Financial institutions are figuring out how to do more with less these days.

Industry leaders have found that getting creative about human capital not only buoys innovation ROI, but it encourages a sense of ownership among different departments and breaks down internal barriers throughout the organization.

“Human capital has become an important cog in the wheel for us as we continue our digital journey,” Sathish Muthukrishnan, chief information, data and digital officer of Ally Financial said during a recent panel discussion at Bank Innovation Build.

Throughout the pandemic, the $182.5 billion Ally relied on employees across the bank to rapidly test and deploy new products.

“We accelerated our artificial intelligence journey, knowing that our customer care agents would be taxed,” Muthukrishnan said.

The Detroit-based lender accelerated the integration of a chatbot to handle mundane service calls, and the bank asked its employees to test it and find errors in order to launch the new function quickly. Thousands of employees self-nominated to help, Muthukrishnan said, “so through this process we learned that, as much as we rely on external customers, you can rely on internal customers to help guide and advance your progress.”

Thousands of employees are not required to reap the benefits of leveraging human capital; sometimes an advantage is realized with just one employee.

Citi Chief Innovation Officer Vanessa Colella stretched her bandwidth a little further in February, adding head of Citi Productivity to her list of responsibilities, which already includes leading Citi Ventures and overseeing D10X, the $1.9 trillion dollar bank’s internal incubator. The Citi Productivity team is tasked with transforming the employee experience with operating model redesign, simplification and new technology to increase efficiency and effectiveness.

For Colella, that means treating employees as the bank treats its customers.

“What if we thought about making our employee experience 10 times better, what if we thought about new tools that help our employees and how would we use that same muscle that we’ve built over the last decade and bring it internal,” Colella said. “We think about it not as a cost-cutting exercise, but as a ‘How can we — every day, every week, every month — delight and impress our employees as much as we aim to do that for our clients?’ And we’re just getting going.”

Citi’s productivity team is now exploring what an equitable return to work looks like, Colella said. “In a world where we’re all experiencing the pandemic, no individual is experiencing it the same way,” she said, noting that returning to work is not a personal choice, but a contextual one. Through this effort, Colella said it will be critical to keep data that measures who’s able to come back to the office and how productivity is affected.

Meanwhile, Redwood City, Calif.-based BlueVine discovered how assigning employees tasks outside of their traditional departments helped to boost morale and scale operations. For the Paycheck Protection Program, BlueVine quickly adapted operations to process stimulus loans for 125,000 small businesses, providing nearly $4 billion of funds.

“We had [our platform] built in a really modular way, albeit for risk and underwriting through to product and product delivery, so our teams really rallied … and we were able to unify as one team,” said Chief Product Officer Herman Man. “We’ve had a lot of learnings in terms of how we scale the digital platform itself, but then also the human platform and the human capital.

“We’ve really, through this [pandemic], learned that much more in terms of how we operate, and how to more efficiently operate, and we’ll take that forward as we build out new products,” Man said.

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