Navigating Change, Technology and Leadership with Souheil Badran, SEVP, COO at U.S. Bank

Thanks, Craig. Thanks for having me. And I can see your background's in beautiful downtown Milwaukee. Beautiful background and city that we were just talking about. It is absolutely a beautiful city. I wish I could give you a better and sunnier day, but we'll take it with no rain.

Yeah, thanks again for having me. Great, excited to be here. Just as a background, I was born in 1975. Okay, so diverted to a small island between Italy and North Africa called Malta. Lived there for four years, then went back to Lebanon thinking that the war was over, but ended up doing a boomerang and went back and finished school in Malta in 1983 before coming to the center. It was primarily because of the war, so many of my friends, we all left all the same age around the same time. But thanks to technology, we're all able to stay in touch through WhatsApp and Facebook and a couple other social media, so you feel like you haven't lost a beat. But yeah, I came here in 1985 to Milwaukee, actually. Okay, and went to a small university here for my undergraduate, ended up getting my graduate degree there, met my wife in 1986. Got involved in Lebanon, and now of course they're also part of some of the war activities and some of the things, so it's been kind of a roller coaster ever since you left, hasn't it?

Yeah, well, we all do. I met another gentleman that's from Lebanon, and I always am very curious about every country. And he just described it being such a beautiful, wonderful country. And so someday I hope to visit and hopefully that things can recover here soon.

Yeah, I think a couple of things. I mean, absolutely come a long way. Financial services was this quiet banking system all around, and that's really what I started my career as a developer, believe it or not, coding on mainframes back then. Of course, not shy to mention the year, which was 1990. And things obviously have changed. We've moved into what we know now as a cloud environment, but believe it or not, we still have mainframes. They're still good workforces that we keep an eye on every single day. And especially now with the last couple of years with what's happening with AI, what can we do with generative AI, predictive AI? I think that really keeps us looking ahead versus being able to say, 'Oh yeah, we're stable, things are good.' So that's an area that we keep an eye on. But if you think about the topics themselves, there are still some historical things. People thought checks were dead many, many years ago. Guess what? Even with the likes of Zelle, people are still writing checks. I just wrote one last week. There you go. I used to joke that the only time I wrote checks was for my kids' tuition, but even now electronic payments are moving to real-time payments, and that's an area that's really exciting. But at the same time, you have to keep an eye on fraud, cyber security, making sure that you're paying the right person. The second part is, kind of like what we think about is traditional. Additionally, we're doing a lot of things on spreadsheets, and you think about with the innovation that's going on with automation, what we're able to find is really work with the teams that are on the ground and saying, 'What are some of the things that you're doing day-to-day? What can we take away from you that you would consider manual, whether it's 20, 30, 40% of your daily work, and how can we automate that so you can focus on the results?' Reconciliation, we think that if you brought in the right process inside the steam and we're able to automate it, we can then make sure that we're just focused on the results and making sure that we see it through and we can spend more time on other things. So you can set the theme at the top, but the reality is it's really being hands-on and working with the teams on the ground that are doing the day-to-day efforts that you really see the productivity.

I would say, number one, no matter what new technology, there were times when I was in the red and then you see the bounce and you're back in. So because it's not backed by anything solid, it's a risk. It's a higher risk than many. I'm not going to go as far as CDs and getting four or five percent, but equities, right? So really depends on your tolerance. But I think the number one is get educated, and please, please, please do not get influenced by somebody on social media that's standing in front of a Ferrari telling you how they made their money, because I guarantee you that's probably leased so they can get your money. So you got to be very, very careful, because again, you can't get it back. And you got to be very careful who you're paying, when you're paying, how much you're paying. If you're using regulation, I mean even at the federal level, people are still discussing how do you track it. And unfortunately, again, same as any new environment, you're seeing some of the bad stories out there, and that gives you a pause to say, 'All right, am I going to put my money in an exchange and will I see that money ever again?' Because we've seen some of the losses that were incurred by professional investors even.

