim Marous (01:33):

We've talked before and I think one of the most interesting dynamics of what you do is having to look forward at the implementation and integration of AI within the Ally Bank ecosystem, both on the customer side, but also back office.

Jim Marous (01:49):

Can you talk a little bit about the beginning of that journey? Because it's not that long, even though it probably seems like years and years for you and what brought on your integration with Microsoft and what you've done in the last few years.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (02:02):

First of all, congratulations on a phenomenal event. This is my first time here, and I can feel the energy. Thank you for having me, Jim.

Jim Marous (02:10):

Thank you.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (02:11):

Just for people that don't know, Ally was started right after the worst financial crisis the country has ever seen in 2008. We are the largest direct to consumer digital bank in the U.S. So, the reason we started was not because consumers needed a bank, they needed a better bank. So, from day one, transformation and making it better has been in our DNA.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (02:42):

So, when I started with Ally five years ago, I was thrilled to be leading technology and product in an all-digital platform. And Ally had invested in the foundational capabilities, but looking at what is the next thing to do is what led to this transformation that we started. And as you see, consumers are always looking for magic from any institution that they interact with.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (03:15):

So, looking back, it would be hard to believe that five years ago, we were still running on mainframes. We still had network that was plug and play hardware-enabled. We had six different apps. For a digital bank, we had six different apps. Consumers were kind enough, we still had a high retention, consumers were highly satisfied, but the moment of truth was fast approaching and COVID hit, and it accelerated everything.

Jim Marous (03:52):

It's interesting because you talk about your journey at Ally, and it's relatively short but suffice to say, a lot has happened since you joined. When you started at Ally, generative AI was not yet here, AI was usually used for fraud and risk more than anything else in the banking world. What was your mission when you joined Ally from a standpoint of what you personally wanted to achieve for your organization?

Sathish Muthukrishnan (04:25):

The intent behind launching what we call a technology strategy was to make sure that technology will continue to be relevant in an all-digital bank, but more importantly, can we create the differentiation and drive significant business outcomes. For that to happen, our technology strategy had to integrate with business strategy. So, we took a step back and said, “What can we do to achieve that?” And we categorized into six different pillars.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (05:00):

You know, physical bank, people walk in, they interact with people, have a discussion, and you start to establish trust and relationship. But in a digital bank, you don't talk to people. The best way to establish relationship is to give consistency, is to make sure you meet your customer's expectations, more importantly, you protect their data. So, security became our first critical pillar.

Jim Marous (05:29):

Because your brand can break down immediately.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (05:31):

Exactly, exactly.

Jim Marous (05:31):

If you break the cardinal rule of “don't mess with my data.”

Sathish Muthukrishnan (05:36):

That is exactly right, that's exactly right. I can't ask somebody to go into a branch and ask them to bank. So, so at all costs, I had to protect my bank so security became our first transformational pillar.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (05:51):

The second thing that we forced ourselves to do, what happens if you have your entire organization focusing on security? You can clamp them down; you can mitigate innovation. So, we said we want to be the best bank that offers the best and differentiated experiences for our consumers.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (06:12):

So, our second pillar was, how can I drive tremendous experiences? And the third pillar is how do I know my experience is working? That's when data analytics came in. Measure what consumers do, but more importantly, measure what they don't do.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (06:31):

Being a digital bank, I know exactly where the consumers are perusing, where they're dropping off, where they're spending more time, where my experiences are kludgy, and how can I simplify that. So, data analytics critically helped.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (06:47):

So, now, I've talked through three pillars: how do I enable this pillars? I need to transform where all of these experiences run. So, in came our operational pillar, migrating to cloud, driving automation, driving consistency in how we develop and deploy code.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (07:09):

And then we said all of this for it to be true, I need to preserve my culture, and more importantly, I need to take care of my talent. So, that laid the pillars, those pillars laid the foundation for where we started our transformation and where we are going right now.

