Investing in the future of banking

By: Tom Mildenhall, Global Head of Technology Business Development

At Bank of America, we believe that a focus on new and emerging technologies is critical to success. It pushes our thinking. It pulls us out of the box. It brings us into the future.

We also recognize that utilizing and providing cutting edge technology is key to enabling our clients to accomplish their financial goals. To do this, we are constantly investing in our products and platforms, evaluating opportunities to build the latest innovation, or partnering with firms that provide leading technology.

A huge piece of our commitment to innovation is identifying emerging technology partnerships that we believe can accelerate our firm’s strategy and enable us to provide our clients the best tools, technologies, and products. And because our partners help us build the technology that does so much for our customers, it’s important that we foster relationships with these startups and mentor them as they navigate the ever-evolving business landscape.

That’s where my team comes in: the Technology Partnership Development team was built to assist in the build-buy-partner discussion internally, and then connect with best-in-class technology firms that are aligned to our enterprise strategy, can help us identify and solve for key pain points and in turn, help us build new, better, stronger capabilities.

Our Commitment to Innovation

Our Global Technology team has built a number of the products we consider core to our business, such as the CashPro platform and the Erica tool for our retail bank.

At Bank of America, our strategy for new technology is centered around consumer and market demand. Company size or buzzwords don’t determine who we work with; instead, the technology often meets an existing client or employee need. That focus includes convenience and ease of use while ensuring our clients’ information is safe and secure. Cybersecurity, client privacy and resiliency are at the core of what we do, and all organizations must meet our guidelines as we work on these new technologies.

Technology & Innovation Summit

Since 2009, we’ve hosted Technology & Innovation Summits in Silicon Valley and New York City that afford us the opportunity to engage with and learn from emerging technology firms that could eventually become Bank of America partners.

These events represent a unique partnership between two of our Bank teams: Global Corporate & Investment Banking and Global Technology. This collaboration – and our continued work together – results in an integrated approach to two critically important parts of our business: how we think about acquiring the best emerging technologies that we can deploy across our company, and how we provide tailored investment banking solutions to current and prospective clients. 

One of the leading goals of these events is to make accessing a large corporation with a global footprint and hundreds of thousands of employees less daunting to entrepreneurs, and to candidly outline our tech challenges in the hopes that attending startups might be equipped to solve them.

Over the last 13 years, we’ve met with hundreds of startups. And it’s without a doubt some of the most rewarding work I get to do. It’s a time to challenge ourselves as a company, to partner with those who are trailblazers in the fintech industry, and hear from those minds who are thinking about solutions to – in some cases – problems we’re just hearing about.

These firms are creating the technology that will enable the future of financial services and are building entirely new capabilities that will, one day, become industry standard. Working with and learning from these tech-forward minds is so important to our success, and more so, critical to ensuring we’re delivering the best products and services to our clients.

These interactions provide a view into the tech ecosystem and offer a unique pulse on the industry, meaning we can continue to live by our standard of “high tech and high touch” operations – always keeping humans at the forefront.

Some principles we keep in mind as we explore these kinds of partnerships:

1.     Begin with the client in mind. Time and resources are valuable. Understanding the client need and its impact to the business will shed light on the greatest opportunities.

2.     Clear the path for rapid response. Innovative firms must have a culture of rapid testing and learning to execute new capabilities.

3.     Innovation is everyone’s job. Innovation at Bank of America is not siloed to one team. We’re looking for the latest technology firms, but it takes a team of business, technology, and risk partners to have an innovative mindset and come together with new approaches to solving our client needs.

Bank of America has the privilege of scale, but we must ensure we’re staying at the forefront of changing client expectations, and partnering with the best technology has to offer is one of the tools to meet those expectations. We know we don’t have all the answers, and we look to these companies to push our thinking and provide a fresh perspective. I can’t wait to report back on what I learn at this year's Technology & Innovation Summit – stay tuned.