No, I'm glad you mentioned South Korea, because you again haven't done that. Our nationville work in the past including South Korea. A lot of it honestly, Craig, depends on the banking system. So if you think about the United States back in at least when I started my career in the early '90s, we had about 14,000 financial institutions. Now we're under 5,000. But think about certain markets where you have somewhere between five and 10 banks that have the opportunity to offer services to 80% of the market. That collaboration is tighter. That collaboration you can make decisions on certain processes, certain regulations, and I think that helps expedite. So right now, I think the fact that we're a little bit more dispersed, for lack of better terms, probably puts us in a little bit of a 'watch and improve along the way before we get to a final decision' mode.

Right. Well, another topic, Souheil, and again, I just want to bring up some really relevant topics, and that's financial fraud. It's astounding. I don't think it's a matter of if a person's going to have something occur that was scary and astounding, and Federal authorities got involved type of thing. So you know a lot more about that than the average person, obviously, and how incredibly pervasive it is. Any advice or just awareness for folks out there and how big this challenge is and what they can do to prevent themselves from being in a bad position?

Yeah, let me start with the advice, because similar to you, we've gone through it a couple years ago. My wife was on a road trip actually during COVID. She drove my middle daughter lives in Denver, she drove along the way, and she only used her debit card once, and all of a sudden we get a call from a bank saying, 'Are you responsible for all these charges?' And they're all somewhere. The bank reversed all of them. Realizing it was fraud, I would say sign up for organizations. I don't mind mentioning them: LifeLock is a great example, and probably there are a couple more, Experian and others. Second, make sure you put a lock on your credit bureau file. Third, please change your passwords on a regular basis or use one of the password tools that are out there where they basically provide passwords to whatever site you're on that you don't even remember, but you have that master. So I think those are the three that I would do right away. And just keep an eye on your statements. And we've become so automated that you tend to... In terms, I mean, it's... Go ahead, no, please go ahead, ask a question.

I think there are a couple things you have to keep an eye on, and it ties back to your second part of the question. The first part I should say, which is across the globe, not just financial services, you're seeing a lot of databases being sold and hell, you get notifications from your financial institution or others if you're subscribed that says, 'Hey, we notice that your email, user ID, password...' Transactions for anybody working in the financial services industry, there are fraud teams and that's all they do all day. And there's a lot of investments happening to make sure that whether or not it is you, does your transaction look familiar? Is it being done in a way that's outside of your norm? Is it something that you're overspending on that isn't really you? That you haven't done this in the past in an environment that you haven't? At the same time, you still see check fraud, right? And people opening up mailboxes. So it's not one area where fraud is happening. It's still happening in traditional methods, but also now in the world that we live in online. There's a good movie called 'The Beekeeper' with Jason Statham. A little bit violent movie, but I would take a look at it. It's about a professional organization that targets elderly and says, 'Hey, there's a virus on your account, give us your password, we'll fix it for you,' and then they drain their account. So these are things that are still happening. And financial institutions, but even let me pause there. Used to be that you had one dealing with the bank, but right now through the technology, if you use any of your... and I'm not going to ask who you bank with, but if you think about how you concentrate, whether it's your brokerage account, your bank, your lending, a lot of them come together to make sure that the whole ecosystem is being protected.

I've been able to mentor a few people in my career, especially in the last probably eight to 10 years. It really depends on the individual. And what I mean by that is I have friends that we started our careers together as developers. They've been with the same organization 30 plus years now. I look at their career and it's always greener on the other side. I think, look, part of again, I'll speak for me personally, part of what got me to where I am today is that curiosity, if you will. I knew early in my career that I wanted to figure out when I was a programmer, I wanted to know what I was programming for. So I went into product management. That got me involved with clients, understand what they were looking for. Then I said, 'Do you have any P&L experience?' I said no. 'What would I need to get there?' So I got into real product management, looking at products from beginning to end, and that helped me. That's where I got my MBA as well. That helped me in my career at the time. So there's all that curiosity on why are we doing what we're doing, and that led me into other things. So my advice to others would be, I've got some friends who are still in the technology realm. The technology path, they went from being individual developers to leading teams of developers, and now going from mainframes into clouds and data and AI, a lot of it on the tech path. So my advice would be, in a sense, follow your passion, follow what your give is. Many, many years ago, this was about 15 years ago, just on an IPO, and I got approached by a private equity firm. And I talked to a friend of mine who was in private equity, and his name is Chad. I said, 'Chad, I'm getting approached. I've known you for a while, you're in it. What would you think?' And he said, 'If I know you well enough, you're an operator. Meaning I think you're going to get frustrated just looking at spreadsheets and what other people are doing. I know you well enough where you want to roll up your sleeves and try and fix things.' And that one comment basically took me in a different path. What looked interesting from the outside and still is interesting was probably at the time not meant for me. And I'm glad that I took his advice. So I would say, follow your passion, but also find a mentor who's going to not just tell you what you want to hear, but really challenge you because they know you well enough to give you the appropriate advice.

