Wells Fargo has announced a new innovation group that will focus on five areas: research and development, innovation strategies, payment strategies, design and delivery and analytics. It will be led by Steve Ellis, who had served as the head of wholesale services, has been named the leader of the new group. Ellis led the bank’s effort 15 years ago to design a single sign-on for multiple financial services. Today Wells Fargo’s Commercial Electronic Office and CEO Mobile, which launched in 2007, offer online banking services through more than 90 applications to commercial, corporate, and institutional customers in more than 190 countries.
Banking innovation seems to move in cycles, Ellis said, citing internet in the the 90s when Wells became the first Internet bank in 1995, and then mobile.
“We are bringing a small team together. It is going to have some R&D components, we will be looking at new technologies, doing some proofs of concepts and some will become real products and services. The last big piece is design and delivery. We have been getting more agile in some parts of our company; we need to do that more consistently across broader swaths of the company.”
Customer experience is paramount, he added.
Ellis sees a big opportunity in biometrics which would allow the bank to identify a customer and provide access to all her accounts. Wells Fargo has been working with biometrics for five years in pilots on the consumer and commercial banking sides, he added.
The bank will work with internal developers and outside startups on innovation.
“Some startups don’t know how to write industrial strength code. We help connect them to a business partner and help them network in Silicon Valley.”
Wells Fargo will take a small stake in the companies it works with.
“We are not exclusive — we want to see them grow and succeed. We want to bank them and hope they grow up to be an Bay or PayPal. We want to help them understand a sustainable business model while we extend the tent poles of our company. We are looking outside for new things to do.”
The bank’s business model is about long-term relationships, he added, not just transactions.
“We want to extend credit, do treasury management, and do business with them as they grow, buy other companies or go public. We have a lot of experienced people and networks to help them. The hope is that by bringing together great ideas from inside the company and outside we can work together to improve the customer experience.”
The Wholesale Services team also recently launched the Wells Fargo Startup Accelerator, now in its third round of funding and mentoring select global start-ups, with the aim of helping to advance innovative technology solutions for the financial services industry, ranging from omnichannel solutions to biometric authentication, to beacon technology.