Jim Marous (07:29):

If you're saying simply, what would be your North Star at Ally today? Because you heard me this morning, and I talked about the fact that one of the mistakes people are making right now is really not knowing what their specific destination has to be, which can change over time, but very much like a GPS system. If you don't know your destination specifically, you may get there, you may not, but it's left up to chance. What is different about the way that Ally has defined your North Star?

Sathish Muthukrishnan (08:01):

My North Star is very simple. I want every consumer of Ally to believe and experience as if they're our only customer. It's very easy to say, extremely difficult to achieve. Because what am I fighting against? Consumers are expecting magic as I said earlier, their bar for experience is the last best experience they had anywhere, not just with banking.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (08:29):

You could have had your best experience shopping at Amazon, flagging an Uber, booking a restaurant, or walking into a restaurant and having a meal. Now, when you're doing banking after that, they come in with the mindset of, "I am expecting the same experience from the bank as I had my last time." So, for me to achieve that, my North Star is for my every consumer to behave and believe that they're our only customer.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (08:57):

Now, to achieve that is where we have to unpack what we achieve through our transformation. Having all our applications on cloud, now we have about 75% of our applications running on cloud, having all our data in a single data warehouse that is cloud enabled, I have about 95% of the enterprise data in the cloud.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (09:17):

What that allows me to do is learn from consumer behaviors, learn and understand what they're expecting, constantly allow us to get better every day, but have the advantage of applications running on cloud and be able to create those experiences real time so my consumers think that they are our only consumer.

Jim Marous (09:40):

So, there are other digital banks out there, but there's also like 95% of the people here, digital plus locational. How do you at Ally compete against or transform to make it so you have a humanized banking experience in a digital world? Because as we know, once COVID came, we all tried to do it better. But as you mentioned, the differentiation is how do I differentiate without emphasizing the benefits that maybe a dual network has?

Sathish Muthukrishnan (10:20):

Isn't that the challenge? Sometimes you feel like, "Oh God, if I had my consumer in front of me, I can explain what's going on. I can actually explain why they have to go through 40 pages of filling out this application before I even make a decision." But I believe our digital footprint is the advantage that we own.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (10:42):

I'll give you an example. So, in the peak of COVID, we saw that our consumers were depressed, and we wanted to offer them assistance. So, anybody that had an auto loan, we offered them to defer their payments for six months.

Jim Marous (11:01):

I know that.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (11:04):

Thank you for being our customer. Now, you can't do that just by sending them an email, you have to rewrite the contract. My team was able to build and deploy something that was 100% digital, where the consumers came in, looked at the offer and said, "This is what I expect my financial institution to do." So, they were able to read the contract digitally, and it allowed them to defer their auto loan for six months.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (11:35):

Compare that to what the other institutions did. They wanted to help out the customers, they didn't have a digital solution, but they offered another solution, which is, can you call us, and we will make sure we'll defer it. You call and you're waiting for days to talk to somebody, so it's not an ideal situation. The intent is right, but the execution is missing.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (11:59):

Now, what we found out was the consumers that took the deferral never deferred their payments. They liked the plan B, but they still wanted to continue making the payments for the bank. So, it was a tremendous win-win for us, showing up for our customers when they needed us most, and then you're driving the loyalty with our consumers.

Jim Marous (12:24):

So, a lot of your business starts, if I'm not mistaken, from the lending side, and you have since brought in more deposits services and you don't push those, you offer those on a regular basis based on transactions. I mentioned to you that once we set up this interview, I started saving all my Ally emails, but they're all very different from what I get from my traditional financial institutions.

Jim Marous (12:52):

Number one, they are more frequent, number two, they are highly targeted; number three, they refer to what I already have with you and talk about what could service me in the future, and there's always an offer of some nature. That sounds like the old pushing out things all the time, but it never feels like that.

Jim Marous (13:15):

How do you build that type of communication where you bring all this data together in such a way that it's not selling, it seems like a mentality that says, “We're going to try to make it so that you improve,” you're taking a vested interest in my financial wellness. What is the method that that goes about? Does it start with data or start with communication or a mixture of both?

