From Features to the Business: Why Digital Leaders Must Be Storytellers

Executive Summary

At TD Bank, digital logs 22 million logins a month, 1.2 billion a year. For Todd Purcell, SVP and Head of Digital Strategy at TD Bank, that number settles the argument: digital is the business itself. Purcell built the first half of his career on the opposite premise, at Chase and then at American Express, where the job was building features and shipping them: add a capability, put it on the menu, move to the next one. The mandate has changed. The work now is outcome-based. Help someone save, spend, or invest, and get out of the way. Customers were never asking for features. They want convenience, access, and security, and they don’t care where a button sits on the app.

If digital is the business, the person running it rarely holds direct authority over the business. Purcell’s answer is influence. He calls the job storytelling: paint the picture of where digital is headed and tell it with the same passion the hundred-and-fiftieth time as the first. The discipline behind the story matters as much as the story itself. When Webster Bank relaunched its website, a preview meant to build senior leadership’s confidence read to them instead as a finished product days from launch. The fallout taught Purcell that bringing leadership along the process beats revealing a finished result. The same discipline decides whether AI earns a real place in banking. TD is building a conversational intelligent virtual assistant meant to serve someone’s whole financial life, the entry point into their whole relationship with the bank. That’s Purcell’s bar for the industry, and most assistants on the market today don’t clear it.

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Key Takeaways

• Digital Is the Business: Purcell’s point to TD’s senior management committee: digital logs 22 million logins a month and 1.2 billion a year. Numbers like that put digital at the center of how the bank runs on equal footing with any other core function.
• The Job Moved from Features to Outcomes: At Chase and American Express, the work was building features and shipping them. Today Purcell frames the job around outcomes: help someone save, spend, or invest, and get out of the way. Customers want convenience, access, and security. Where a button sits on the menu barely registers.
• Influence Is the Digital Leader’s Real Authority: Purcell’s team has no direct authority over the store channel, the contact center, legal, or fraud. He calls his real job storytelling, painting a picture of where digital is headed and telling it with the same passion the hundred-and-fiftieth time as the first.
• Bring Leadership Along the Process: When Webster Bank relaunched its website, a preview meant to build senior leadership’s confidence read to them instead as a finished product days from launch. The backlash taught Purcell to socialize work in progress early and often, rather than save the reveal for a finished result.
• An AI Assistant Has to Earn the Whole Relationship: TD is building a conversational intelligent virtual assistant meant to serve someone’s whole financial life, the entry point into their whole relationship with the bank. That’s Purcell’s bar for judging any bank’s AI investment.
• The Real Competitor for That Context May Be OpenAI or Perplexity: Purcell’s concern is that platforms like Claude and Perplexity already hold rich context on people’s personal lives. Add financial context to that, and the recommendations get sharper than anything a bank builds alone. That’s the gap he wants banks paying attention to.
• For Community Institutions, Focus Ruthlessly: Purcell’s advice, drawn from his years at Webster Bank: smaller institutions have fewer resources to spread across every priority. Knowing your customers and your community, and choosing exactly what matters most, is the advantage scale can’t replicate.

 

Full Episode Transcript

Alex Jiménez: Welcome to Next Best Action. My guest today is Todd Purcell, senior vice president and head of digital strategy at TD Bank. With over 30 years of experience, he’s a veteran leader in digital transformation and financial services marketing. Throughout his career, Todd has led major digital initiatives and customer experience strategies for top-tier brands including American Express, Citi, USAA, and EPAM Systems. A true pioneer in the space, he began his digital banking career at JPMorgan Chase, where he developed and launched the bank’s very first internet banking service. Welcome, Todd.

Todd Purcell: Great, Alex. Great to see you again. Thank you.

Alex Jiménez: Good to see you. Today I want to talk about the growing role of digital banking leaders, what capabilities matter most, and how they drive transformation across the organization. And what better person to have that conversation with than someone who has been there since the beginning. So, let’s go back to that beginning. What was your first job in digital, and what was it all about?

Todd Purcell: Yeah, Alex, it’s amazing, as I was preparing for our conversation and reflecting on when I first started my career. I graduated college in ’91, got into an MBA training program, and then joined Chemical Bank in their leadership program, in deposit product management, really starting to figure out where I was going. But just as I joined Chemical, in the leadership program, they announced they were acquiring Chase Manhattan Bank. At that moment, they were also exploring their dial-up service, a piece of software called Spectrum, and considering ways to go digital, which at the time was the big conversation. If you recall Wingspan Bank, a lot of the big brick-and-mortar banks were asking how to go pure digital. So, I happened to be, I think, in the right place at the right time, where someone said, hey, can you take a look at taking our software-based program and exploring a pure digital play like our competitors were doing. I had no idea what I was doing, but I started thinking about the customer experience and the journey a customer would take as they explored their finances in a new way to access the bank. Then working with our operations team and our technology team, I was so lucky, Alex, to be at the center of that so early in my career, to really be the internal face of what was called ICOB, Internet Chase Online Banking, and to build that from the ground floor, partnering with incredibly bright people in operations and technology, but also asking, how do we build this experience, and then how do we market it? How do we drive awareness and change behavior from a brick-and-mortar, big-branch system to a dial-up service? I was extraordinarily lucky, I think, to be in that place at that time, thinking about customer-centric experiences and journey mapping in Excel. Obviously, we do it very differently today. But to be at the ground floor of that, and to be able to say I launched, with thousands of people behind me, Chase’s ICOB experience, that was extraordinary and really set the stage for the rest of my career.

Alex Jiménez: I remember around the same time I was working at Bank of America, and our treasury technology team used to go out with floppy discs to install the solution on our clients’ computers. It’s such a different world.

Todd Purcell: Amazing.

