An Interview with the Managing Director at BNY Mellon, Aaron Todd

Speaker A: Hi, I'm Howard Tiersky. Welcome to the Winning Digital Customers podcast where we focus on the stories of large scale digital transformations told by the people who lead them. Hey everybody. Welcome once again to the Winning Digital Customers podcast. I'm joined today by my good friend Aaron Todd here. He is a former McKinsey partner and has spent more than the last decade with BNY Mellon driving transformation. And we will be talking today about how they drive transformation at BNY Mellon, some of the things he's learned and some tips that we can all use in our efforts, in our heroic efforts every day to drive transformation, whether in financial services or otherwise. Um, I should add, if for anyone, I would imagine Most everybody knows BNY Mellon, but I'll just say a word or two. BNY Mellon is number 180 on the Fortune 500 list. Giant financial services organization. They are the world's largest custody bank. They are the world's sixth largest investment management firm. And not only that, they are one of the oldest banks in the world, founded in 1784 by Alexander Hamilton and another Aaron, Aaron Burr. So can you imagine that? First they found a bank and then they get into a duel. I'm sure we'll have a lot of interesting discussion about that. Maybe not, but they should have covered that in Hamilton anyway. So that's, uh, bny, and that is Aaron. Aaron, welcome to the show. So happy to have you here. Anything you want to add by way of introduction so that people know who you are before we dive into some of the great stuff you want to

Speaker B: talk about, I think you've covered most of it. I think just a couple highlights. Uh, over a decade at the bank, having held seven different roles across strategy, tech, operations, client service, the business, and what's most exciting here, about two years, helping start and drive digital transformation across the bank. And so I think that's a little bit of what we're here to talk about. So very excited, uh, to join you, Howard, in this discussion.

Speaker A: Awesome. And you know, I mean, when we talk about driving digital transformation at the oldest bank in the world, founded by the founding fathers of this country, practically, it makes one naturally think that sounds a little tricky. I mean, uh, you think of digital transformation being easier in newer companies and harder and older companies, and you are one of the oldest, probably one of the oldest operating companies in the country. Um, how is that? How does the age of the organization positively or negatively affect trying to drive change? I imagine it's been through a lot of change over the years.

Speaker B: Well, and I think you hit on it, there's two points here. The first is it is a large old institution. And so with any large old institution, it brings challenge. Yet at the same time, because we'd been along and around that long, we've had to have figured out we've transformed numerous times. And we often joked early on it's like, hey, we're doing digital transformation. We're like, we've probably done this a couple times. When we invented the computer, we were one of the first banks to use a computer full stop. And so it's like we've obviously figured out transformation numerous times to be around for 200 plus years.

Speaker A: Right. You're not using those big dusty ledgers by candlelight anymore. So you obviously, as probably is how it was when Alexander Hamilton founded it all those years ago.

Speaker B: No, we have them in nice pretty glass cases.

Speaker A: Well, do you?

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker C: Cool.

Speaker A: That's, that's cool. The BNY Mellon Museum. I love it. So. So let's talk a little bit about how you develop a vision when you have such a storied company that has so much history and you want to try to get everyone aligned around a different way of business, a more contemporary way of doing business. I know you've used some really interesting practices to create that transformation vision there. Can you tell us a little bit the story about how you got started in that, who you involved and how you, how you successfully created a vision for the future of the organization that you got by into?

