Why generative AI is sparking Wells Fargo’s next chapter
Ather Williams, Wells Fargo’s head of Strategy, Digital, Innovation, and Enterprise Payments discusses how the rapid onset of generative artificial intelligence is changing innovation in financial services.
Key takeaways
- Our business and technology teams are breaking new ground at Wells Fargo’s Innovation Center in Silicon Valley, which puts the company in the heart of the country’s largest startup community.
- Our teams put our customers’ problems at the center of what we do. Popular tools like Fargo® and a completely reimagined digital experience for our Commercial clients in Wells Fargo Vantage® show how we’re doing just that.
- Generative artificial intelligence is a driving force in what is next at Wells Fargo and the wider financial services industry. It has the potential to change how we work with each other and with our consumer and business clients.
At our Innovation Center in Silicon Valley, I’ve gotten a — literal — peek into the not-so-distant future of banking.
Wells Fargo opened the company’s first innovation center to create a hub where our teams from around the organization can collaborate with each other and the broader Silicon Valley community to find innovative solutions to our customers’ and company’s most pressing challenges through the application of new technologies and design thinking principles. While we have our business teams; Technology teams; and Strategy, Digital, and Innovation (SDI) teams doing incredibly important work around the country, the Innovation Center provides us with an environment equipped with the tools and staffed by design thinking experts who can help them to step outside of their day jobs to look for innovative approaches to addressing existing and emerging challenges and opportunities.
Recently, I had the opportunity to try on a pair of smart glasses powered with artificial intelligence. Curious, I asked it to give me a summary of the terms and conditions of one of our credit card disclosures. Within seconds, its camera scanned the paper documents and did just that. The experience was conversational, real-time, and allowed me to understand a complex terms and conditions document, something few people — let’s be honest — ever get through.
Our customers can experience a version of this today through Fargo. And very soon, AI-based tools may be the primary way most of our customers will want to bank, rather than in the branch or even on our website. Already, more customers interact with us via our mobile app and Fargo than visit our branches or contact centers. Before Fargo launched two years ago, that would’ve shocked a lot of us. In the next few years, we envision the AI-powered banking experience will be even more personalized, conversational, and easy to use.
"The tools we create must solve our customers’ problems, make their lives easier, and unlock insightful, personalized, and efficient banking experiences."
We have also been really focused on ensuring that our business clients are well-supported with great digital experiences. In 2023 for our Commercial Banking clients, we launched our new digital portal experience called Wells Fargo Vantage with a laser focus on helping clients of all sizes manage their businesses with the same ease and intuitiveness of consumer-like experiences. With Wells Fargo Vantage, clients can manage their money in and out, get advice and support, manage their cashflow including leveraging the lending tools we have, and even conduct complex foreign exchange transactions with ease.
We recently launched a new mobile experience to complement the desktop experience with our VantageSM Mobile app. On-the-go business clients need to have the pulse of their business at their fingertips, and the new mobile experience will allow them to do just that.
The quest for automation and simplicity for business clients has also fueled the growth of our suite of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Our clients are looking for ways to programmatically make business decisions within the tools and solutions they use to manage their business, their customers, and the experiences they deliver. They are all on a digitization journey themselves. These APIs, either individually or prebuilt into select tools such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, allow our clients to make significant progress across that journey and realize the efficiencies they are looking for to spend their time on the thing they care about most: their business.
That experience of converging technologies speaks to how we’re innovating at Wells Fargo. Today, we’re not only a bank; we’re a tech company. And the tools we create must solve our customers’ problems, make their lives easier, and unlock insightful, personalized, and efficient banking experiences.
At Wells Fargo, why we innovate matters, but so does where it happens and who is involved. Customer feedback is critical to getting this right, whether collected at branches or service centers or within the mobile app, and we’re committed to understanding our customers’ issues and aspirations. We want to earn your trust and your business.
That’s why we build innovation from the ground up, empowering employees at all levels to have a stake in the process. We need to hear the most from the people working closely with clients on managing their finances and helping them progress toward their goals. By putting customers at the center of what we do, we create solutions tailored to their needs. That’s been part of our company’s story going back to the 1850s.
What are we building toward? The next chapter of our innovation journey is being sparked by generative AI. Wells Fargo has used machine learning technology for decades, but the rapid pace of change with generative AI has been unprecedented.
This has led us to rethink our approach to learning and development. How do we train ourselves when knowledge is changing so fast and the tools available to us are performing at new levels each day? Our real currency is our ability to learn and apply what we know to the customer problems we’re trying to solve. That’s one reason why we have the Innovation Center to look at innovating differently every day. It also brings us closer to the startup and entrepreneurial community behind the latest ideas and capabilities.
The last piece of this is perhaps the most critical: trust and security. We’re balancing innovation with risk and compliance. That starts by being open and transparent with key stakeholders during each step of creating a new business initiative like Fargo or Wells Fargo Vantage. Every solution or tool we bring to customers goes through that same rigorous review and testing process. We look at risk from all sides.
One of the biggest challenges the financial services industry is facing is cybersecurity, from fraud schemes all the way to nation state attacks. When our lives are going faster and there’s less time to check a real-time payment, for example, how do we maintain the same checks for bad actors? That’s where innovation can come in. New generative AI tools can serve as prediction engines, helping us to spot red flags as soon as they happen. That’s where we create real impact for our customers.
It’s an exciting time to be an innovator in financial services. We’re on the precipice of huge changes in the industry fueled by AI, and we can make a real change in the lives of the millions of clients we serve by getting it right.
Learn more about Wells Fargo’s innovation journey.
Ather Williams III is Wells Fargo’s head of Strategy, Digital, Innovation, and Enterprise Payments.
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Footnotes
- Availability may be affected by your mobile carrier’s coverage area. Your mobile carrier’s message and data rates may apply. Fargo is only available on the smartphone versions of the Wells Fargo Mobile® app.↩
