Feb 9, 2016
Dominic Venturo, CIO of US
Bank
Visiting Dominic Venturo is a little like walking onto a
James Bond movie set during the Q gadget briefing scene. There is a
wonderful "wow" factor in encountering the most fascinating new
technologies in banking.
The title "CIO" used to mean Chief Information Officer. It
still does, of course, but today that "I" increasingly stands for
another word too: innovation. Dominic Venturo, the Chief
Innovation Officer of U.S. Bank, reflects a growing trend of banks
assigning specialized leaders to spearhead their work in innovative
technology.
U.S. Bank actually took this step long ago. As we learned in
Episode 12 with
CEO Richard Davis, this is the country's fifth
largest bank, and its focus on innovation caused them to name
Dominic for this role eight years ago. In fact, he was such an
early user of Twitter that he got the extremely cool handle
@innov8tr (be
sure to follow him on Twitter - he's one of my
favorites).
I always love hearing the backgrounds of our podcast guests,
and especially noticing how they break down between people with
financial backgrounds, and people with anything but. Dominic
is a career banker with 16 years at U.S. Bank and 26 years overall
in financial services product development and management,
commercial risk management, commercial lending and sales
management. He talked with me about how he's complemented that
background with a wide mix of the other skills. He has 25 people,
including many who, as he says, probably "spent a lot of time in
the principal's office."
In our conversation, he talks about how to make these
trouble-makers highly productive and more broadly about the "art"
of making great innovation happen inside a big company.
There's a lot of conventional advice about that challenge,
including the need to wall-off the innovators. Dominic agrees with
that, and also emphasizes that innovation must be a full-time job -
he thinks it's delusional to imagine that part-time people will
somehow stay on top of today's tech trends by catching up on their
reading backlog after hours. At the same time, he talks a lot about
how to keep innovation focused on the practical. One key, he says,
is that "innovation loves constraints." Another is not to start
with an abstract white board session, dreaming up brilliant
solutions in search of problems, but rather to focus on finding the
real problems that need to be solved - especially problems
impacting the customer. When you do that, your bank will usually
want them, even if implementation is going to take some
work.
At the same time, though, the practical focus has to be
balanced with imagination and vision. Dominic's group tries to look
3-5 years ahead in thinking about the bank's operations, and at how
people are behaving differently and doing jobs differently. They
brainstorm trends and find the insights that will reshape markets
and technologies.
One key to getting this balance right is to set up new kinds
of success metrics. Dominic discusses the dissonance between bank
cultures built to keep risks and failures extremely low, versus
innovation that requires trying a lot of things that will
fail. Financial companies need new ways to keep
score.
Our conversation also covered the downside risks that
innovation creates for consumers; his thoughts on how regulation
impacts innovation; and his advice on how to keep up with
technology change. As I mentioned in my year-end wrap up, I always
advise bankers to attend some fintech conferences. Dominic shares
his list of favorites, including Finovate, Bank Innovation, and
SXSW (I'll see you there this year, and also check out my
end-of-year interview with
Chuck Harris of Netspend for my own list of
suggestions, including Emerge).
We also got Dominic's recommendations for fintech
trend-watching:
Wall Street Journal Personal Tech, TechCrunch, and
qz.com.
And last but not least, again, I recommend following
him on Twitter for cutting edge insight on tech trends, mixed
with humor, such as on much needed respites from the content
overload.
Dominic's background:
A few highlights on Dominic's background. He is frequently
featured as a keynote speaker at industry conferences and has been
recognized by Bank Innovation as a Top Innovator in Financial
Services (#3, 2013), Bank Systems & Technology as one of "Elite 8"
CIOs (2012), Twin Cities Business Magazine as one of "200
Minnesotans You Should Know" (2011), "Bank Technology News as
"Mobile Banker of the Year" (2011) and as "Top 10 Innovator" (2009)
and by Paybefore Magazine as a "Top 5 Innovator" (2011). He also
serves on the board of directors of the Minnesota Community and
Technical College Foundation. He earned a bachelor's degree in
finance from Oregon State University and is a graduate of the
Pacific Coast Banking School at the University of Washington
Graduate School of Banking.
The Q Factor:
In our discussion, Dominic shares
examples of innovation successes at U.S. Bank, including
"advances in mobile payments, voice bio-metrics, tokenization and
integrated mobile and web commerce solutions." As
often happens, though, I found that our discussion got even more
interesting after we turned off the microphone. He showed me an
amazing product demo that's still embargoed but that really wowed
me. And we talked about the Internet of Things. And then, he
admired my iPhone 6s - we met just after they came out, and I'd
gotten one before he did. He started talking about the Live Photo
tool, which he described as "Harry Potter feature." As often
happens with me, I had a cool feature on my phone without even
realizing it. So we recorded a little bonus feature as he showed me
how to make a photo animation that looks a bit like the living
portraits in Harry Potter's world. These are fun, as is my Google
Photo tool dreaming up little animations for me using the photos
I've taken. If you have Live Photo and don't know how to use it,
here it
is.
Enjoy my conversation with Dominic Venturo.
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