Ally Bank, one of the largest banks by assets in the United States, is also one of the first (the first, according to the bank) to operate a purely digital banking network in the country. The company launched at a time when faith in the banking system was at an all-time low, and digital banks were unheard of. Getting the neobank’s branding right was vital.
“The premise and the phrase we used at the time was, ‘The world doesn’t need another bank, it needs a better bank,’” Diane Morais, Ally Bank’s president of consumer and commercial banking, tells Fortune.
Ally was rebranded from GMAC Bank, a subdivision of the century-old General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC), units of which had faced bankruptcy during the subprime mortgage market collapse that led to the global financial crisis. GMAC Bank was only launched in 2000 and was rebranded in 2009.
To many observers at the time, the rebrand was a clear effort to separate the bank’s image from that of its troubled parent company, although Morais says the name change was much more about creating a brand that could “stand out in the wake of the financial crisis” and that its executives felt they could fully own.
“We actually technically didn’t even own the name GMAC,” Morais says. “Part of the thesis at the time was that, if we don’t own this brand, it really doesn’t make sense to invest heavily in it. So the selection of the brand [name] was a pretty extensive process.”
The name Ally was, of course, intended to give customers the sense that the bank was in their corner while reflecting one of the bank’s core pillars: Be customer-obsessed. But choosing and messaging your brand’s key core values is one thing; actually solidifying them within your corporate culture is another. Morais says it took Ally a few years before its internal structure actually aligned with its values.
“At that point in time, we had a hodgepodge of a few different subcultures, and we said we needed to be one Ally with one common set of values, and we built that into our performance management system,” Morais says. For example, Ally has an annual award to celebrate the employees who Morais describes as “poster children for our culture.”
On the customer-obsessed side, Morais says Ally delivers on that core tenet in multiple ways. The bank measures customer retention, customer acquisition, how many products a customer has, and each customer’s net promoter scores. Ally also sifts through customer comments on its corporate sites to gauge sentiment, while using audio analysis on customer complaint calls to map pain points in its service. Once all that data is collated, Morais says, Ally’s executive team has a quarterly review of its customer satisfaction to help keep the bank on course.
“We’ve invested very heavily in ensuring that we are on top of customer sentiment—registering customer needs both expressed and unexpressed,” Morais says. “It’s a powerful differentiator for us.”
Eamon Barrett
eamon.barrett@fortune.com
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