FNB Corporation CEO Vincent Delie Jr. asked, “Do they spend that money wisely?” He predicted that as artificial intelligence continues to change rapidly and becomes more accessible, as in the case of coding assistants used to write code for programming, “I think the future’s going to lead to smaller banks coming out with some very innovative tools that the larger banks miss.”
“Large banks have bureaucracy, they have embedded spend,” and “they keep muddling along,” Vincent Delie Jr. said during a recent interview with BankingDive.
“It’s harder for these mega-banks to get everybody on the same page, and to create something better for the customer,” he added.
FNB, the holding company for First National Bank of Pittsburgh, operates in seven states and Washington DC. It has spent the past 10 years rolling out a digital strategy based on data management and making online banking feel more like online shopping, though the lender declined to share how much it has invested in the digital strategy.
The eStore platform is an e-commerce-like experience for customers shopping for banking products and services, Vincent Delie Jr. said, and FNB enables a customer to fill out one common application to access about 50 checking, savings or loan products, which is paired with its branch footprint to create an omnichannel environment for customers.
“Other banks didn’t engage customers the way a retailer engages customers,” Vincent Delie Jr. said of the gap he saw. Bank websites were a “spaghetti bowl of information. You really couldn’t find things.”
And to access multiple products or services at other banks, “it’s a hodge-podge of disparate applications and origination systems that really force customers to do a lot of work,” Vincent Delie Jr. said.
He said that FNB has attempted to make those processes more intuitive and to reduce the time required to apply for a product or service. That is something that banks have sort of missed over the years, he said, as other industries moved much faster.