Chase's Chief Product Officer On Shaping The Future Of Banking: 'Artificial Intelligence Is A Hot Topic'

The banking landscape post-COVID-19 pandemic looks different, with some surveys showing upwards of 90% of consumers prefer managing their money in one place, online. The tech-forward banks are some clear winners in this race, particularly following the financial crises over the last two years.

Benzinga chatted with Chase Chief Product Officer Rohan Amin to learn more. Here’s a lightly edited version of the conversation that transpired.

Q: Hello, Rohan! It is nice to meet you. Can you share with me your background?

Amin: I worked in the defense and intelligence community near the [Washington] D.C. metro area for over a decade. It was a fantastic experience that had nothing to do with financial services; instead, I was doing government work in information technology, cybersecurity, and electronic warfare.

In 2014, I received a call from JPMorgan Chase. This opportunity also allowed me to be closer to my family, and I took it. Since joining, I’ve had three jobs. I was the Chief Information Security Officer responsible for the banks’ cybersecurity globally. I was the Chief Information Officer. And now, I am the Chief Product Officer accountable for product development, design, data, and analytics, including our AI and machine learning agendas.

Q: What does your day-to-day look like?

Amin: The best way to describe that is to talk about one of my peers, Gill Haus, the chief Information officer. He took the job I had in terms of running our technology.

Today, Gill and I copilot our customer-facing product development organization. That’s 17,000 product developers, engineers, designers and data and analytics people. We refer to them as the quad. They make up the roughly 100 teams that build all the experiences, such as the process by which customers open an account and our credit monitoring tools free to customers and non-customers. My day-to-day is strategy and working with the teams to birth new customer experiences.

Q: How do you balance innovation with security?

Amin: Job number one is the security and privacy of our customers' data. For example, we were the first bank to move away from screen scraping, not allowing third parties to scrape customer data, and to ensure people are using secure APIs and exposing that to the customer.

In other words, customers can turn things on and off regarding where their data gets shared. All our work on fraud and protecting customers against scams — ensuring we have a well-run, well-controlled environment — is job one.

Job two is to bring new value to customers, taking inspiration from all forms of competitors, including fintechs.

Most of our inspiration comes from our customers, though. We prefer that we have the best offering or one that best addresses customer needs. Sometimes, we are first, and sometimes we are not. That is fine.

An excellent example is our Chase Pay in 4℠ offerings, launched as our answer to buy now, pay later. Essentially, debit card customers can split purchases between $50 and $400 into four installments and pay no fees or interest.

Q: What trends have you observed?

Amin: We did our digital banking survey in 2023, and over 90% of survey respondents said they use the mobile app more than once monthly. We see more customers using mobile versus desktop web browsers. So, mobile adoption continues to rise.

Second, installment lending and digital payments continue to increase, and we have been bringing to market our offerings in those spaces as well.

We have 26 million active users of Zelle, and that number is growing.

Lastly, our personalization and credit monitoring tools, which allow customers and non-customers to get their credit scores and personalized plans for improving their scores, are seeing a lot of interest, particularly from the millennial generation.

Q: How are those trends, among other factors, influencing your product roadmap?

Amin: There are several factors that we respond to in real time. For instance, we had the pandemic, during which we had to pivot all of our plans to help small businesses pay their bills, employees and other things they had to do.

Sometimes, macro situations may drive our roadmap. In other cases, it’s those trends we just talked about, including installment and point-of-sale lending. When we observe customers who want to use those payment solutions, we'll build in response to that.

We obsess over feedback, listening to calls, or reading input verbatim in our app. All those wants and needs get added to our product backlog. Our managers will synthesize all the feedback and set objectives that we will work into our apps, which are updated every two weeks.

Q: Say you have a customer that’s experiencing an issue. How does their feedback flow to you or your teams? How quickly are those issues then resolved?

Amin: We have dashboards that retrieve customer feedback from places like the Apple App Store within minutes. We’ll mine that data to understand what the issues are.

We’ve gotten so good at recognizing and addressing issues that if you’re having a problem and you call, our automated interactive voice response (IVR) system will change the menu options to surface the thing you want. So, if we think you're having trouble with a payment, the first thing you'll hear when you call is making a payment.

Q: What excites you most as we head toward year-end and 2024?

Amin: Machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) are hot topics. We’re careful to explore, integrate and use these technologies to enhance our customer-facing products and services and some of our back-office operations. Fundamentally, AI and machine learning help us personalize the content surfacing to you so that your online and physical interactions at our branches, which 60% of customers use, are holistic and pleasant.

Photo: Tim  Samuel via Pexels