Amit Thawani, CIO for Consumer Data & Engagement Platforms at Wells Fargo, on the journey towards becoming a customer-centric company

This month’s cover story reveals how a customer-centric approach to technology is helping Wells Fargo deliver stable, secure, scalable, and innovative services.

Welcome to the latest issue of Interface magazine!

It’s our biggest issue yet! The common theme this month is the focus on the creation of customer-centric technologies that offer reliable, secure and helpful user journeys from travel and banking to health and business.

Interface dives deep for insights on understanding, planning, implementing and communicating change across industries.

Read the latest issue here!

Customer-centric banking with Wells Fargo

Amit Thawani, Chief Information Officer (CIO) for Consumer Data & Engagement Platforms (CDEP) on the technology journey at Wells Fargo: “All tech employees at Wells Fargo are tasked with working towards delivering stable, secure, scalable, and innovative services at speed that delight and satisfy our customers while unleashing the skills potential of our employees.”

TUI: Developing a technology ecosystem

Kristof Caekebeke, CIO for Product & Engagement, is a member of the leadership team that is driving the transformation of the TUI technical ecosystem which has seen Master Domain Owners taking different blocks of the ecosystem under their control to roll out across the organisation.

TUI Group

Responsible for product and engagement, Caekebeke’s focus is on building products out of the thousands of hotels, flights, experiences and cruises TUI is offering. “I’m responsible for every contact point between the customer and TUI. The websites, the mobile apps, the retail systems – any contact point we have between the customer and TUI. It’s a large team of 1,100 tech people.

A digital bank transformation journey with Banco PAN

“Until 2018 Banco PAN was very much an analogue company reliant on legacy paper processes,” recalls Leandro Marçal. Joining the bank in December 2020, to become Technology & Operations Director (CIO/COO), Marçal was tasked with accelerating a digital transformation journey.

“Banco PAN invested in innovation before I arrived,” says Marçal. “It is my team’s job to formalise the path towards becoming a digital bank. Our legacy operation was digitalising. It was an opportunity to improve the customer experience with our checking account and credit card systems.”

Pohlad Companies: The power of people

A pillar of the community in Minneapolis, Pohlad Companies is well known to Minnesotans for its influence, its charity work, and the opportunities it has created for people since the 1950s.

Alongside significant commercial real estate investments, Pohlad Companies owns a custom engineering and robotics company, a group of automotive dealerships specialising in luxury vehicles, a film production studio, and many more businesses. Famously, the Pohlad family also owns the Minnesota Twins, a Major League Baseball team.

This variety is part of what makes Rachel Lockett’s job so exciting. She’s Pohlad Companies’ CIO and has spent a decade in her current role. Lockett began her career as a programmer over 25 years ago and quickly moved into IT leadership management.

Coalfire: Embracing change in cybersecurity

If you wait for something to happen, then it’s often too late. The art of having a finger on the pulse is an essential ingredient to success. Failure to manage change and implement cybersecurity protocols could mean leaving an organisation vulnerable to hackers. 

Sreeveni Kancharla, Coalfire’s first Chief Information Officer, is leading the company’s digital transformation with unwavering determination. As a cybersecurity advisor, Coalfire assists private and public sector organisations in managing threats, closing gaps, and mitigating risks. Kancharla ensures that her team stays up-to-date with the latest technologies to guard against zero-day attacks.

Uni of Kansas Health: Cybersecurity at the heart

Speed versus safety. The two topics are intrinsically linked and vital in their own individual way. But can you have both in healthcare when the risks are so great? Ultimately, there is no higher stake than saving people’s lives – it goes above everything and is why cybersecurity is so vital.

Protecting the healthcare system

“There’s nothing more important to me than patient care,” affirms Michael Meis, Associate Chief Information Security Officer at The University of Kansas Health System. “It is one of the highest callings you can imagine, to be able to help people. While the cybersecurity team and me, individually, do not directly care for patients, we enable a lot of that patient care to continue and to be able to achieve some of the goals that the health system has set to provide that healing, research, and innovation within the healthcare space.”

Also in this issue, we ask ChatGPT what the future holds for AI and learn from Zoom how businesses can leverage analytics for insights from their hybrid events.

Enjoy the issue!

Dan Brightmore, Editor

Ian Povey, CIO – Head of Payments Services & Technology, on the strategic transformation taking place at NatWest benefitting both the bank and its customers

This month’s cover story reveals how innovation is at the core of change for payments processes at NatWest.

Welcome to the latest issue of Interface magazine!

Charles Darwin famously said: “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent; it is the one most adaptable to change.” Technology is helping us to evolve. And that evolution is being driven by innovation.

Read the latest issue here!

Payments transformation at NatWest

“It may be a cliché, but a transformation journey really has no end… If you fixate on a constant end state without ‘checking in’ you can, and likely will, fail in your objectives.” A wise outlook from a CIO with three decades of change management experience across banking’s payments panorama.

Ian Povey, CIO – Head of Payments Services & Technology, discusses the strategic transformation taking place at NatWest and how that journey of change and innovation is benefitting both the bank and its customers as it evolves to become a relationship bank for a digital world. “Our environment is always changing – we must be on the back of the ‘Change Dragon’ and steering/influencing as a leader and always learning from our teams for new ideas.”

Customer-Centric transformation at FedEx

We also check in with logistics leader FedEx… Custom Critical CIO Cheryl Bevelle-Orange reveals a “technology-forward yet flexible company” embracing innovation and “paving the way for customers to get more relevant information faster about their packages while delivering with excellence”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=galaZZlrEn0

Continuous Improvement in IT at Mazars

Mazars CIO David Marcelino explains his approach to innovation and leading on a successful IT transformation program at one of the world’s largest audit and advisory firms aiming to improve the digital experience for all its stakeholders. “Change Management, adoption, training and awareness are at the core of every single business technology project we deliver.”

Tech innovation at speed with the US Air Force

We also caught up with George Forbes, Director of Digital Operations Directorate at the United States Air Force, who outlines the importance of innovation within the federal government.

Digital Transformation in healthcare at Avellino

Nancy Selph, Global Head of IT at Avellino Lab, discusses how technology is creating new opportunities to improve health outcomes and the importance of leadership in the industry.

Also in this issue, we round up the key tech events and conferences across the globe; we learn how Minted are making it easy for everyone to invest in gold; and we feature the latest on cloud digitalisation from IFS.

Enjoy the issue!

Dan Brightmore, Editor