Capital One Financial Corp. will not be a bank soon.

Capital One CEO Richard Fairbank, speaking at a Goldman Sachs event in New York yesterday, described his aspiration to make the bank a digital company with digital customers.

The McLean, Va.-based bank is known for its innovation efforts with Capital One Labs and partnerships with startups. Fairbank has spoken before about the importance of entrepreneurship and organic innovation to the bank’s lines of business.

Asked about how costs and efficiency might be affected by moving customers to the digital channel, Fairbank offered this:

I will make a prediction to you, and that is that the tendency of banks is going to be to add digital as a channel. And in fact if you — unless one really actively goes to a destination that says, we have got to become a digital company, there is just lots of stuff to invest in and it now becomes another channel. And customers are offered all channels and if you don’t watch out it becomes more costly, not less.

In other words, digital as just “another channel” may not be a cost-saver at all, as spending on information technology and integrating vendor technologies can quickly erase any savings gained from self-service transactions.

Without offering specifics, Fairbank described making digital the primary channel for customers, which is not just about ticking boxes or building technologies:

So our first objective is, create a digital experience that enables customers to choose digital as their primary channel and that’s a lot more than just creating capabilities…. If you build it, they will not necessarily come. So the second thing about this: There is huge need to systematically, as a conscious and high priority strategy, to drive customers to digital.

Fairbank concluded by saying that digital is where he wants Capital One and its customers to do business.

I know your question was more oriented to cost, [but] to me the opportunity is to really create a company where digital is not a little channel that’s added on but it’s who we are and how we do business, even as we support some other channel. That is, we are absolutely focused on that destination.

Capital One holds assets of approximately $297 billion.