How Bread Financial’s CTO is Transforming Fintech with AI & Agile Innovation | Technovation 950

If you don't take the time to understand why, what outcomes we're trying to drive, then often times you can get into a situation where you're investing a lot of time and a lot of money in technology, but you're not achieving that vision for your customers or for your partner customers.

Thanks, Peter. Thanks for inviting me to join you today. It's a pleasure.

Sure. You did a very nice job, Peter, so thank you. Bread Financial is a tech-forward financial services company. We empower millions of US consumers through our suite of payment and savings products, and we do that through delivering growth with some of the most recognized specialty retail, health and beauty, travel, entertainment, jewelry brands and merchants. Our product suite includes private label, co-brand, and general purpose credit cards; it includes savings products and pay-over-time products.

Sure. From a role perspective, my responsibilities, whether you call it a CIO or CTO, are pretty standard: responsible for the engineering organizations, the tech organization across Bread. When I think about the areas of focus in all the roles I've had, whether it's the previous role as a unit CIO or the role I have now, I've been very focused on how product and engineering come together. I'll talk a little bit about the product operating model transformation. But I think about those key ingredients for success: one is that strong vision about why we're investing in technology, what's that product vision. Two, it's about going deep in engineering excellence. And three, especially in a B2B2C business, it's about connecting to those partners and understanding the experience that our partners want to drive with their customers. So yes, day-to-day responsibilities are just as you would imagine in a CIO/CTO role, but really very focused on how we leverage technology to create those simple, omnichannel, customer-centric experiences as a company.

Sure. When you think about the power of embracing a product operating model, it is really about helping all of the teams that need to work together understand that shared vision and the why. Yes, the what and the how are really important: how are we going to deliver this, what tech stack do you use, where do we run the application, are we taking advantage of the public cloud, are we on-premise on a private cloud infrastructure? But if you don't take the time to understand why, what outcomes we're trying to drive, then oftentimes you can get into a situation where you're investing a lot of time and a lot of money in technology, but you're not achieving that vision for your customers or for your partners' customers. A big part of shifting to a product operating model is just creating more structure around identifying that shared vision and being clear upfront, not just to the commercial teams or the business units who have always been really clear on the objectives, but down to the individual engineers, so that we can help all of that creativity, that untapped creativity that you get in those of us that wanted to go into technology. It's often that problem solving, that creativity, that desire to create that drives the interest in technology to begin with. So how do you take advantage of that creativity and bring it into not just the creativity around the how, but also around the what and the why? It's about speed to market, it's about quality, it's about the experience itself. That's the why. If you think about the three steps that we've taken: one, we zoomed out and we said in 2025, what are the key areas of focus and investment? Then we had a bit of a debate on how we want to organize ourselves and decided to embrace a value stream, capability-oriented model, because we recognize that our customers and our partners really want to be able, depending on the particular customer, to be open to different products and to make that integration with us quite simple, whether that is for a co-brand, a private label, or even a pay-over-time product like Split Pay or installment loan. So we said, let's organize ourselves around capabilities, things like Apply and Buy. From a customer lens, what are the outcomes we want to drive for customers, for partners, around that really streamlined, amazing experience of applying for one of our products and then using that product to buy, to make a purchase? So the first thing we did was really get ourselves organized around where we were going to put subject matter expertise and where we were going to create roadmaps. Then the second thing we did is, based on the size and scale of the objective in 2025, we lined up scrum teams of engineers and, where possible, tried to really dedicate engineers to this capability or set of capabilities, to this value stream, again for the purpose that the more you have dedicated focus, you can bring subject matter expertise and then you can bring business, product, and technology different lenses around the same business objectives and go a little bit deeper on the what and the why. And then the third thing we're doing is, once we have that structure and we have people stacked against it, as much on a dedicated basis as possible, now we're training everyone up on some of the basics of agile that we've already been embracing for a long time, but also what makes a good OKR, how are we going to make that outcome, that objective and key result, clear within that structure to all of those teams, how are we going to create that roadmap and backlog, how are we going to continuously refine. So that third piece is really about process best practices.