Speaker B: Yeah, so we commonly refer to this as like the reimagination process. And it is something we've kind of started doing differently over the last couple years. And, uh, I'll jump to the end. There's no real secret sauce. If you kind of tick off all the items individually, you'll say that's not, you know, novel. But I think what's special is bringing them all together and holding yourself accountable to that process. And so a couple of those, you know, common items. So one is beginning to look at the problem end to end as well as including the client lens. Amazon talks about the red chair that represents the client, et cetera. But it is really who in the room is representing the client's view. And whether we do that by bringing in clients, which we did, or client surveys, information from them over the years, making sure that their voice is represented is a critical part of it. I think the second part is with any complex process, we're getting representatives from each different part of the organization along that, whether it's from the, you know, the business in the front End indicating with the clients, ops, tech, you know, finance, legal, you name the different pieces. If they have a critical voice here, are they being represented in that reimagination process? I, uh, see two more sessions. One is then use professionals to facilitate that. Now in many cases we've hired people who've done this in numerous agencies. This is what they do, this is what they're trained to do. And using them to facilitate those sessions. Critical part of it. And then finally we actually co located this team for the vast majority of six weeks in Pittsburgh, wiped out a giant conference room, whiteboards on the wall on our innovation center, brought them in and brought them out of their day to day job so that this was, they were living and breathing this for six weeks. And you know, that's a massive investment in time. But we saw that it paid dividends when we looked at the end product. And so I think those are just a couple of the things that we saw were critical to reimagining and getting to a solid, detailed view of the future.

Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. And I want to ask you some more specific questions about those six weeks. Uh, because that's of everything you said, that's the part that's probably the least common. Most of the time you don't hear. You hear we did a two day off site. Yes, but not. We took everyone out of business, out of their day to day. And I mean it must have been, uh, people must have been dying for the opportunity to come to Pittsburgh for six weeks. I mean just that alone, you know, um, it is teasing. Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh is actually a lovely place, much nicer than people would think. But in any case, um, so, uh, can you tell us a little bit about, um, first of all, maybe give the audience a little bit of background. And when you say you were driving transformation of processes, like what specifically were you working? Was it account opening? Was it business to business or more business to consumer? Like what, what kinds of things were you transforming? And then I'd love you to just tell the story about, okay, you brought all these people there for six weeks, who did you bring? How did you spend the six weeks? Did you just sit in a room for six weeks and talking about it or what kind of structure did you have around it? How did you divide the time, et, uh, cetera, et cetera. We'd love to just kind of have more detail on that because I think that's really interesting.

Speaker B: Yeah. So we've done this for a number of different opportunities. Whether it was end to end billing, client onboarding, uh, but in particular I want to talk about our client sales and servicing. So we spent a lot of time looking at how we service clients. And so a lot of people call this like the client inquiry process and custody, looking at whether you're thinking about call center complaints, email inbound, like when we get a client and they have something they need help with, how do we service that? Right. So we started pretty broad and we brought in basically client service experts and representatives from the various different business lines across the organization and started with identifying like, what are the commonalities in concerns that we are hearing from our clients? Where did we stand up in our commonalities or kind of lack of commonalities on processes, toolkits, et cetera. So if you think about the six weeks, the first couple were, you know, similar to what you would see as a two day off site, just gathering the information and beginning to lay out, um, kind of like the client journey mappings, the flow diagrams, like how does this view, you know, from a client's point of view? And then internally, what are the operations team, client service reps, what are we doing internally to meet those different expectations, those different kind uh, of pain points of the clients? And so the first phase was on getting that common methodology, that common view. And in a lot of cases it's having the right person run back to their team, pull out those flow diagrams, pull out that data and get it into one place. The second phase then was testing, uh, going through ideation, like, hey, what are the ideas of the pain points? What do we think the answer is? And then moving into testing that with our clients. We actually brought clients in to speak to us and hearing what they were saying and then shared with them our views, like, hey, we've heard this, what do you think about these concepts? What do you think about these? Uh, do we have it right? And so I think that was, you know, the next phase then that we've, you know, established a structure and began to build out what a future could look like, uh, based upon that direction. And then we tested that with our technologists, we tested that with our client service reps, and then began to form on what this kind of theoretical answer could be and kind of form out a, kind of built out a kind of an end to end target state, experience the technology, what screens look like. And I think that was like kind of towards the end of five weeks. And then we spent the last week like six sizing it up. Like, what is the impact you could see from this? So to the view of like, what does six weeks look like that's a lot of what our, that six week kind of, ah, you know, reimagination session looked like?

Speaker A: That sounds fantastic. Um, and what was the output? Was it drawn journey maps? Was it requirements documents, user stories, what literally when you finished, you said, we're done. This is what it is. What was it?

