PHOENIX, Ariz. — Innovation is like the Golden Gate Bridge – you can’t just paint it once and say you’re finished. You need to keep painting, Katherine McGee, head of digital product management, at Wells Fargo Virtual Channels, said yesterday at the CBA Live conference here.
The bank is not just “innovative for innovation’s sake,” but rather focuses on how innovation can meet consumer needs, McGee said.
“What technology can we bring to bear, and solve problems in new ways that the customer wouldn’t expect,” she said. “The ecosystem of how we communicate has evolved and changed.”
Wells Fargo studies innovation in a variety of ways, including customer research, a startup accelerator, and a lab dedicated to experimenting with technology such as what functions the company wants to “bring to life” on the Apple Watch.
“For example, we noticed that [on average] customers log in 15 times per month to check their balance,” McGee said. So the company implemented Fast Look, which allows customers to see their balance before they log into their account.
Apart from Wells Fargo’s experimental lab, the company asks customers to volunteer to keep journals on how they are managing their financial lives, and is constantly looking at that data.
“You have to do all of these things,” McGee said. “You can’t just say: ‘We have a lab, and we’re done.’”
