As the leader of a 32-person R&D team helping U.S. Bank’s business lines implement new technology and scout out the most promising financial innovations, Dominic Venturo is on the front lines of fintech innovation in the banking world. On the latest episode of the ABA Banking Journal Podcast, Venturo talks about recent and upcoming innovations that U.S. Bank is rolling out.
For example, U.S. Bank recently rolled out a mobile app feature that allows customers to opt-in to share their location information — an anti-fraud and customer experience measure. Venturo offers the example of a customer on vacation. “They get off the plane and they start doing what vacationers do: spending money in a place that’s not their normal geography,” he says. “That happens to looks a lot like fraud.” When customers share location information through their mobile app, it allows the bank to approve transactions automatically rather than requiring the customer to verify that the transactions are valid.
Venturo also discusses how U.S. Bank a few months ago became one of the earliest banks to implement voice-driven interactions via Apple’s Siri and Google Assistant, a result of a natural language processing pilot project run through the innovation group. “We did an implementation with Amazon’s Alexa to implement U.S. Bank skills” like checking a balance or a bill due date. “We did that pilot in such as way that if other voice platforms began to get scale, we could adapt to them.”
Venturo discusses faster payments trends — with U.S. Bank being part of the launch of the Clearing House’s Real-Time Payment service and an investor-member of the Zelle network for P2P payments — as well as the innovations in the bank’s corporate payments business. He also talks about how to bring a spirit of innovation into banking, how to adapt the approach he takes at U.S. Bank to smaller financial institutions and what U.S. Bank is learning about applications for distributed ledger technology, or blockchain, technology.
If you can’t see the audio player above, click here to listen to this week’s episode.
In this episode:
Chief Innovation Officer
U.S. Bank
Editor-in-Chief
ABA Banking Journal
