At the beginning of Cameron Wadley’s career, people asked “silly questions,” such as whether he was a technologist or a banker.

Wadley, a supervision tech executive in Bank of America’s wealth management division, is an electrical engineer by training, but also has a business degree.

“Fast-forward 20 years and it's a ridiculous question, because even to be a pure banker, if you don't know anything about technology, you're not really qualified,” he said in a recent interview. “The world has just changed a lot.”

Wadley, who’s been at the Charlotte, North Carolina-based bank since 2006, has applied for 70 patents and holds more than 40. His patents run the gamut: some are tied to retirement planning or new ways to make payments; some are data-centric, relating to predicting certain situations and proactively notifying a client they can take action. 

Several of Wadley’s patents are at the foundation of Erica, the bank’s artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant. 

With many of his ideas, Wadley’s thought process was tied to Bank of America’s consumer business, and they’re now in use in all eight of the lender’s business lines, and its employee tools in some cases.

“It always starts with the customer problem that we’re trying to solve,” Wadley said. “We've got to have some north star, something to anchor ourselves to, [that] this is actually a good use of the company's resources.”

He raised several potential challenges, such as furthering digitization and reducing contact-center call volume.

An idea is also evaluated for feasibility and scale, he said. Will it meet the $3.5 trillion-asset bank’s risk standards, and can it operate reliably across a global client base?

With one of Wadley’s patents, named “system for predictive usage of resources,” there's broad applicability in pattern matching and using it to predict resolution at scale, from anticipating questions customers might raise in online banking chats or questions BofA employees might ask if they run into tech issues, he said. 

The country’s second-largest bank has about 8,400 granted patents and pending patent applications. About 1,600 of those are AI-focused patents.

Most of BofA’s new patents are being granted related to AI and machine learning, information security, online and mobile banking, payments, data analytics and augmented and virtual reality. The lender spends about $13.5 billion annually on technology, and about $4 billion of that goes toward new initiatives.

Patents offer a competitive advantage and protect the bank’s intellectual property.

“We don't want to do something based on feedback from clients that we roll out there and it delights them, and then all of a sudden we have to take it away because we didn't protect it with some sort of a patent,” Wadley said.

Bank of America seeks to create an innovative culture by encouraging any of its 212,000 employees to put forth an idea they might have and work with a dedicated team to flesh it out, he said.

“Innovation isn’t in its own lane,” Wadley said. “We don’t want some designated geniuses to do all the thinking and everyone else does all the labor.”

The lender also holds innovation challenges, seeing what ideas are generated to tackle general business problems. Erica came to fruition through one of those challenges, he noted.

“It can't just be, ‘Hey, how fun would it be to…?’ It's got to be, ‘Hey, look, this is important. This is how we maintain our edge. This is how we figure out what we want to invest in over time,’” Wadley said. “We've got to create a space for it, and in most cases we do a big one twice a year.”

At a wealth tech innovation summit last week, the bank brought together technologists and employees of Merrill Lynch and the private bank, to think through how they could tap technology to solve real problems. Unsurprisingly, there was keen interest in AI, he said. 

With AI, “everything is being reevaluated,” Wadley said. “Fundamentally, innovation is innovation, but the pace of it and the zeal, the level of enthusiasm, has changed remarkably.” 

Wadley sees room for Bank of America to personalize more, since customers expect financial experiences “to reflect their individual needs in real time, not a one-size-fits-all model,” he said. 

BofA has “made strong progress, but there is still more to do in making those experiences more intuitive, more predictive, and more seamlessly integrated into how clients manage their financial lives,” Wadley said.