David Tyrie is the newly appointed head of digital at Bank of America, a role he stepped into at the turn of the new year.

Tyrie, who previously served as head of consumer and small business products at the $2.8 trillion bank, now leads the transformation, integration and management of Bank of America’s digital platforms across all segments, including consumer, small business, wealth management and global banking.

Bank of America serves 66 million customers who interact with the bank 10 billion times annually, 9 billion through digital channels, in a trend that has accelerated in the past year.

Tyrie spoke to Bank Automation News about the philosophy that guides his technology roadmap, the role automation will play in his innovation strategy, and how the bank’s virtual assistant, Erica, automates more than just customer service. What follows is an edited version of the conversation.

Bank Automation News: It must feel like you have a lot on your to-do list, and maybe a lot more you wish you could add to your to-do list. How do you prioritize?

David Tyrie: Our baseline philosophy is: Banking should be easy, convenient and safe. So we said, “How can we leverage technology to make banking more easy, more convenient and more safe,” because that’s what people are actually buying — that is the value proposition of a bank. If you take a peek under the covers at everything we do, it’s centered around those three things.

Now we have uniquely positioned it as a balance of IQ and EQ [emotional quotient]. IQ would fall into bank automation, which couldn’t be more boring — that is the IQ side of things — go get me this, make sure I can do that type thing. And the EQ side of things is really about, what does the customer experience feel like. Banking is a relationship business, and so how can you develop a digital strategy that’s just about the IQ?

So we have three basic principles on the EQ side of things: We want people to walk away from our digital experience feeling like all of the content and capabilities that we have invested in so heavily are brought to them in a relevant and timely fashion. The third is, if you do those first two right, you walk away feeling like, “Wow, Bank of America is acting in my best interest.” That’s my long-winded way of setting the stage for all I try to do — it doesn’t matter what line of business. We’re doing it for the consumer bank, where we’ve been wildly successful, for the wealth management space, and now expanding into the commercial banking side of things.

BAN: So, thinking about the IQ side of things, how is automation playing a role in your tech roadmap?

DT: We are not focused on the number of users we have; we are focused on what those users are doing in our properties. That’s where the automation piece comes in, because the genesis, I believe, of your question is: What are the things that you’re automating? I can give you a laundry list of stuff that Bank of America and other banks have automated. The question becomes: Are their customers using it?

We have gone beyond the stage of automating things — we’ve automated virtually everything from fraud claims to mobile check deposits to moving money. I think that game is pretty much over.

The new game is how many people are actually using those capabilities, because the people using them have the impact on your business. It doesn’t do you any good to log into our website and look at your account balance — that doesn’t help the business.

What matters is we have people using Zelle — 5,000-plus banks in the Early Warning Services system, the Zelle network as a whole is now twice the volume of Venmo — and Bank of America is processing one-third [of the volume] of the entire Zelle network. So the question becomes, why are we doing this? Because 75% of the people using Zelle now don’t write checks at all, that’s big savings for a bank of this size. Mobile check deposit, too, that’s a tenth of the cost if you do it on our mobile check-deposit app, compared with processing it the old way.

BAN: In that case, what would be the most highly used automated feature at Bank of America?

DT: Well, as of mid-February, Erica just took the No. 1 spot. Erica started off on a normal path when it was “level 1,” as we call it internally, which was “Go get me some information.” Level 2 was “Go do something,” like, give Andy $20. It hockey-sticked up when we started providing insights to our customers, so it was “Hey Andy, you’re going to run out of money this month, if you don’t curb your spending.” And then, it would go back in and offer some suggestions based on your spending, saving and subscription habits. Erica is now providing insights to our customers, always with the choice of what they want to do, but it’s providing insights and that’s why it’s taken off.

BAN: What’s level 4 for Erica, after the insights?

DT: I don’t think there’s a level 4; I think the insights get better and richer. When we think about the next level, it is exiting out of the Bank of America ecosystem to the device system. So you don’t have to log in to get Erica to do or tell you something, you are actually going to set up alerts so that Erica will actually send you a text saying, “Hey wait, something happened in your bank account, you may want to log in.” So, that way we become part of your life, not just part of the Bank of America experience.

BAN: Erica is obviously customer-facing. Do you use the technology or tool internally at all?

DT: Definitely, we do. The capability is so unique in the sense that, in its rawest form, it has turned systems development on its ear.

In the old days, you’d be in a line of business within the bank — let’s say you were running checking products — and Andy had his credit card platform that was processing things, and I had my mortgage platform. If you were the web guy, you would say “I want to have a login page that shows information out of Bianca’s system, the information from Andy’s system and the information from Dave’s system.” What you would do is spend a million bucks and go create some pipes and it would spend a lot of money and time.

Erica doesn’t need the pipes. Erica cuts across every platform the bank has, can go in, pull the information, and take it out and assemble it. That’s why we’ve moved from what used to be four releases of new tech offerings a year, like any other big bank, to now we do releases every 28 to 32 days, which makes it easier for us to develop new technologies to scale across different business lines.