Sathish Muthukrishnan (13:41):

We have an ambition. We have an ambition to be your best financial ally in the nation. How do we bring that ambition to life, is by not giving you banking speak. Even if you go through our products and then consumer products to the experiences we offer, there is not a lot of TNCs. And I have to thank my colleague Andrea Brimmer, our CMO.

Jim Marous (14:09):

She’s been a guest on the podcast.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (14:12):

A phenomenal human and she simplifies the complex like nobody else does. And she forces and partners with technology to make sure that we bring that to life through the experiences that my team, digital team is building.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (14:26):

The advantage that I have is the product team that dreams about the features, the UI/UX team that designs the experience and the technology team that builds it all part of the same technology organization. So, we challenge each other to make sure we simplify the experience that our marketing teams dream up, and what they dream up is, “How can I make this as simple as possible?”

Sathish Muthukrishnan (14:56):

You said we start many of our relationship through lending, and that is because we are one of the nation's largest auto loan producers in the country. We do about $45 billion a year, have about 21,000 U.S. car dealerships that we have a relationship with.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (15:18):

We also see a ton of consumers coming to us to open regular banking products, whether that is savings, CDs, et cetera. We also have an invest platform. So, we took it upon ourselves to say, “What could be the minimum number of clicks for our deposit customers to open an invest account?” And I think we spoke about it when we had our first podcast, and we called it one click account opening.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (15:46):

So, if I already know you as a consumer, and if you have shown intention to invest and build your wealth, can I open your invest account through one click? And that was a challenge that we took on, and 90% of our invest customers come from our bank deposit customers, so it's a subset of the bank customers that come in. We said one click, but for FINRA regulations, we had to go through three pages, but it still was way better than four clicks.

Jim Marous (16:18):

Aww, what's interesting, I got to think about this — that it’s better than the numbers that getting an Apple card was, which I thought was the epitome of customer experience because they had already pre-filled nine-tenths of it. They never knew me, but they pre-filled it, and they gave me the approval almost immediately. But four clicks, I don't think you can get lower than that with government regulations.

Jim Marous (16:44):

Speaking of government regulations, you talk about internally and Andrea and what she does and her team does from a requirement of, we got to get into this, this, this — how do you deal with what is perceived to be the compliance issues that everybody has to deal with? Because obviously, you have the ability to view compliance issues in a different way.

Jim Marous (17:05):

Maybe it's bringing compliance in the front end of the game, which we've talked about that. But on top of that, viewing things from a risk management as opposed to risk avoidance perspective, not putting as many as you can, not making it so nobody can read it.

Jim Marous (17:21):

Yes, we all screen, but the reality is you don't have to do that with yours. How do you get it down and stay within what your organization believes to be compliant?

Sathish Muthukrishnan (17:34):

It was hard work. We had to make it systemic. So, to make it systemic, we created our own technology operating model, we call it Ally's Technology Operating Model short for ATOM. So, we internally fondly call it as ATOM, and that is where we embedded our compliance folks with our story writing folks.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (18:01):

It was such a subtle difference when you engage compliance and risk folks to changing their mindset and saying, "I want you to be a part of writing the requirements." So, you're not coming after and telling me what I did wrong, now you're actually guiding me, making me go take the right direction.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (18:27):

And we created a small, but mighty group within my UI/UX organization. What they do is they take the experience. One part of it is compliance making sure we are building the right code. The second part of it is building out the experiences and they work with our legal compliance and risk folks. They take the user experience before it is being built and coded, and walk through our control folks to say, “This is what we are trying to build.”

Sathish Muthukrishnan (18:58):

Now, in some instances, we have north of 60 people sitting there opining on the user experience. Ultimately, the compliance risk and legal folks are also humans, they also want to contribute to the betterment of the bank.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (19:13):

And we have to say, "Okay, this is the business folks and the marketing folks that tell us what the UI/UX should be. I want you to tell me the compliance requirements that are required to overlay this, overlay this." So, there is a little bit of ground setting that happens that you have to overcome, but that's a small hurdle to overcome as opposed to building something and that-

Jim Marous (19:38):

And having it destructed.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (19:40):

Yes, exactly.