Yeah, it's a great question. And in full disclosure, you and I have met in the past a couple months ago getting ready for this call, so it honestly gave me a chance to kind of think about how would I describe it. And I'm a big believer in the rule of three, okay? But I'm actually going to shift this to five, all right? Because that's how I... and I hope if you ever get a team, if I looked at my team today at the bank, they were all in place today. So it wasn't like I came into this new environment, brought in my own team with my own playbook. They're all fairly great senior leaders in their own right, but they were all running different units, and it was the first time that we brought them in as a team. So by fostering this inclusive environment, we're able to over-deliver, and that's kind of harnessing the power. The second on my side, the reason I took this role also is back to your point around continuous learning. There are areas, if I think about what I manage today, mortgage and lending, while I had been in financial services, I've never really worked in that group before. So to me, it was an opportunity to learn and bring more transparency to the team so they're learning from each other as well. By curiosity, asking questions, nothing is off limits in a respectful way, obviously. But if I have five teams, some are probably more mature in their processes than others, so why go through the same mistakes? Why not learn from each other? The third is empowerment. And I put it in the middle in a sense, but really it's kind of one of the cores. Give the tools, give the resources, have them come up to you with good ideas, but support them where they need to succeed. My job isn't to challenge and say it's a good idea or a bad idea, because I know that we're all at least... priorities. Let's use automation and AI as an example. Automation AI is probably going to have a better weighting than something else, but at the same time, is it something else that we're going to put behind necessary? So empowering them to come up with the ideas is really key. The fourth is EQ, or emotional intelligence. It's vital for building a strong relationship. Everybody's smart, but being able to balance that intelligence with that EQ, aligning our values and considering the broader impact in everything that we're doing on the large teams that we're managing, is really key. And that's why we focused on automation. Why are we focused on efficiency? To drive better value for the bank. And last but not least, integrity, ethical behavior. Those are non-negotiables. You don't last in the financial services industry the way we do in our careers. So you got to make decisions every single day, everything that you do, that align to our values and considering the broader impact for the reputation of not just the bank, but your team and your own reputation as well. So those are the ones that I try and really focus on as a team and drive it. And we have an ethical hotline, so if something didn't, somebody made a comment that gets reported, and you look at it. I appreciate you planting the seed with that question because it's hard to summarize. You want to throw one off the cuff, but I know hopefully you're going to have a lot of listeners. That to me is really key, and you try and act it every single day. And I think having beliefs is one thing, but being able to act it every single day is really key.

This one I will keep it correct to the rule of three, okay? And again, these are things that I witnessed through my parents, through the good mentors that I've had throughout my career. Somebody asked me a couple of days ago, and it's funny, it's based on the movie title, 'What's your favorite...' Having lived in different countries, life is constantly evolving, and you have to be adaptable to be able to navigate ups and downs. So that's one. The second is you can't live life on your own, so valuing the relationships is absolutely key because they're the cornerstone of fulfilling your life. Whether it's your significant other, your family, your kids, your parents, your mentors along the way, people that you've dealt with that helped you without you knowing it. Meaningful relationships, meaningful connections is absolutely key. And the third is practicing gratitude. That to me is... appreciate the time versus writing you. So you should know what to expect, Craig. Craig is writing you something that's meaningful. Whether you go to a party, whether somebody, my friend Chad who helped me 15 years ago, being grateful for the time that people spend with you, even if it's just five minutes, that goes a long way and it shows that you mean it. So that's something I would say I continue to work on myself, and I would encourage others to work on. Don't call people when you just need something. Call them or send them something when it's least expected, and that's a form of showing gratitude as well. And those are things that I would say help me not just in my career, because that sounds selfish, but more importantly helped me maintain the relationships.

Craig, again, good luck and thanks for putting the podcast together in the first place. So I appreciate you. Thanks so much.