Name: Ally Financial CEO: The 'Constant Pressure' to Innovate
Uploaded: 2017-08-04
Duration: 4 min 5 s
Description: Ally Financial CEO Jeffrey Brown breaks down the company’s innovation strategy.

JB, you've been making a lot of changes since you became CEO just two years ago. You expanded way beyond auto lending, you've gone into banking, wealth management, mortgages, credit cards, what's next? Well I think the three major areas that we've invested in you should expect more out of Ally in the future. So wealth management Credit card and mortgage are all relatively new offerings and those are all very attractive markets. We've always said if the customer wants it, we can do it in line with our risk management framework and we can deliver a reasonable return for the shareholder, it's something we're going to explore. You must collect so much data from your customers, from your employees and other sources. To what extent does Do those data analytics influence what your next new expansion's gonna be? Well I think it's really helped influencing our model and our approach, which right now is being digital only. Not using any brick and mortar. Which makes us very unique relative to other financial services companies and other [ CROSSTALK ] Right, you have no branches. No branches. You're online only. Online only. Seventy- one billion dollars of retail deposits. Which was effectively zero, back in 2009. And so we have gone through dramatic expansion. And we were, in the deposit book and we really viewed the deposits as kind of the gateway. Where the cornerstone product to get a customer in the door Really understand [ UNKNOWN ] and start to expand with all these other products and services. And leads to a very attractive growth profile for the company going forward .>> You been in banking for most of your career, to what extent you gather this data, do you overrule it and just go with your fundamental knowledge of how the market works. Yeah, I don't know if it's an over rule per say. But we have a lot of healthy debate about, is this a smart deployment of shareholder's capital? And I think we have healthy discussions. That's the consumer wants it. But can we make money on it? Can we deliver a reasonable return? Can we do this intolerance with our rest framework? And so it starts with the overall risk mandate. Not everything we look at ultimately leads to execution and I think the products we're talking about those are the ones that have risen to the mark of check check check. We feel very good about the outlook for growth there .>> So you are very comfortable about. Using technology to innovate with your banking. So I wanna ask you a little about artificial intelligence cuz everybody is talking about that. How do you see see artificial intelligence playing a role at LF Financial? Advanced analytics, AI Is really gaining a deeper knowledge of your customers and so we're developing how I personas, of really helping us understand when a customer comes in and whether they call the call center, whether they log in to their iPad, their Their iPhone. We have an idea of maybe what they want before they've even started exploring, and there's other companies that do this targeted marketing tremendously well. Amazon obviously at one of the tops of the list there and so- You know in some respects that's what we're really trying to do at Ally, is take this customer centric focus and really deploy an even broader fashion of Ally personas. Mm- hm. With technology changing so fast, we hear this so much from CEO's How much pressure do you feel to innovate? It is constant pressure. We have to be willing to take calculated mistakes. You can't take undue risk and endless risk. But you have to recognize that if you're gonna be a truly innovative culture Not everything is going to work. So having the willingness and having employees that understand it's okay if we tried something and doesn't pan out that's okay. If we get a valuable learning that's really what matters. That's ultimately is what counts .>> What is the risk if you don't innovate fast enough .>> Yea. I think your brand, your company will be dead 5 years 10 years. Ten years from now and that is a strong statement that I think ties right back to the point of how fast technology is moving. Companies and I think our customers today are demanding it. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Ally Financial CEO: The 'Constant Pressure' to Innovate

Leadership

Ally Financial CEO Jeffrey Brown breaks down the company’s innovation strategy.