Chase Escalates The War For Talent in Retail Banking

In an interview on the podcast, Banking Transformed, Daniel Schreiber, CEO of Lemonade Insurance stated, “The biggest threat to digital transformation is legacy leadership.” Research by the Digital Banking Report reinforces this statement, where financial institutions of all sizes ranked the lack of digital talent and “old-school” leadership as major barriers to digital banking transformation success.

In response to the need for digitally astute leadership that is in very short supply, there have been flurry of talent poaching that is relatively uncommon in retail banking. In March, Omer Ismail and David Stark, two key executives at Marcus by Goldman Sachs, joined Walmart’s fintech startup. The departure of Ismail was surprising because he was considered the chief architect of the consumer business at Marcus, and because he had just been named to head Goldman’s consumer bank only three months prior. It is believed that the experience of both of these executives in starting a fintech from scratch, and their history of building credit card partnerships with Apple and General Motors, was also coveted by Walmart.

One of the overarching reasons for escalating poaching of talent could be that organizations no longer need to limit recruiting to areas where they have physical locations. With more and more firms embracing a future of remote work, banks, credit unions and non-traditional financial firms can recruit talent from anywhere in the world. On the flip side, organizations also need to be wary of losing their best executives who no longer need to move to a new location to accept a new opportunity.

The quality of work/life balance has also become increasingly important as the most prized executives are in high demand and can set the terms for accepting a job. Some believe the loss of key executives at Marcus by Goldman Sachs was partially due to excessive pressures at the firm.

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The poaching of Marcus by Goldman Sachs didn’t end there, however. Sonali Divilek, a managing director at Goldman, who had just been promoted to be the head of product at Marcus will be joining Chase’s consumer and community banking team this summer as the head of digital channels and products.

Sonali was recently interviewed by the Banking Transformed podcast, where she discussed the product development strategy at Marcus, the importance of innovation and customer experience improvement, and how a partnership mentality had helped Marcus become a force in the retail banking ecosystem. She also emphasized the importance of financial education as a tool to create trust and loyalty in a highly competitive banking ecosystem.

Divilek also guided the launch of Marcus Invest, a robo-advisory service that was introduced in February. Before joining Goldman, Divilek headed global charge products for American Express. According to Chase, as the head of digital channels and products, Sonali will ensure the quality, consistency and integrity of the end-to-end digital experience across customer channels including Chase.com and the Chase mobile app.

In addition to Sonali Divilek, Chase also announced the addition of Kaaren Hanson as their chief design officer. Prior to joining Chase, Kaaren was an executive vice president of experience design and research at Wells Fargo. Kaaren also was a product design director at Facebook and spent over a decade at Intuit, where she led the company’s transformation to being a design-driven organization through an improved customer experience and innovation culture.

Finally, Sumit Gupta was named as the new head of customer experience and personalization for Chase, where he will oversee the end-to-end customer experience in all platforms, particularly for multi-product customers.. Gupta most recently was at Google, where he was the global director of…