Yeah, absolutely. As you said, our goal is to retire our mainframe and our dependencies on the data centers and really take advantage of the public cloud environment, which has a lot of capability, a lot of automation, and the ability to scale very, very quickly and nimbly. We have, as you said, already made quite a bit of progress at this point. All of our partner-facing APIs are in the public cloud, and we've seen some great value from that, whether it's the basic availability of services, whether it's the speed that we can enhance those services for our partners. The small investments that we've made in taking advantage of the public cloud infrastructure, we've already seen some of those returns. The next step from here, now that we have sort of nailed down our cloud strategy more broadly, which is we would like to go all in, we are going through the process of scaling out the landing zone that we have to receive all of the different variety of services and capabilities that we have, not just those most critical partner-facing capabilities. And with that new opportunity comes the ability to lay the foundation of common blueprints, common data strategies, reusable components, all for the purpose of allowing the different engineering teams to focus on building and iterating new capabilities in innovative ways for partners and customers, and not have to spend quite as much time on the interworkings of the platform and the process.

Something that has been incredible to me joining Bread is just how many long-tenured associates we have at the company. I think it's a really a reflection of the culture that we have and the investment in people that the company has had, even well before I joined. So when we think about this journey to the cloud and we think about embracing a product operating model, it's a lot of change. For especially long-tenured associates that have only operated at Bread, it's a lot of learning. For those that have come from different places that have either operated in the public cloud or operated in a product operating model, it's a bit more straightforward. But when we think about the power of the talent that we have, it's about making sure that we're taking the time and we're making the investment in the team, whether it's on what is a product operating model and how do I work with business and product to make the magic happen, how do I think about public cloud, how is it different or the same as whatever architecture I've been working with. So we've on the one hand increased the amount of investment that we are making in our teams and in learning platforms, whether that's the learning platforms of the public cloud providers or additional capabilities that we're bringing in. We're also spending a good amount of time in the first quarter this year making sure that we're making time for learning, because sometimes you can spend a lot on the materials and the instructors and then not really give associates the time and space to devote to the training. So we're looking at: do you embrace a sort of two or three hour block once a month, do you do an innovation sprint, do you do no meetings Friday? I've tried a lot of different things, and something that we're trying to really embrace at Bread, especially taking advantage of the scale of the organization, is make sure wherever possible that the associates in the team have a voice and we're doing what makes most sense for us, not necessarily whatever I've done before or whatever industry says is best. So that's really going to be the focus for this first quarter 2025. We've already nailed down what are the things that we need to train on and made some of those investments. Now it's what's the best way to make enough time and space to train on tech and not neglect also leadership training, because leading through change is tricky in and of itself.

Absolutely. At heart, I'm a scientist, and there are lots of studies on the importance and the business outcomes, especially in creative fields, when you look at how a team of similar thinking individuals performs versus a team with different styles, perspectives, and experiences performs. That's how I define diversity: bringing different perspectives, different experiences, different styles to the same management team or the same scrum team or the same value stream team, if we're going to go back to the product taxonomy, because it's through those different perspectives that you bring a higher number of unique ideas to the table. So when we think about what easy says or does, I try to think about improving and embracing diversity in the hiring process in a couple of ways, and generally they're all pragmatic. It's sort of what are the small things that you can do that add up, that are most likely to move the needle in the objective of having a diverse team that feels engaged and empowered to bring that different perspective to the table. So one: when you're hiring and you're looking at a pipeline of talent, and if you look at the different resumes or the backgrounds or you have conversations and you walk away with a feeling of sameness, sameness of experience, sameness of background, of style, stop. There are so many people in tech with so many diverse experiences, so many different companies at different stages of development, so many skills. So if you're in the hiring process and you find yourself with a group of the same, then pause and have a think about either the way that you've crafted the role or the specificity of what you're looking for, and ask the question: do we need to be that specific? I find in tech, you may need skill A today and then skill B tomorrow, so being too narrow, which then narrows your pipeline of candidates, often works really well tomorrow and then 12, 24 months from now doesn't work out as well. So broaden the pipeline whenever you feel like you're in that position. And ideally, try not to hire one role at a time. There was a great study — I was a psych major before I was a computer science major — there's this great study with kindergarteners. If you ask a group of kindergarteners every morning what do you want for snack, they may tell you 80% of the time they want pretzels, pretzels, pretzels. But if you pull out a calendar and you have with the group, you say, well let's fill out the snack calendar, you'll get materially more variety in the snacks over the course of the month. It's just sort of human nature to say maybe, but we don't want pretzels 80% of the time, that sounds a little boring when you look at it that way. So if you can manage to hire multiple roles, if you can manage to create a pipeline role for engineering managers or a pipeline role for engineers, and then you can sort of hire more people at the same time, sometimes it's a little bit more obvious if the top candidates all feel like they're bringing a very similar set of skills and experiences. Those are my sort of two how I think about diversity and then sort of two tips on how to inject more variety into the team.

