1
Catherine Bessant
Chief Operations and Technology Officer
Bank of America Corp.
Last year: 2
Can a $2.2 trillion-in-assets megabank modernize and innovate as nimbly as changes in technology and the competitive landscape require? If there are lingering doubts, Bank of America Corp. is well along in putting them to rest. “We’ve set a goal as a management team to make the digitization of BofA our legacy,” says Catherine Bessant, who for the last six of her 34 years with the bank has been its chief operations and technology officer. “Finance is technology, and technology is financial services. It’s a complete molecular osmosis. You can’t tell one from another.” Scale to a great extent defines Charlotte, North Carolina–based BofA, which employs more than 200,000 people and earned $15.9 billion in net income last year. Its U.S. retail business consists of 47 million consumer and small-business relationships, 4,700 offices and 16,000 automated teller machines. Bessant revels in some big numbers of her own: an annual technology budget of $17 billion and 110,000 employees and contractors around the globe. Signs of how times have changed: The bank has 33 million active online customers and 20 million mobile; 15 percent of deposits are made through mobile devices. “The role of mobile is to be a virtual financial center, a virtual financial adviser, a virtual trader,” says Bessant, 56, whose previous positions included president of global corporate banking, president of global product solutions and global treasury services, and chief marketing officer. She is proud that BofA was granted 259 patents in 2015 — more than any other financial services company. (The bank also leads the industry in blockchain-related patent filings, with 36.) But size and technological prowess have a downside. A big target for hackers, BofA is spending more than $400 million annually on cybersecurity and will commit more if necessary, Bessant says, noting that 23 percent of last year’s patents were security-related. Bessant is leading a transition to a software-defined network infrastructure that by 2018 is expected to be handling 80 percent of the bank’s workload. Other projects include cardless ATMs, which are accessed with mobile phones, and iFulfill, a web-based loan origination system.
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The 2016 Tech 50
1. Catherine 2. Jeffrey Sprecher 3. Lance Uggla 4. Phupinder Gill 5. Shawn Edwards and Vlad Kliatchko 6. R. Martin Chavez |
7. Robert Goldstein 8. Adena Friedman 9. Deborah Hopkins 10. Daniel Coleman 11. Stephen Neff 12. David Craig |
13. Michael Spencer 14. Michael Bodson 15. Charles Li 16. Chris Concannon 17. Blythe Masters 18. David Rutter |
19. Neil Katz 20. Lee Olesky 21. Richard McVey 22. Seth Merrin 23. Robert Alexander 24. Brad Katsuyama |
25. Antoine Shagoury 26. David Gledhill 27. Lou Eccleston 28. Andreas Preuss 29. Dan Schulman 30. Scott Dillon |
31. Mike Chinn 32. Craig Donohue 33. Gary Norcross 34. Steven O’Hanlon 35. Sebastián Ceria 36. Michael Cooper |
37. Tyler Kim 38. Neal Pawar 39. David Harding 40. Chris Corrado 41. Brian Conlon 42. Jim Minnick |
43. Stephane Dubois 44. Mazy Dar 45. Yasuki Okai 46. Kim Fournais 47. Jock Percy 48. Robert Schifellite |
49. Brian Sentance 50. Pieter van der Does |