Perspectives podcast: Leadership advice and more from Tangerine Bank CEO Gillian Riley

Stephen Meurice: Hey folks, before we start today I just wanted to let you know this will be our last episode before we take a break for the holidays. Thank you so much for listening and following the show this year and we have some great episodes already lined up for 2024. Thanks, and happy holidays.

Gillian Riley has been the CEO of Tangerine Bank for half a decade. And she worked at Scotiabank for another 25 years before that. So, what's she learned in that time? What’s her secret to being a good leader?

Gillian Riley: Sometimes when you get more senior, people don't always give you feedback, kind of don't always want to hear it either. I think some of that comes from, ‘I'm the leader and I'm in charge and I don't want to show anybody any weaknesses.’ And people are afraid of that. I think it's okay to say, ‘I don't know. Can you help me with this? Because I'm trying to be better.’ That would be advice I’d give to anybody at all levels.

SM: Gillian is our guest this episode. She joins me in the studio for a candid interview as she marks her fifth anniversary as the head of Tangerine – a pioneer in digital banking in Canada. She’ll tell us about the evolution of digital banking and where she sees it going. What it’s been like being a woman in the corporate world and how that inspired her to create the Scotiabank Women Initiative, which has committed billions of dollars to advancing women in business. And as you heard earlier, she’ll share some honest and insightful lessons about running a team. And hey, since Tangerine is the official bank of the Toronto Raptors, I’ll see if I can get some tips for the court, too.

[from interview] SM: How's your jump shot?

GR: [laughs] I used to play basketball when I was in high school, actually, I was the point guard. Not bad then, not so good now.

SM: I’m Stephen Meurice and this is Perspectives.

Gillian, thanks so much for joining us today.

GR: Thanks. I'm glad to be here, this is a lot of fun.

SM: So you are coming up on your fifth anniversary as the head of Tangerine Bank. Can you give us any sort of highlights or the things that stand out in your mind from those five years?

GR:  Can I give you three things that stand out for me?

SM: Sure, yeah.

GR: Okay, good, good. So let me start with Tangerine really started as a savings bank. And so, when I came there in 2018, there was a huge opportunity to morph into more of an everyday bank, so provide more products and services. And so, we were able to add debit cards, credit cards, new investment products. All of these categories have created an environment where Tangerine Bank is now a full-service bank. So, I feel really good that we've been able to add more products and services to create an everyday bank, but also to give Canadians more of what they need. And these are products that have been hugely important for Canadians. And so we're really proud of — I'm very proud of the team, the ability to launch these products and these services over the last five years, to really put us on the map in banking. So that would be the first one. The second one is through COVID. It was obviously a difficult period. I'm super proud of the people that work at Tangerine and the way we were able to react. Obviously, it was a very difficult period for everyone. Digital banking became at the forefront because people couldn't go places and we quickly mobilized as a team. And we were there for our customers in very meaningful ways. And I could go through countless numbers of examples of how the team came together in very short order to support Canadians, whether it was through government money that came out, whether it was through new products and services to enable an effective opportunity to, from your home, do your banking very seamlessly. And I think Tangerine stood out in that regard during that period. The team really, really came together and was highly, highly resilient and was very much together as a team to serve customers. And the final thing that I'm very proud of over the last five years is we've just recently won J.D. Power for top retail bank in Canada for the 12th year in a row. And we've gone up and the industry itself has come off a little bit in retail banking satisfaction in Canada. So, the opportunity to maintain that in this period of time to me is an astounding accomplishment. Those three things are the ones that stand out for me over the last five years.

SM: It was certainly a very interesting time, anyway, to be taking on a relatively new role. I know you've been with Scotiabank for a long time, but yeah, it just occurred to me that you would have just been a couple of years in the job when COVID hit. But there must have been advantages to being a digital bank that maybe some other institutions didn't have?

GR: Yeah, there definitely was. The opportunity to do your banking from your living room with your phone or your tablet or on your laptop. That's what digital banking is all about. So of course, that enabled in COVID, right. So, our transactions went up double, triple the number of activity account openings. I think COVID accelerated the digital agenda by ten years probably.

SM: Yeah. And I mean, the people who are customers of Tangerine at least would have had the advantage of being accustomed to using a digital bank where customers at other banks maybe had to learn some new tricks as they went along.