Speaker B: Yeah, so you hit on a couple of them. So you had a kind of high level flow diagram of what the process looks like, both from a client experience view as well as a kind of internal technical flow view of like, hey, here's what these changes would be. Uh, on top of that, then you had uh, kind of an impact assessment. What would this impact from a, you know, system design? What are the impact from employees? Are there changes there? Is it more efficient? Is it not? What's that impact assessment? And then kind of most important, like what is next step, like what is to do this? What is the high level plan look like to get from our idea to that future state? And so I think those were like the outcomes of that session that kind of concluded the six weeks. But that's far from impactful. Right. It's like, great, I've now got this design and then we start to say, like, how do I get that theory into a target state plan into an approved idea that we need to go take forward? And so that then takes us into like the next phase.

Speaker A: Yeah, great. I would want to ask you one more question about the six weeks and then I want to move into that next phase. So. So to be able to do this ton of work effectively, figure out what does the front end look like, what does the back end look like? I imagine it's really critical to have the right people participating. How did you figure out who all? First of all, it'd be interesting to know roughly how many people participated in the six weeks. Were they all there the entire time or did some of them come and go? And what were the skills? What were the types of people that you had involved?

Speaker B: Yeah, so you had a couple that came and went, but the first was the skills was, you know, representation. That was what I'll call like senior enough to know how things worked in their organization. Right. And in some cases it was, you know, the kind of most senior line manager from, you know, client service for group X or client service for group Y. Right. Now the interesting thing is the structure across our different groups change. So finding that right person, uh, you know, was critical to the success. And it often started with, you know, talking to the organizational, you know, owner CEO or the next level down about this is what we're trying to achieve. Who do you want representing you in that to make it successful? And so I think that was a very critical question because put a little bit of onus on the business head to choose the right person and to also empower that person to represent them. And so I think that was a core part of it. Uh, the second part was we followed some data and said, well, these are the core systems we use. Who understands those systems? Who are the people we need to go after? And a couple of those technologists. We had one kind of generalist technologist dedicated for the whole time, but then we brought in or out these other technologists based upon the deep owners of those various systems. Uh, from a technologist standpoint of view, we had a generalist kind of part of the team the entire time, uh, to basically tell us when something was hard, when something was easy, and also to play as the liaison to the expert technologists that represent each of the different systems that we are using now. The other critical components we had were two. One is we had digital experts that came in and out. These are the newer technologies we're looking at using. So when we looked at using AI, we brought in a kind of digital expert on AI early on to give us a primer and then to also test us on the ideas later on. The other thing we did is we identified a potential, um, product owner or any kind of process owner for the future. And that person helped shepherd the entire process together. Now it was leading a little bit with, hey, if we're going to be doing this as a group, we're going to have to have someone that owns it end to end. And so we had a very capable woman, Leila, uh, Sejczak, who joined us for that entire session. She was critical to the success. Now later on we did hire a full time person to take this on and Layla transition to that individual. But that view of like, we need someone who sees ownership end to end of this was a critical part of the design and the eventual solution.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's great. I mean I love this story because it contains so many truly best practices that so often are not followed. And that's one thing that we often, uh, we're always looking for when we run workshops, for example, which is whoever's going to drive this afterwards needs to be a part of it from the beginning so that they can be in the. We don't want to get to the end of the workshop and be like, okay, we figured out what we're going to do now, who's going to lead this? You really want that person to be there. And they, you know, and one of the rules we always have when we have workshops and we've identified that person is that sometimes in workshop type sessions there's a point where you have to move on. You know, where you have to say, okay, we've had enough discussion, but like time wise we need to move the next thing. But the rule was always that one person, the person who had to be responsible for sort of being the product owner, project manager, pushing things forward, they always got all their questions answered like they were the one person. This is our sort of standing goal. That person can never be left with unanswered questions because ultimately they're going to be the one accountable afterwards. So, um, yeah, that's, that's, that's fantastic. So, and well, I just, gosh, I have to ask you one more question about this phase and then we're definitely gonna move on the next phase, which is, was it hard to get everyone in alignment? When you finished, did you have something that absolutely everyone agreed on 100% or were there a lot of, you know, lively debates? Were there things that no one ever really totally agreed on but you just finally had to make a decision? Or did you find that once all the facts were on the table the, that everyone pretty much uh, lined up around how the future vision of the

