Capital One Financial Corp. CEO Richard Fairbank confirmed the bank’s commitment to organic innovation in the company’s Q3 earnings call yesterday.

Fairbank is himself an entrepreneur who co-founded Capital One in 1988. The bank takes entrepreneurship seriously, installing entrepreneurs in residence in Capital One Labs, for example. Fairbank said the following yesterday, in answer to a question about the bank’s possible need for acquisitions in light of its small footprint in prepaid, gift cards, and payments:

There’s obviously a tremendous amount of activity going around the edges of banking and particularly, in the payment space. We are heavily investing [in] people who understand what’s happening at the edges of that space and, most importantly, to prepare ourselves for digital leadership in the tremendously important area of just regular old banking. And so, to us, that’s not a quest to go buy things. That’s a quest to really be at the forefront and understand how that fast-moving space is evolving. Recruiting talent, a very, very extensive effort to recruit native digital talent, not just banking people that happen to have worked in technology, and to make sure in this company that we can be digital and think digital and not get caught in sort of conventional wisdom in the business. So we have a lot of energy into it, but the energy is an organic energy and really focused on an imperative we have in the company to be a digital leader in a tremendously important evolving opportunity here.

In other words, Capital One is less concerned with picking up startups than with picking up individuals who can contribute organically to the bank’s internal innovation efforts. “Be digital and think digital,” Fairbank says. That sounds about right.