Until recently, BankMobile, the mobile-first division of Customers Bank, didn’t have an executive dedicated to customer experience, at least not formally. However, with roughly 2 million checking account customers, a growing white-label business and partnerships with the likes of T-Mobile on its newly launched mobile checking product, the bank is thinking broadly across its offerings.

Joseph Krzemienski, BankMobile’s first Chief Experience Officer, previously served for about three years as the bank’s Chief Design Officer, leading the experience design program and creative strategy. Although his new role was announced in February, Krzemienski told Bank Innovation he had long before assumed many of the duties the position entails.

Indeed, the CXO role is becoming more of a common sight across the financial services industry. In January,  Mastercard announced that it had hired Donald Chesnut, formerly with interactive agency SapientRazorfish, to become the company’s first CXO. Chesnut’s team was given the mandate to improve Mastercard’s consumer payment experience while providing merchants, issuers and other partners “a more holistic way” to work with the company’s products and services.

Also see: FIs Hiring Customer Experience Teams, But What Are They?

Krzemienski’s rise to CXO at BankMobile was a more organic process, he said. As CDO, he had been given a blank canvas, despite having creative experience at the time that was largely outside banking and finance.

“I was brought in to design a bank from scratch, which was an offer I couldn’t really refuse,” Krzemienski said. “Generally, I just thought banking was pretty lame, and I thought someone of my background might be able to bring something a little different to the space.”

There was a lot of discovery and learning throughout that process. “Any conversation within the bank where I could be a fly on the wall, I tried to insert myself so that I could better understand the parameters for what we were designing and operate within those restraints,” Krzemienski said.

Krzemienski’s design team built successful products by listening and reacting to customer needs and experiences. This, he said, prompted leadership within the bank to see the potential for his design thinking methods to touch other aspects of the bank.

“I was thinking about how I could insert myself more strategically within the company, and it just kind of made sense to propose this to leadership and say, ‘Hey, I think I have something to bring to the table here’,” Krzemienski said. “It was important for me to know that I could do the job before taking it, and I got the support from the company to do that.”

Krzemienski’s team of about a dozen UX designers and researchers touch every aspect of BankMobile. “One of the biggest challenges this year, in taking on the new CXO role, has been broadening the communications, working as a liaison between stakeholders and trying to figure out what all the different business units’ objectives are, then aligning them so that we’re all working in the same direction,” he said.