Yeah, absolutely. I have on my list, with three young kids it's quite a long list, but on my list is go back and actually see who on LinkedIn posted that initial analogy that really resonated for me, because I will often be asked how do you think about AI and generative AI and the potential impact that it can sort of encroach on jobs. And this idea that there are lots of things that we do as technologists that don't spark joy. There are lots of process, there's a risk of having quite a lot of process work in the day-to-day life of an engineering manager, of an engineer, of someone in infrastructure, in security. So when you think about the things that AI and generative AI is quite good at automating and removing from our plate, frequently they're the things that don't really spark joy. So I love this idea of how do you see AI and generative AI as this tool to help in the pie slice of our everyday life spend more time on the things that spark joy, like product roadmap and technical solutioning of a really hairy technical problem or different ways to optimize an experience, versus making sure that all things have been checked that need to be checked. So I really enjoyed that analogy, it really stuck with me.

I was a concentration in AI when I studied computer science in undergrad, so I do confess that when I think about the different trends, the trend and power of generative AI when you look at the speed that things have improved, it's really incredible. The speed of the pace of change in tech has always been insane, but the generative AI cycles in particular are really incredible. So I'm really excited about the practical use cases of this new technology. You get a little bit in the hype cycle and it solves everything and you have this hammer and you're looking around for the nails risk, and in some cases I've seen some inclination to leverage generative AI for what predictive AI does better. So I'm really excited for the trend where we see some of this new tool and technique combined with what has been done in AI for decades come together and really allow us to, ultimately, the customer experience, and for us the partner experience as well, given it's such an important part of our business.

Yeah, when we chatted last, I had a chuckle which is I very rarely read non-fiction, and I looked at my book list and I said, you know, I'm going to read a non-fiction book and I kind of say it's amazing. So I'm reading right now a book called, I just looked it up, A Woman of No Importance. It's about Virginia Hall, one of the first SOE British intelligence members and the first woman for a very long time in the Second World War, and sort of tracks her really remarkable — it hits that truth is often stranger than fiction scenario. She lost her leg in a bit of a freak accident and yet was, I think, the longest spy in country in France during the Second World War. She actually escaped — and I'm only about 53% through the book, so stay tuned — she escaped over the Pyrenees with an artificial leg that she managed to hide and shield over a 6,000-foot pass in the Pyrenees. And the things that I really enjoy about fiction, all of the different characters and different time periods and thinking about what are those lessons that history teaches us, fiction or non-fiction. I read historical fiction and crime and comedy and fantasy. Last year might have been my low point: I read 62 books. The year before I read 74 books, 93 the year before. So apparently changing jobs is a reduction. I think it's important to work hard, play hard. I have three little — my husband and I have three little kids, 10, 8, and 4. I like to make sure I bring a good amount of balance in what I read, what we do, and try to encourage the team to do the same.

Thank you, Peter. I had a great time.