Jim Marous (19:41):

It's interesting, if anybody's seen or heard any of my podcast, watch my podcast, see me just this morning even talking about it. If you have compliance (I worked in marketing virtually my whole life in some way or another) — if you let compliance come into the end, they will find something wrong. If you bring them in the beginning and have them part of the solution and vested in the solution, they will be your ally.

Jim Marous (20:08):

I'll put another plug in for you, but it's the biggest thing that can get in the way is the unwinding of thought process, and it's destructive to the culture because it gives them a bad name when they may not deserve it, but even worse, it makes it so that people feel at risk to voice what they'd like to see.

Jim Marous (20:27):

I mean, Andrea would be deflated if she didn't have the ability to think this was going to get through. But she also, I know from interviewing her, she has enough flexibility in her mindset that says, "I'm not steadfast, I'm not saying this way or the highway, but the reality is it's that working together."

Jim Marous (20:45):

So, we bring up to November of 2022, generative AI gets introduced to the public, but you are already working with Microsoft.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (20:54):

Yes. Yeah.

Jim Marous (20:55):

What let you know that this was going to be one of the biggest changes you had seen at Ally ever since the implementation of data and AI within Ally was, what made you move that way and what's kept you on that path?

Sathish Muthukrishnan (21:13):

It's the pursuit of what is next. We as a technology team, we're significantly empowered to go do what is right for the future of the company. One of the things that I love about Ally, there is several things. The focus on long-term strategy and the effort, intent, investment and execution against that long-term strategy never waivers.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (21:42):

So, as I talked about, we had our cloud strategy, we had our data in the cloud warehouse, and at that time, beginning of 2022, I had requested to go completely modify our network because we have tremendous amount of data, our applications are running on cloud, I can have somebody carrying this data in a wheelhouse, like you need to be software enabled. So, we redefined our network.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (22:10):

When we did that, we were saying, "What else could we do?" And frankly speaking, we were thinking about AI and we had launched our chat assistant called Ally Assist. Yet another example of Ally doing it right, not giving it a proper name, but letting our consumers know, this is a chat bot and you can chat with this chat bot. And if we can't answer your question, we'll seamlessly transfer you to a live person, which we have 24 by 7 live support in the U.S.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (22:42):

So, as we were thinking about it, all of a sudden, it coincides with our board meeting. One of the board members literally that morning is like, "Did you hear about ChatGPT?" And I'm like, "I'm preparing for the board presentation, I haven't heard about ChatGPT."

Jim Marous (22:57):

You're supposed to know this already.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (23:00):

And then one thing led to the other, and I'm like, "Oh my God, this is …" You see something and you're like, "This is something that I have to experiment." Just to give a little bit of context, we also have what we call an Ally Technology Lab. The goal of Ally Technology Lab, it's a simple three-part execution.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (23:22):

One is you need to be experimenting in a new technology and that new technology has to have a relevant business consumer outcome and then you have to have a stakeholder supporting you from outside of tech. So, that was the goal of the Ally Tech Lab.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (23:38):

And I asked them, "Okay, this is a newer technology, can we start experimenting with it?" And we saw this moving really fast, really fast. And then we saw the Microsoft investment in OpenAI and we said, "We need to go sit in Seattle." So, my entire leadership team and I, in November 2020 (not the ideal time to visit Seattle when it's really cold), we went there for three days, sat with Amazon, sat with Microsoft, and started asking questions.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (24:14):

At that time, now they've all caught up, I felt like Microsoft was way ahead of their game, and I'll tell you what those three days of investment helped me do. I came back to the organization and said, "We need to build something using generative AI, but I see this fast-evolving because Amazon has a different roadmap versus what Microsoft has.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (24:38):