Speaker B: transformation should be to gain alignment on vision. But once you start getting into the implications of that, uh, is when it got difficult and I think the right level of debate led to better answers. And I think that was critical. And the exciting part, I think at times you would park items that said the level of challenge to achieve that varied throughout different parts of the organization. And at times it often had a lot to do with the history and their past investments. If organizations had already invested in a certain level of automation, uh, to address problems, their willingness to transition to a new common system or a new common approach approach was lower. Right. Hey, my problem's not as big because I've already invested versus other groups that I'm completely manual and moving to this automated solution is like gold to me. I'm definitely going to do it. And so I think you've got a little bit of that difference to address.

Speaker A: So I just want to ask you one last question about this six week workshop process which is so interesting. And then I want to move on to talk about the process of getting it funded and implementing it. But I'm curious, did you find that everyone was pretty aligned. Like you brought everyone together and laid it all out and everyone was sort of on the same page pretty quickly. Or rather that, uh, as I often find, you know, different people have different points of view and it's, it's tough to get everyone to really align around a common vision. Uh, how, how difficult was that? And did you wind up with something that everyone really was 100 behind or did you still have to wind up with something that was kind of a, a compromise in horse trading and not necessarily something you really had complete buy in or from the people in the workshop?

Speaker B: Yeah. So I think the people in the workshop there ended up being quite a large alignment along the vision. Right. But then once you get into the details and what I'll call is like sequencing of organizations, moving to that vision is where the um, where the rub comes in. Right. Where you had different organizations who had already previously invested in different levels of automation and therefore the benefit of them switching to a new common platform or new solution was lower versus organizations that may have not had that level of advancement. And therefore there's a huge advantage for them shifting. And so I think the differences that we began to work through are the sequencing and the level of integration that would result. And I think for some they weren't on a platform, moving to something was going to be hugely impactful. They wanted to go first. And others, once something was up and running and tested, there's going to be more benefit for them shifting over. So I think there was that spectrum, but everyone aligned on like what I'll call the shiny vision in the sky. And it was much more into the details of how do we get there now.

Speaker A: Well, yeah, even that's a victory to me. I think, uh, I always say it's easier to agree to agree than it is to agree. You go into something like we're going to get aligned on something, you know, and then when it comes time to actually agree, people are like, well, no, wait a minute, that's not what I think. So, um, that's, that's, that's in of M itself.

Speaker B: Great.

Speaker A: And it sounds like even in this workshop then you were really getting to more than just the vision, but really a detailed implementation plan during the six week period.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I think we got different core parts, had details to them. Right. As I would imagine, like if you had a full picture on the wall, you know, left to right being the C sequence and then up and down being the detail, it was a little bit more like a comb. Right. You had Areas where it's like, hey, this is, this is where we need to really figure something out. And so you went deep, but it did leave, you know, different gaps that still had to be, you know, worked out as you went.

Speaker C: Mhm, mhm.

Speaker B: Great.

Speaker A: Well, it still sounds like a lot accomplished in a six week period, so that's, that's wonderful. Um, so let's move on to the next part. So once I would imagine after spending six weeks with all of these key people coming up with the vision, you probably just went to your CEO and board of directors and within a couple of days they'd said, well, if you guys all agree on it, we agree. Here's the money, go forward, full speed ahead. Is that what happened next?

Speaker B: I'd say it'd be nice if that were the case.

