In his newly created role at Huntington Bank, Ameesh Vakharia is overseeing the melding of marketing and digital efforts to create better customer experiences.
Vakharia was named chief marketing and digital products officer at the Columbus, Ohio-based regional bank Sept. 2. Previously, Vakharia was chief strategy and brand officer at USAA; he also held leadership roles at Truist and one of its predecessors, SunTrust.
Prior to Vakharia’s joining the bank, marketing at Huntington had been under a different leader, and digital products had been embedded within respective business units, he said; the two were brought together to create one team that supports all of the bank’s businesses.
With Huntington now holding $284 billion in assets and operating across 21 states following the acquisition of two banks last year, Vakharia’s role “makes a lot of sense” as the bank seeks to accelerate its pace of delivery and tell its story in new markets, he said in a recent interview.
“If you think about a consumer or prospect who's going to try and shop and browse for a checking account and then wants to, within a few minutes, be able to open that seamlessly on their phone and be on their way, that spans parts of brand marketing to product marketing to a digital storefront into an onboarding routine that starts to curate what the first 90 days are like,” he said during a recent interview.
“In the past, maybe that was multiple handoffs, and we're seeing, does it need to be, or how can we have better line of sight to that?” he said. “Bringing together what I think would have historically been a separate brand experience from a product experience – customers are seeing those as one and the same nowadays.”
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
BANKING DIVE: When you say customers don't distinguish between brand promise and product experience, what does that mean for the bank?
AMEESH VAKHARIA: Everything from the look and feel of experiences, to how something that’s digital, self-service – how does that hand off and work in concert with our colleague-led channels? Digital is not this thing in and of itself over here. It has to complement the local delivery model. Are folks feeling what is distinctively Huntington as they engage in that?
We can't have marketing buzzwords or campaigns that don't manifest when you have a consumer logging in a billion times a year, or a commercial client trying to accomplish payroll tasks or treasury management tasks. It has to be deeply connected, from the customer insight and the research, to prioritizing what we choose to work on for a sales or service experience for them.
What does a more seamless experience across physical and digital channels look like, and is Huntington there now?
One of the critical things to enable that is clearly the data, because that feeds personalization in digital experiences, but it also feeds context to a colleague, whether that's in a face-to-face interaction with a banker or with one of the colleagues over the phone. Do you know me? Do you understand what my intent is? And if I need to move from one channel of engagement to another, how are we passing that off, so you can stop, start, continue, as opposed to having to start from scratch again, re-explain your situation, and go through it? There are many examples today where you'd say we are doing that. There's always a lot more opportunity to improve that, as especially as you go from online to offline interactions for customers.
How is artificial intelligence changing the marketing function in banks?
How customers are researching and finding potential products and/or companies is completely changing, as you look at what would have been a search engine optimization capability from a few years ago, to how you’re engaging and working across large language models from an agentic AI standpoint.
Being present where customers' shopping behavior is happening is a huge change. Making sure we're showing up, and understanding how to actually market into those new channels, is definitely changing for all marketers.
Internally, the tools are helping us be more efficient, as you think about creative development, reviews and checks before things go out the door, the workflow.
Anything missing from Huntington’s digital product strategy you’re looking to pursue?
It’s an assessment I’m still going through. Broadly speaking, the industry has continued to say, “How can we better deliver advice to a segment of one?” Depending on scale, banks could have several hundred thousand, several million to many millions of customers, and the bar continues to be high relative to establishing trust, knowing that context and delivering advice.
Every time you log in to deposit a check or send someone money via Zelle, you don't want to be met with the same message, whether that's about a new product or a service feature. There, the opportunity is still pretty high for the industry as a whole to get better, and a lot of data, a lot of high-volume interactions create an environment well-suited for digital and AI capabilities.
The types of capabilities we experience and our expectations are not set by banks for one another. It's what we feel when we get recommendations from our media consumption, such as Netflix or Spotify – think that level of how it knows you and can tee something up, but as it relates to financial education, financial advice, the next step you can take, not just the next product you might buy.