So, collectively, as a leadership team, we decided to create what we call Ally AI because what we knew then was technology is fast-evolving, but the narrative is, I am scared of you sending data to any LLM because everybody in the world would know. So, to avoid those conversations, we built an AI platform that had the ability to connect to an external LLM, but it did a number of things.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (25:09):

It would remove PII, it would keep track of all of the transactions going in and out, the ability to rehydrate PII, so it'll have the context for Ally consumers that are using it, very simple. We built it in two months.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (25:24):

Going back to my trip to Microsoft, as we were building and showcasing this, we now had to go write a contract. Imagine two corporations writing a contract, Ally, it's a new contract to use LLMs and Microsoft is like, "We are not changing our corporate contract."

Sathish Muthukrishnan (25:42):

But leaning in on those conversations and the investment we made over those three days, they were able to accommodate several of the red line that my legal team did, and we were able to move fast. And by beginning of 2023, we had a use case that was working on Ally AI using 3.5 GPT running on our own private VPN on Azure.

Jim Marous (26:09):

It's interesting because in our discussion a year, year and a half ago, it became very clear that you were educating Microsoft as well as Microsoft educating you. They had to learn more about banking, they wanted to be in the banking industry, you wanted open AI or at least a generate AI platform. But we've been now two and a half years, three years into the game, there's a lot of providers out there. Do you use alternative providers as well to build this better platform in your Ally AI?

Sathish Muthukrishnan (26:45):

Yeah. I'm telling you, if I can go back and revalidate, one of the decisions we made was to build Ally AI. Not only it has the ability to API into 3.5 — all the way from FLAN to cloud to Bedrock, we have several LLMs that are connected to the single platform. And not only are we able to pick and choose the right fit LLM depending on the use case, now I can combine answers from several LLMs and pick what is best for Ally.

Jim Marous (27:17):

For the purpose.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (27:18):

For the purpose. Fit for purpose.

Jim Marous (27:19):

Some are much better at one element than they are at others. Some are better back-office providers, some are better communication providers.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (27:25):

That's exactly right. Our content creation in LLM is different from what I use for code generation, and that is different for what I use for risk assessment. So, several use cases using several different models.

Jim Marous (27:41):

So, you are on the cutting edge/leading edge of what's going on. Who do you look at or what do you look at to keep you ahead of the game personally and your team ahead of the game? Because it's not like most of us, including myself, that are learning from the leaders. You have that leading spot and there's not necessarily somebody out there that is ahead of you, you're trying to catch up with, you're trying to be the leader. Where do you look to get your inspiration on the what's next?

Sathish Muthukrishnan (28:15):

I'll categorize it into two things. One is executing and the other one is experimenting. I get a lot of inspiration from what we are experimenting with. What do we have to experiment with? We have to experiment with the problems that everybody across the globe says, “It's extremely difficult to solve, you cannot solve it, or the models are too expensive, or the models are too complicated.”

Sathish Muthukrishnan (28:45):

Because what do we know? Six months from now, that model is going to be a hundred percent less expensive, it's going to advance so much faster that the problem that I am saying it cannot be solved, you will have a way to solve it. So, that gives me a lot of inspiration and we are looking at several complex problems that we would love to solve.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (29:09):

Now, who do I look at? I look at all of the big banks. Obviously, I mean, look at what Chase is doing, look at what Bank of America has done and Wells Fargo has done — they have advanced their gen AI journey, they've rolled out gen AI to several of their employees as is some of these fintechs.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (29:33):

What do we know right now is a company with less than 20 people can quickly build something and can very quickly have a hundred million-dollar ARR, and they're working harder than you to come and compete.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (29:51):

So, if all of these fintechs, went and did a list of, let me look at all of these big corporations that are not performing well and have a poor net promoter score. A poor net promoter score generally says, "I don't like the product that you're offering."

Sathish Muthukrishnan (30:07):

And if they said, "How can I use AI to restart this business from ground up?” I guarantee you somebody's looking at it so that is my fear. I go back and look at how can I passionately re-underwrite what Ally does starting with AI, and see how I can beat some of these fintechs coming my way, so how do I get my insight? I go sit with all of these venture funds and I talk to them and say, "Where is your money going?"