GR: We had to adapt too, though. And we were the first to introduce a selfie and AI technology during COVID so you could onboard in your living room by taking a picture and putting in your identification and going into an AI type tool to authenticate and not have to go into a physical environment to authenticate that, let's say, it was me opening the account. And that was a huge accomplishment.

SM: Yeah. I was going to ask and maybe that would be one of the answers, but, over the five years that you've been at the head of Tangerine Bank, what have been the things that have stood out in terms of the evolution of digital banking? I mean, it's not like it was brand new then, but, you know, a lot happens, especially in the technology space over the course of five years. How would you describe that evolution?

GR: So, Tangerine started out as ING and Scotiabank purchased it in 2012. It was the first test bed for ING for telephone banking when it started 26 years ago. So that was the forefront of digital was telephone banking. So that's how it started. So, it's morphed away from the telephone and a contact centre to being much more digital, which means mobile led. And the mobile technology is what's really evolved over the past couple of years. I mean, over 95% of transactions, bill payments, move money done on the mobile application. I've seen a lot of progression on the mobile app. COVID has certainly helped that as we said. But, I think there's just so much more usage and people are expecting a lot more capabilities on the mobile app and that's going to evolve even further as we build out even more this mobile first, mobile led, if you want to call it, type of environment where that's where you do things and you get nudges and you market to people and you help people with insights, right? So that's where it's going. For sure using AI is going to be a big component of that as well.

SM: Yeah. I want to come back to sort of the future, including something like AI, but I'm curious whether when you moved over to Tangerine, were you a person with a technical background or an interest in that kind of thing? Did you have a big learning curve moving from sort of more of a bricks and mortar bank to a digital one?

GR: Yeah, my career is rather interesting because I was in retail banking earlier on and when I came to Tangerine, my immediate job preceding that, I was running commercial banking for all of Canada. Which is working with companies small, medium, large companies with their lending needs, their deposit needs, etc. I was building a digital framework for commercial banking, but it's quite a different thinking. It's a lot more face to face, right? A lot more relationship building with clients in that space. So, it was a big shift to go back to retail. I understood the retail products because I'd worked in deposits and mortgages and so on, so I had a good background there. But the digital side of that was definitely new. But I think the team at Tangerine is incredible and I like to dig into things and understand things. So I spent a lot of time learning and understanding the technology, the digital agenda, you know how we want to work to be more successful because it's a smaller bank. So, we work in a very agile, we started very agile type teams. That's how we work at Tangerine, agile. We started that in 2018 and I wasn't familiar with that but I got a lot of good education and support from the team and from some third parties as well.

SM: Okay. And so Tangerine having been sort of at the forefront of digital banking, as we said, a lot has changed since then and all of the banks have moved into the digital space. They need to because that's what consumers want out of their bank, as with everything else. What does that mean for Tangerine when everybody else is kind of moving into the digital space, a space that you maybe didn't own, but you certainly were at the forefront of?

GR: Yeah. I mean, we have had a history of being at the forefront, being that challenger, disruptor brand in this country, and that's how it really got started. And so, I think we've always been the bank that's not like the big five banks. And people trust us, right? We have when you look at all the brand studies, we show higher brand equity around trust. And people see us that way. We've also got the JD Power I mentioned, plus competitive MPS. We're always at the top across all of the banks. And so, I think that affords us the opportunity to stay ahead of the group with the brand and the trust that Canadians give us as different from the big five banks. Very few Canadians even realized it’s owned by a big five bank, they're not always sure which one it is. So, I think that gives us the opportunity to be different and to be seen as different and be seen as innovative. And we also provide those uncomplicated and very seamless customer journeys. We can sign up for an investment product in six minutes, whereas with other FIs it takes 12 minutes. That kind of a thing is how you keep ahead of the pack and differentiate.

SM: And it does feel like Tangerine has maintained a separate identity in spite of, as you say being..

GR: Owned by Scotia, yeah.

GR: Owned by Scotiabank

GR: Yes, it definitely has. Tangerine brand awareness has gone up quite significantly. Some of the partnerships we have, which you can talk about in a minute, have really helped us to bring the brand to life. Like the Raptors. And so yeah, I think it's been a really nice ability to keep it separate and be successful with that.

SM: Yeah, I mean you certainly have that very distinct brand presence in a place like Toronto with the Raptors and the bicycles that you see all over the place, all that stuff. Is it similar across Canada or is Toronto sort of your main market? Or do you have that kind of identity across the country?

