In this monthly Q&A segment, Bank Innovation directs five questions to executives and industry thought leaders who highlight technology and innovation trends in financial services, exploring strategy and best practices in leading financial institutions.

At the helm of Wells Fargo’s digital payments and consumer retail API teams, Ben Soccorsy aims to change how financial institutions and consumers think about moving money digitally.

“The history of helping our customers move money in the digital channel is really a lot of single point solutions,” Soccorsy told Bank Innovation. “Whether it were the emergence of mobile check deposit, or bill pay, or Zelle and P2P solutions, each of them kind of sprung up in their own context and siloed thinking.”

The opportunity to advance digital banking lies in bringing those point-to-point solutions together for the customer and removing complexities from the user experience, Soccorsy said.

Soccorsy oversees several digital initiatives at Wells Fargo, including consumer and small business payments, digital wallets, Control Tower, Zelle, and the Secure Data Exchange API program. Prior to joining the digital team, he managed consumer lending products at the San Francisco-based bank.

BI spoke with him about the evolution of Control Tower, the pandemic’s acceleration of digital and contactless payment initiatives, and what contextual banking means for the industry. What follows is an edited version of this conversation.

Bank Innovation: What are some of the challenges to connecting siloed, money-moving capabilities?

Ben Soccorsy: I’d say this is an industry-level challenge, but the technology infrastructure behind each of these things wasn’t built necessarily to support this real-time money movement world that we’re living in. Now, that’s not a problem that industries haven’t overcome in other contexts, but I think the technical aspect of this is really something we have to focus on.

I also think — more importantly than the technology and APIs — is to position these things in context for customers, and get customers to realize that money movement is related to the context of the situation, whether it’s buying something or paying somebody money, or a bill. I think that shift is one of the biggest things that needs to occur here, and I will give credit to fintech companies that really focus on this area. We observe them and we learn a lot about how customer-focused they are, and they do a good job of helping customers migrate to new ways of thinking about these things.

BI: What’s a specific product or feature you’re prioritizing this year, and how are the overall objectives changing through time?

BS: One thing we continue to invest in is our Control Tower program. It’s a feature within our mobile app and Wells Fargo online that gives customers three things: A single place in our app to manage their increasingly complex financial life; it provides transparency into their recurring payments, which in our increasingly subscription-based digital world is driving incremental value to customers; and then thirdly, it gives them control over their data sharing and bank data that they want to share with third parties through the API program. The engagement we’ve driven with customers on this has been really good and we want to continue to build on that.

We launched something called “Call Transaction Control,” which gives customers the ability to manage their debit and credit card where they can turn it off and back on, and we enhanced that by enabling what we call “International Transaction.” It gives the customer a peace of mind and also has reduced fraud by increasing control. That’s an example of something we launched that’s unique, and we are looking at other ideas like that to enhance the level of control.

BI: What’s an emerging innovation in your realm of secure data exchange and APIs that you’re excited about that you would consider adopting into Wells Fargo’s strategy?

BS: We’ve got 15 secure data exchange agreements for our API program and I think we continue to have opportunities to drive the industry toward a better solution, relative to API. One thing is continuing to implement and bring those agreements to life.

Late last year we signed an agreement with Plaid and are working through the implementation of that agreement, which will bring more of those connections that customers will see in Control Tower. As agreements are implemented, customers are able to see more and more of the places where they have connected their data, and that provides more value.

What’s really different and unique about Control Tower and how we’re approaching it is, we’re listening to our customers by looking at what their behavior is. They want to use different types of apps and experiences to help manage their financial lives, and that notion of open banking — that we need to bring more of our experiences to our customers’ lives — is critical. I like to call it the age of contextual banking and with APIs, we should be able to do more in your life, as opposed to you coming to us.

BI: How has the pandemic accelerated the acceptance or adoption of open banking internally?

BS: A couple of things are pretty clear through this pandemic. Number one, it is an unexpected event that’s going to change how we live our day-to-day lives for some period of time. As we talk about it internally, I actually think there are aspects, especially of what we work on, that may not go back to what it used to be.
I don’t think anyone has a firm grasp of what the implications of this whole episode are going to be, but I do think increasing our ability to recognize that customer behavior patterns are going to change, whether it’s in the context of depositing checks or through e-commerce, or whether emerging technology — like contactless payments — becomes the standard technology. Those things are likely to just accelerate and may not go back, even when the beaches in California do open up — as a poor man’s surfer I’m hoping it’s sooner rather than later.

BI: You lead several large teams at Wells. What’s a piece of leadership advice you share with your teams to help guide and motivate them amid this dislocation?

BS: Given the current circumstances, I can’t think about answering this question in any other context than in the spirit of crisis management. In my travels, a lot of what’s happening now is reminiscent of the last go-around in the Great Recession.

The leadership things I’ve always lived by is, during the toughest challenges you have to really step up and reveal your character. What we do in our industry and in our company really matters and this is a serious situation. The things we help our customers to do, which is move money around and provide solutions for their financial needs, matter all the time, but especially during a challenging time like this. It matters even more now. So the leadership principle I’ve always followed and driven to the team is that we do important work.