Jim Marous (30:36):

I love it, I love it.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (30:38):

So, they tell me-

Jim Marous (30:39):

Where do I have to be next?

Sathish Muthukrishnan (30:40):

Yes. So, they tell me and bring me all these companies that they're investing in. And you know what I heard as an amazing nugget, is in the history of investing, they haven't seen as many companies rise to profitability in less than six months as they're seeing right now. And every one of those companies is working on something that AI is using to solve a critical problem for the consumers.

Jim Marous (31:06):

Several nuggets in that sentence response. One of them is, you aren't asking AI to tell me how do I get better, the only one; the one is what am I doing wrong that I need to improve upon?

Sathish Muthukrishnan (31:20):

Correct.

Jim Marous (31:21):

I interviewed an author once that was combining a book with multiple authors as part of that, and instead of asking AI, how can I improve each one of these chapters, he asked, “In each chapter, what is one flaw in this chapter that people will go against?” In other words, “What's wrong with this chapter?”

Jim Marous (31:42):

A complete reverse of what we were used to doing. This was two years ago, we did the interview, but it was interesting because you go, if you take the reverse, you get completely different answers: how do I improve what I'm doing? Then use what you're doing now as the foundation as opposed to what am I doing wrong by my net promoter score?

Jim Marous (31:58):

What's also interesting, you talk more and more about not just the experience from a standpoint of ease and simplicity, but we're hearing more and more about the need to generate engagement. I see it in how you're communicating to me, it's a whole lot different than it was when I got the loan seven years ago.

Jim Marous (32:17):

The reality is it seems like you're pushing for the ongoing dialogue that we could have why? What is the end game of that? I know it's not the sale by itself, it's more than that. But what is that end game of that engagement that goes beyond simply a good easy-to-use app?

Sathish Muthukrishnan (32:37):

What a great question. If we do a thought experiment right now, what is the most personal thing to anybody? It is their finance, and finance drives emotiveness. It makes you happy, it makes you sad, it makes you anxious. And if our ambition is to become the best financial ally for you, it can be transactional. It cannot be transactional, it has to be relationship-based. I need to understand in most cases, anticipate why you would come to Ally.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (33:15):

So, I'll give you a simple example. We rolled out what we call savings buckets. Savings buckets is the old school, I have an envelope, I'm saving money, I have multiple envelopes, I'm saving money. It's your deposit account and then it has multiple savings buckets. It's a very simple mindset shift of you are allowed to name your own bucket.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (33:43):

It could be I am saving to buy a pet, or I'm saving to go on my honeymoon. What we have found is people save twice as much as they normally do when they have a savings bucket, which if I translate into emotiveness, we are encouraging and influencing our consumers to achieve their goals twice as fast. What is better than that?

Sathish Muthukrishnan (34:12):

I mean, banking is a noble profession and if I can enable my consumers, my customers to achieve their goals twice as fast, and if technology is the tool that is enabling it, and I'm just giving you one simple example, what is wrong in creating this continuous communication that continues to add value, that showcases what your bank can do to be your best financial ally.

Jim Marous (34:37):

So, we're at a time right now in the economy and in the world, where fear is driving a lot of things. You talked about the aspirational things, I talked earlier this morning about the fact that I had my biggest savings account ever, but it was built with Acorns where little bits of money were taken out every month in different ways, almost like Christmas Club plus the Bank of America roundup.

Jim Marous (34:59):

And it generated the highest savings account I'd ever had. Not real proud of the fact that it was my highest, but I saw that as being aspirational. Today, there's a lot of fear in the marketplace. There's credit that's going off the charts, people are having to pay it to download. How does Ally work on that side to actually encourage or work with a customer on their financial wellness journey to unwind challenges that they're facing?