Speaker A: You could tell I'm joking in my question. I know it never quite goes that way.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think there was, you know, we started with a foundation of directional alignment because we invested six weeks, you invested critical time. And so I think that largely came on the back of the operation. Owners and various parts of the business who are putting up time. So I think we started with that foundation. But as you can imagine, replacing changing platforms, not cheap. And also when you're interacting with client service, you're going to impact your clients and therefore a, uh, high level of expectation has to resolve for you to make that investment. Now going into this, I think we were fairly well aligned. However, during this time we did have a change in the coo. And so one of the biggest backers of this ended up leaving the organization. And uh, this is on the back of a kind of a CEO transition we had a number of years ago. And so I think that did lead us into a number of weeks where, where there were four critical leaders. I was one of them. Um, so you had a leader from digital, one from ops, one from client, uh, service, and one from tech who are kind of supporting and trying to drive this forward. And so I think that was critical to the long term success. But then we needed to once again convince, uh, a number of executives, the new COO included, that this was something they should be doing. And I think there are a couple lessons learned there. One, having the number of dedicated people was critical to this. And I say dedicated not from a time point of view, but dedicated to this vision was critical to making that happen. Uh, the second thing was we had what I'll call decent documentation of previous support, but we did need to kind of clean that up again and to move forward and almost like represent it to the coo re present to the CEO of what was going on. And if I had anything to do again it would have been to have like document some of that along the way. Slightly better because we had to you know, spend a little bit of time cleaning up some of that information, uh, which we didn't do as well, but we did re go through that process.

Speaker A: So this is like the shuttle diplomacy part of it. You talk to this person and they say well I'll agree as long as I have this. And then that person says well but I also need this. And you get all these complex, I'll do this if that. And then making sure you can keep all, keep track of all that. That's what you're talking about?

Speaker B: Yes. As well as uh, kind of pinning them down a little bit of their numbers. How many of your people are doing this? How much do you spend on that system a year? It's kind of getting all of those things on paper in a common way that you know, you could then get uh, know, get behind. And so I think that was a little bit of the challenge that we could have done a better job on. But uh, we eventually got there. But it did probably cost us three, four weeks in calendar time.

Speaker C: Mhm.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Well in the grand scheme, I mean uh, that's not a long time for major decision making. And, and how important do you think the fact that the recommendations you were, you were pitching came from this robust six week cross departmental effort did that? I would, I would think, but I'd be curious like how much you feel it added to sort of the weight and the credibility of being able to then get the buy in after that.

Speaker B: I think the details that came out of this definitely added to the credibility because it wasn't just a, uh, theoretical. Hey, we put a big black box here. Right. It identified core issues as well as what the solution would look like. And so being able to articulate that solution was very important. And I think as mentioned earlier, we actually brought clients in that gave support and some of them were actually willing to be pilot clients with us in this. And I think that also added a level of kind of critical support where it wasn't our theoretical view of what they wanted. They a couple really large clients were articulating. Yes, this, you know, would be something we were excited about.

Speaker A: Yeah, great. And it sounds like you were saying there was also maybe some, some lobbying or that by having all these people there could be. Did I. Am I understanding kind of like that informal, like uh, the decision makers are hearing from lots of different people that had participated that they believed in this, that kind of thing.

Speaker B: Definitely, because that's going to be critical to implementation. Right. The various owners of these teams and the kind of heads of the different technology groups that will be doing the work, having them aligned and supporting it, I think also gave that mental support that okay, this can be successful, we can pull this off.

Speaker A: Mhm, mhm. Great. Uh, and then so congratulations. You got the support you needed, you got the green light, you got the funding. And now let's talk about kind of the last part as we round the corner on our time here as well on today's episode. Um, let's talk about the implementation. I know you guys ultimately built a lot of this on Microsoft Dynamics. Can you talk a little bit about that choice? Uh, and um, what you found when you went to take this vision created out of nothing but thin air, markers and whiteboards and insights and then had to actually make it so in a package that has of course a lot of built in capabilities and certain ways of doing things that somebody has built into it. Because I don't think you didn't design this for Microsoft Dynamics. Right. You designed the vision for your customer and now you've got to figure out how to make that work within a package software environment. So how did you find that process and were there any bumps or challenges or decisions you had to make? And just love to hear a little bit about that, that experience certainly.

