Innovation is all the rage in banking, but banks often seem to struggle with it, as Chris Skinner and other observers often point out in describing bank efforts to move from branches and paper to digital.
So when Stephen Brobst, the CTO at Teradata, said that Wells Fargo has one of the best records in moving innovative ideas into production quickly, I asked for more information and learned about Control Tower℠, which the bank launched in 2018.
Ben Soccorsy, SVP and head of digital payments in Wells Fargo Virtual Channels — including digital wallets, bill pay, wires and Zelle — said the bank aims to help consumers manage their digital lives.
Control Tower app
Control Tower originated in 2017 and moved into production in 2018 using agile methodology to get from announcement to launch in a matter of months. That agile approach facilitated the bank’s being able to respond to a growing opportunity in helping customers manage their increasingly complex financial lives. Control Tower has three components — card management, visibility into recurring payments and data sharing management — in some cases pulling together into one place capabilities that had already existed but might have been overlooked by customers.
In card management, if you lose or misplace your debit card you can turn it off from your phone, and turn it back on if you find it. Wells Fargo added the ability for customers to turn debit cards on and off for overseas transactions.
Control Tower also offers insight into recurring payments, of growing importance as people sign up for subscriptions that may renew with little notice, overlooked notice or none at all — gym memberships, publications, software packages, news feeds.
“It’s extremely valuable for customers who have subscriptions they have a hard time tracking. And it can be useful when a card expires or you lose it.”
The bank did a publicity campaign around it, reminding people to check how much they are spending on subscriptions and offering a way to help them monitor recurring payments of all sorts. It also offers more controls over sharing data with third parties such as Intuit or Plaid. Customers will have account level control on which data is shared, and if they don’t want to share their data any longer, they can turn off the permission to a specific third party.
In developing Control Tower, the bank built some components from scratch and also took advantage of capabilities it already had in both its mobile app and its web app.
“One of the key aspects of agile is getting full leverage out of what you have and integrating with existing concepts and reformulating in a way that adds value.”
With agile, the development team went from concept to an internal pilot in months, then to customer pilots in early 2018 and to all customers October 2018.
“That’s the cadence. We are in a time where speed matters,” Soccorsy said. “As we lean into agile there are four key types of team members — business people, the tech team, the line of business and then a designer. Those types of folks are pulled in from the beginning to work side by side in an agile way in a fast sprint to get something.”
Compliance and legal are integrated into the team as a top priority, he added.
“They are at the center of everything we do, baked into every step of the journey.” In getting started, the team needs a vision and then keeping that first set of features manageable is critical.
“If the long term vision is critical, then you will have the chance through agile to iterate toward it, but it takes a delicate balance of how much to tackle right out of the gate. I think we did a good job of balancing the material MVP (minimally viable product) We, have millions of our customers who have engaged with Control Tower and are happy with the engagement, but it’s always tempting to want to do more sooner.”
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