Sathish Muthukrishnan (35:25):

I mean, ultimately, we are a business, we have to be because we are investing our shareholders' money, we are answerable to our investors, so we need to be responsible in terms of lending money. But what we have done is, we have this platform called Conversationally, where we are writing financial articles to educate consumers on how can you be better at credits.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (35:55):

We have rolled out a product that is called Plans that essentially, tells you how you can pay down your debt across your multiple accounts that you have, and we are constantly educating them. And we found that this requires a lot of text and consumers don't have a lot of patience in reading through it.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (36:15):

In comes gen AI. What we did was we simply took that entire article and we created a five to six-line bullet of this is what the article is talking about and it was done by generative AI, if you like it, you can click it. We see significant increase in engagement and the amount of time that they're spending because they now know what the article is going to provide. That's a subtle way of-

Jim Marous (36:41):

If you click to expand it, then.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (36:42):

That's exactly right. It's a very subtle way of educating our consumers in driving responsible financial behaviors.

Jim Marous (36:52):

So, we're running out of time, what's next? Without giving away any trade secrets, but what do you see maybe in the industry or at Ally, where do we go from here?

Sathish Muthukrishnan (37:04):

I'll tell you, let me start with the industry. I feel like what a time to be alive. You see opportunities everywhere, you see technology that'll help break down those problems and build solutions for your consumers. Your consumers are engaging with your platforms and their expectations are constantly improving, creating challenges for your teams to go solve for it.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (37:30):

As I said before, if you open your mind and if you start seeing some of the roadblocks that are creating friction in your experiences, and you start to question yourself, “Why do they exist? How can I go solve them?” (And I keep this in the experimentation bucket) — and solve the hard problems, what is going to happen is your brand is going to become more relevant to the consumers. You are going to become the next best experience that they ever felt, and that's going to deepen the relationship. And ultimately, they'll show up in business results. So, what a time to be alive.

Jim Marous (38:12):

It is interesting because there's only upside really. I mean, we take care of the downside, we get ourselves in the way all the time with regard to excuses and things that are going on.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (38:23):

Maybe I'll just quickly add, the founder of Anthropic, he had in one of his blogs, he had written a big blog but ultimately, when I was thinking through it and simplifying it, all it said was, "You now have access to a world of geniuses in a data center that you can enable through an API."

Sathish Muthukrishnan (38:44):

And that world of geniuses can actually help you solve problems that you never had access to before. You don't need to hire thousands of thousands of people. With a small team, you have access to this world of genius, it's called generative AI. And you can ask and ask the help, like you said, even ask it to define the problem as well as help you solve the problem.

Jim Marous (39:08):

That's a takeaway for the audience, the people who are live in the podcast. I think one of the things to really embrace here is you mentioned earlier that you can be a very small 25-person shop and replicate where Ally is today.

Jim Marous (39:25):

Scary easy. It keeps you up at night because you go, “How do I keep ahead of the sheriff because the sheriff is coming after us?” How do you build the brand so that people realize you're on their side, you're their ally — great name to have, you've leveraged it very well. How do you get people engaged on an ongoing basis so they feel connected to who you are and they feel like you're connected with them?

[Music Playing]

Jim Marous (39:55):

Way ahead of the game, but not unachievable especially if you're a smaller organization who can be nimble. I cannot say this enough, that the organizations are doing best are the largest, and in many cases the smallest. And we have a lot of organizations in this room today and in the conference of various sizes, but the hurdle appears massive. But it takes a culture, it takes leadership and it takes a knowing your North Star and what you want it to achieve so that every day when you sign into work, you're working towards that goal.

Jim Marous (40:33):

Sathish, thank you again for being on the show.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (40:36):

Thank you.

Jim Marous (40:37):

This is a gentleman who knows what he's doing, but he's a great person to because he breaks it down. I do encourage everybody to look in the Ally app. It's not hard to break down how they do what they do, and to understand what sets them apart. Great time. Thank you very much.

Sathish Muthukrishnan (40:56):

Thank you, such a pleasure. Thank you, Jim.