GR: So yeah, good question. We have good identity across the country. Quebec and Ontario are our big markets and we're really trying to grow much bigger out West. But Quebec has been, we've been over indexed. The brand awareness is even higher in Quebec than it is in Ontario. Quebecers are very digital oriented and they've really like the value proposition, the simplicity of Tangerine. We've signed a partnership, you talked about the bike share here in Toronto, we've also done the BIXI bikes which are in Montreal and they have a very strong bike program with lots of bike lanes and that's been a highly successful way to build brand awareness. And the Raptors is really Canada's team. When they won the championship in 2019, that was another great moment for Tangerine. That is broadcast all across the country. We have ads during the games and during that period where there were millions and millions of viewers from across the country. We were able to build our awareness, but also to build new customers from that in a very significant way. So, I think that has helped our brand coast to coast to coast.

SM: Okay. So where do you see digital banking going from here? I mean, I think most people probably do a lot, if not most of their banking digitally. What's the next step? What can people expect to see?

GR: I think people can expect to see more on the mobile application. I think people want to build up more features and more capabilities. I think data and analytics is going to afford us to personalize more things so not every customer gets the same things, but personalizing that. Could be different offers, different insights, different opportunities. I think working with partners like the bike share, the Raptors to bring banking close to where people are. And bring that together in kind of a marketplace that's digitized that will build out of loyalty likely. You know, you bank with Tangerine, we’ll give you a giveaway to get the basketball shirts at the Raptors game as an example, if you're a loyal customer. You can see how that will come together digitally into the future and into kind of marketplace type of concepts.

SM: And do you think your customers generally, again, because they bank with a digital only bank, essentially digitally only, are they just more comfortable, do you think, with adopting new features than maybe people who bank at other banks who are more accustomed to a more traditional banking approach?

GR: Well, I think people have gotten a lot more digitally savvy, if I can use that terminology. So those people that are comfortable doing things online are generally increasing. But I think that that's the target audience. They like being able to do it whenever they want, wherever they want, at whatever time of day is appropriate for them. So, it gives a ton, a ton of flexibility. And if it's not very complicated, I don't need advice, I think that's where people get excited about doing it digitally.

SM: For sure. So just to switch gears a little bit here, at almost the same time as you're marking your fifth year as CEO of Tangerine, the Scotiabank Women Initiative will be celebrating its fifth anniversary. And you were instrumental in the creation of SWI five years ago. I have a few questions I want to ask you about, maybe you can start just by for anybody who might not know, just explain what the Scotiabank Women Initiative is.

GR: So, yeah, I'm very proud of this program as the founder. And there's been many, many, many people and it's really morphed into this incredible program. Advancement of women in business has certainly been a topic that's been near and dear to my heart over my entire career. The SWI program was created to strengthen equality and financial support for women entrepreneurs in Canada. That was the beginning of the program. And it was really about helping women entrepreneurs get the funding and the mentoring they needed to be successful. There were all kinds of stats where women founders were not getting the support they needed, multiple levels, to start businesses, grow businesses, build businesses further. And so, the opportunity was quite enormous to create this program. And it wasn't just about providing capital, but it was also giving the mentorship and the education support so that they could be successful. So as bringing together communities of other women and other thought leaders and other experts in HR, marketing to help women founders with their businesses, to grow them and build them out. And we committed to $3 billion of capital in this program in Canada. And now we've put that up to $10 billion and we're almost over $7 billion that's been deployed in the last almost five years. And so, it's had quite a significant impact on women in business in this country. And what's been amazing is the women who work both in small business and commercial banking and retail banking have embraced this as a way to talk to their clients, to recruit new employees, to feel really that they're giving back to the community in much bigger ways. And so, everyone got behind this. It became almost a grassroots movement, where people got really excited about this program and what it could do to help. It was something for good in getting more women to be successful in business and it's morphed into global banking and markets, global wealth management and into the international locations. They’re variations of the same program, but they've launched in several of the countries and international. So, I think people feel very good about what this has done for women in business and for women in general, I think.

SM: And were there experiences that you had in your career before, either just as a woman coming up in the corporate space or I guess, as you said, you spent a lot of time in commercial banking, so you would have experienced firsthand or seen firsthand maybe some of those challenges that women faced in that area. Were there personal experiences that that were the inspiration for wanting to create something like this?