Speaker B: So if I think about, you know, that end to end process, I break it up into three phases. Right. So the first is like your partnership selection and I think as you've indicated and as we've been kind of in the press about, we end up choosing to go with Microsoft uh, Dynamics for a number of reasons. Um, I think a couple of the important ones there. One is we did a huge amount of our client communication on email and we're using Microsoft 365 Outlook, uh, to do that anyway. So there was a large opportunity to connect and deepen that relationship that we're already communicating on. Uh, the second was looking at we wanted a trusted partner who was going to work with us end to end on this. And so we did select Microsoft to be that partner as well as we didn't use any other kind of outside third parties here. We looked at them um, end to end on the partnership for here. And so that was a big step forward and kind of a critical solution. The next phase though is when you actually are getting into the details right? So you've selected, everyone's happy, you have this partnership, and now you're going into that detailed design. You're getting into actually working on a pilot for, for an internal group and a client. And this is where you're really making it work. And I say, this is the critical phase. Like, did you choose the right partner? And it really comes out here, uh, that it's more of a partnership rather than a, I wrote this down. Go make this happen. And I think there are a couple critical, uh, moments when this is where like, you know, partnership comes in. Let's say, hey, our tool is developed this way. And I think having that willingness to say, this is, this is what we want it to do, help us understand how your tool in this very specific cases can do it. And we saw kind of like yielding both ways. Sometimes we're like, okay, let's adjust our design to benefit and take advantage of the powers of the tool we're kind of implementing. And I think there's a full rationalization that anytime you change a design or you change a package, either that package has to embed that design change in perpetuity and kind of make it part of their package, or you're kind of signing up for adjusting every time there's a rollout to make that, you know, part of a change you're going to have to own. And I think we've made, uh, choices we've chosen along the way. All three. There are cases where we said, yep, this is critically important to us. It's part of our solution. It's part of the, uh, kind of the answer we provide our clients. It's so critical we will make those changes kind of year in and year out. Other times the vendor offered a solution that we adjusted to, and it's going to be, it's going to work for us. And it's something we've learned and we use their expertise to advance our capabilities. And then what I loved is there was this third thing where we brought, uh, kind of design theory to Microsoft and it's something they put on their development roadmap. And so it wasn't that we were going to be taking a one out. They were going to take that idea and put it into their roadmap going forward. And it's going to be, it's part of Dynamics Native now. And so I think balancing those three were the critical part of this second phase. And then we kind of moved into the third phase of once we got that pilot up and running, once you've got the client it's now about rollout. How do I take this to the next team, the next part of the organization, and begin to scale this across the organization? So the good news is, at last count, we've got thousands of users doing this and thousands of clients using it.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. And looking back on the decisions that you made now with some fullness of time and sort of seeing how the rollout went. Of course, the ideal is if you say, well, I want the package to work differently, and the vendor says, oh, okay, we'll change our package to work. Exactly. You know, if you have the clout with the vendor or the partner to get them to do that, obviously that's, you know, that's perfect. Um, if most companies in most cases are having to deal with that choice between the first and the second, the choice between saying, we're going to customize even though we're going to deal with some sort of debt going forward versus we're going to compromise on our design goals and we're going to go with how the package works. Um, any, any guidance or principles. Do you guys feel that in retrospect that you made most of the right calls? Are there any calls where you look back and you think, m, maybe I would have done it differently? And I asked that not so much to get into the details, but to ask if someone's. Because I imagine a lot of people listening to deal with this all the time, this constant question of within situation after situation, when do we compromise and when do we hold to our design? And I'm curious what advice you have for people in that situation based on your opportunity to make a bunch of those decisions and see the outcome afterwards. And how do you know when to hold and when to just go with the flow of the package?