GR: Yeah, it's a that's a really good question. So going to be 30 years at Scotiabank in January. Which is incredible. And I think back on 30 years, and I've had a lot of really interesting mandates and roles and I feel like I've moved around a lot and met so many different people. And I think women in banking, women in business, women in the community has come such a long way from when I started 30 years ago. And I've always had this for myself, is to be a voice that can impact change. If I have to think about sort of a phraseology for me, every role I've had has been impactful in trying to create change or transform something. And I think that comes a bit from sometimes being a little bit of the underdog. Being the little engine that could and pushing forward to really move the dial on something.

SM: Did you feel that way sometimes earlier in your career?

GR: I did. Sometimes in earlier in my career, yeah, definitely. And so it's sort of it's figuring out where to have your voice, when to let others have the voice, when to really push things in the background or let other people take them. And so, you don't always have to be the one out in the front of it, the one pushing it, because you don't always get the reaction that you want, right? So, I'm proud of what's been accomplished and I'm proud of the things that I've seen develop over the last several years. There's still a ways to go. And it's hard sometimes, it was hard on some of the years to be the only, the only women in meetings or the only woman as part of a certain team. And that can obviously create some things in your mind that you have to learn how to manage through. And having mentors that can help you along the way for me has been really important and helpful.

SM: And have you seen a significant change in that space? I think probably, you know, 30 years ago when you're starting out at Scotiabank, there were probably lots of meetings happening where there was maybe one woman in a room or maybe none. How much has that changed?

GR: I think it's changed quite a bit. Tangerine, as example, my management team is more than 50% women. We've made a huge commitment to building diversity across our teams at all levels, and I see that at Scotiabank as well. There is a lot more diverse groups that  are represented at all levels. I think it will create better results, better outcomes and better decision making, certainly, by having a diverse group. And I think it creates a lot more inclusivity. So, if you're the only one of something, you sort of feel a bit more reticent to speak up, and I certainly experience that over the years.

SM: Yeah, you talked about mentorship a little earlier and maybe people who helped you along the way. I think probably some people are listening now and thinking, well, I'd like to run a bank some day. Is there any advice that people gave you as you were coming up that stood out to you or that you would want to pass along to people with ambitions similar to yours?

GR: Yeah, I think being curious is a really important one. I ask a lot of questions. But I think being curious about what's going on around, ‘What is best in class? What do the best in class do around different things?’ That's having that competitive mindset so challenging to get to that best in class using curiosity as way to understand that better, because we often, ‘Oh, well, we're doing great. You know, I don't really know what anyone else is doing.’ So that curiosity is number one. Another one is good in high self-awareness. And I often see people who don't have that high level of self-awareness.

SM: What does that mean exactly?

GR: Well, I think sometimes when you get more senior people don't always give you feedback, kind of don't always want to hear it either. And I think feedback, 360 feedback from all different places; above, beside, below, all the people that work around you is really important to realize and take that and embrace that and say, ‘Hmm, I better think about that. I did that wrong. Oh, I should do that. I better listen.’ Listening and taking feedback, create self-awareness. You have to have the confidence for the self-awareness, though, right?

SM: Right. And that must be harder as you move up the ladder. Like I think there are people as they become more and more senior, for whatever reason, they feel like they're in charge, so they have to be the ones making the decisions that maybe are less likely to listen or take feedback. How do you make sure that you keep doing that?

GR: Well, I think some of that comes from, ‘I'm the leader and I'm in charge and I don't want to show anybody any weaknesses.’ And people are afraid of that. But I think it shows a lot more empathy and realness if you can show vulnerability. Right. I think it's okay to say, ‘I'm listening. I'm here to listen. I don't know. I don't understand. Can you help me with this? Because I'm trying to be better.’ And that would be advice I'd give to anybody at all levels to be self-aware and vulnerable. Because it creates trust, too, and it builds credibility and empathy. Empathy is important as a leader.

SM: For sure, just one more question for you. You mentioned the Raptors a couple of times and I know Tangerine is also a big supporter of the WNBA.

GR: Yes.

SM: How's your jump shot?

GR: [laughs] I used to play basketball when I was in high school, actually. I was a point guard. And I'm not that tall, so I was a point guard. Not bad then, not so good now. [laughs]

SM: Okay, well, next time we'll bring a ball and we'll test our your skills.

GR: We’ll test it out, yeah.

SM: Well, I think we'll leave it there. Gillian, really appreciate you taking the time.

GR: Well, thank you for having me. It was a fun conversation.

SM: I've been speaking with Gillian Riley. She is the President and CEO of Tangerine Bank.