Speaker B: Even as that balance, we tried to always answer was, what's the level of differentiating value? Are we providing value to our client that's going to be meaningful and worth the investment? And I think that on the investment side, it's realizing it's not the investment now. Like, the investment now of like, oh, it's going to be X number of man hours and Y dollars and, you know, Z things to do this. But it's understanding and you're going to have to continue to invest to maintain that in perpetuity. And so often you would see an easy trade off of, oh, it's going to be, you know, 10, um, on the value side, 10 on the investment side, like, well, that's investment now. It's going to be Ten plus one in perpetuity. Right. And so unless you're going to continue to get more value there, how do you either kind of reduce the cost or try to capture that value in a different way? And I think a lot of our discussions focused around that, the client value we wanted to provide. And is there a way that the, you know, the platform, the service can do that in a different way? And if that's capable, then we would go that. It's like, hey, you experts on dynamics, this is what we're really trying to provide in terms of a value. Is there a deal different way of doing it? And if we could capture that value, we would kind of move over.

Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, that makes a lot of sense. Um, great. Well, uh, any final thoughts about this whole journey? It's. Thank you for walking us through it all. I know we're just about out of time. As you look back at the whole journey, you look there it is in front of you all the way from that, the six week workshop to having to get the buy in to the complete implementation and rollout, anything else you'd point to that was an important lesson learned that you want to share with this audience.

Speaker B: One thing we did while we were starting to select, um, a partner for this, you know, you get references and so I do remember actually vivid conversations I had in the back of taxis in New York of calling these different providers. Um, they were, you know, coos, they were ahead of, you know, they were pretty product heads on a spectrum of, uh, different organizations, you know, financial services, tech, you name it, that have put in these different systems and really having pointed discussions with them similar to your question, would you do this again? What did you learn? What would you do different? And being able to take that and incorporate it into our solution or into your approach. Because a couple of the lessons learned was often if the person they're recommending a talk to, you know, it's like, yes, it was worth it, right? And which is good to see. And I would say for us, yes, it was worth it, right? There was a huge opportunity to provide better value for our clients and we're doing that. But then the second thing is it is a journey, right? It took years from the initial concept or thought of, like, hey, we should do this. How would we start this journey to rolling it out and getting value across the organization now getting value in choosing which initial clients and groups to provide that, you know, positive ROI was critical. And so we did identify kind of larger, lower hanging fruit, like, let's get that out of the way to hit that positive ROI quickly, but then continuing to stay committed to bring on those other parts of the organization. You know, takes even work today where it's like, hey, you're past the 80% mark. You've gotten your positive ROI, but still continuing to go after year in and year out. Uh, the tail is what we're doing now.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great. Well, thank you, Aaron. Thank you so much for giving us this, this guided tour of this whole journey of transformation, because it's hard to come by. So I really appreciate you opening the kimono and walking us through some of the specific things you did along the way. Big challenge you encountered. Congratulations on the success of leading this transformation and really appreciate you making it a learning tool for everybody else to hear what you did and, uh, and how you got through it. So thank you so much for that. And if people are interested in reaching out to you for one reason or another, or learning more about, I don't know what you're doing or the bank or, I don't know, anywhere you want to send people. You know, sometimes we have people on here, they're authors, they want to plug their book. I know you don't have a book, but anything you want to plug, any place you want to send people before we, uh, before we let you go,

Speaker B: certainly, I'd say happy to talk about it. You know, this is one of a number of, you know, exciting transformations I've been a part of. And so either, you know, find me on LinkedIn. So, you know, Aaron C. Todd, I think most of us are on LinkedIn these days. Easy to find. If not, you know, Aaron, you know, toddnymelon.com you can find me there. And, you know, certainly happy to, you know, happy to talk.

Speaker A: Great. Well, that's nice of you to give out your email and we'll put it in the show notes. So if people want, it's okay with you. So it's easy for people to find if they want to reach out. And once again, uh, thank you so much for joining us and thanks to all of you for listening and watching the Winning Digital Customers podcast. Always appreciate you tuning in. Look forward to seeing you next time, and until then, keep transforming.

Speaker C: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Winning Digital the podcast. Find more Great episodes at WDCpodcast, Captivate, FM M on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Overcast, or wherever you listen. Listen and visit winningdigitalcustomers.com to learn more about the Wall Street Journal bestselling book that inspired the podcast.