Alex Jiménez: So, the mandate has changed dramatically. You’re using a lot of the same terms we still use, customer journeys and experience, but it’s night and day if you go back to that first framework you put together, to where we are today. How would you describe the shift from where it started to what the role requires today?

Todd Purcell: I’ve been lucky, I think, to have had the opportunity to work for many of the companies you mentioned in the introduction. But what’s interesting, Alex, is that while it’s dramatically different from the days when you and I were both at the ground floor, in some ways it’s the same playbook. We’re thinking the same way, just through a different technology lens and different customer expectations. When I think about where we started, at Chase and then at American Express, we were building features, digital products, digital features. Just get the feature built and get it out there. Now, moving from features and products to really thinking about what the experience is, and what the role of digital is, the mandate for the role I play now at TD Bank is less about feature building and more about the role of digital as the business.

Alex Jiménez: Right.

Todd Purcell: I mean, this is the bank. Digital is not a feature. Digital is an experience. Digital is part of the business. I recently had the opportunity to present to our senior management committee, and I made the point that digital is the business. We have roughly 22 million logins a month, 1.2 billion logins annually. Digital is not a feature, it’s the experience, it is the business. And that mindset, I still see it, where there’s this maniacal focus on just building things to build things. But I take a step back and ask, what is the role of digital in our entire business? I think that has to change. There has to be a shift. You still have to build experiences, but digital has to have a seat at the table where it is the business. It’s not a conversation anymore about the role of the channel, and you’re not relevant anymore if you don’t think about this as a business. I tried to change that at TD over the past couple of years, to think less about features and more about experience-led thinking, and the true role that digital plays as the core business of the bank.

Alex Jiménez: Customers aren’t coming in asking for features. They’re asking for convenience, for access, for security. Those are the things they worry about. They don’t worry about whether you put something on the main menu of your mobile app or where you put things. All of that is helpful and important, but it’s not what drives what a customer expects.

Todd Purcell: As we think about the experience at TD Bank, and in my prior roles, it’s really more outcome-based. Banking isn’t that difficult when you think about it: I’ve got to save some, I’m going to spend some, I’ve got to invest some, and what do I need to do to make that happen? I think about preparing for my kids’ college, or my retirement. This should be an intuitive, frictionless experience that just makes it happen and helps with my financial journey, versus thinking about navigation and features and components and capabilities. It just has to work. So, we’re trying to shift more to outcome-based, the jobs-to-be-done on that journey for someone’s financial life.

Alex Jiménez: So how was it going from Chase and American Express to Webster, a community institution? How was it different? What was the thinking? At the time you were there you were buying technology, not building it. What was that switch like?

Todd Purcell: For me professionally, it was a really significant pivot. My prior career was all working for large Fortune 50 organizations, and the scale of people and investment, moving that big engine, was exciting, but you knew how to play it. You knew how to get it going, even if it took time. I specifically looked for my next chapter at a smaller bank, a community bank or credit union, for two reasons. One, there was more of a story of connection with customers. Two, I thought it gave me an opportunity to come in and really help an organization transform at a very significant, C-suite level, where you could have real impact. That’s what attracted me. But I remember my first week on the job at Webster Bank, coming from large organizations, the head of our deposit business came by to talk to me. He’d also left Citi, I think, to join Webster. We were talking, and I was lamenting some of the initial challenges I felt around scale. We had big aspirations, but the investment dollars were a bit smaller. He said the journey he and I were on was very similar. We’d both come from Citi and Webster with the same aspirations, just a few less zeros in the budget and a few less people to do it. That wasn’t meant to scare me, just to say, that’s the reality. But our ability to be more nimble, to acquire fintech solutions more quickly than a larger bank could, was the power in it. At Webster I quickly realized what attracted me, the smallness of it, was also what scared me a little, the smallness of it. That’s what happened.

Alex Jiménez: Were you able to make decisions more quickly? Onboard technology more quickly?

Todd Purcell: Than what I see now at TD Bank, yes, and that was powerful. We were able to make decisions more quickly, and that was a really unique moment for me, coming from large banks to Webster. I’m back at a large bank now, but what I learned in those six years is still very much part of my blueprint today at TD Bank.

Alex Jiménez: Yeah, and I’d say the DNA of TD is quite different from Chase or the other places you’ve been. It’s way more community-focused, at least that’s what I think.

Todd Purcell: I think that’s spot on, Alex. It’s the same vibe, obviously at a different scale at TD compared to Webster, but the sense of community, the sense of customer, the importance of the branch presence, or what we call stores, the legacy of in-person relationships and being human, it feels different at TD. And as I talk to colleagues across financial services, it feels more authentic.

Alex Jiménez: I’d agree with you. So, tell us about a transformation effort that didn’t go the way you planned, and what it revealed, about the industry, about the scale of an organization, about where we’ve been in digital.

Todd Purcell: I still have some scars from this one. It was at Webster Bank. We were about three months into a full redesign of WebsterBank.com, and then COVID hit. You can imagine the in-person collaboration, the way you’d normally work with a strategic partner building an entirely new website experience, was a significant effort, the largest digital effort at the time for the bank, but we were making progress, doing a great job, and I was really proud of the team. We were able to navigate through uncharted territory. It took a little less than a year from start to finish, but as we got closer to launch, now with a diverse team, leaders all over the bank, no longer physically together, we had to rely on different ways of working, trying to connect people and bring them along the journey, because we didn’t have moments to bring everyone into a room. It was all calls and Zoom discussions. As we got closer to launch, we spent time bringing our most senior leadership in to give them a preview of what WebsterBank.com was going to feel like, so they could see the impact it would have. They’d been along the journey all along, but now it was becoming real: here’s the new site, here’s where new experiences will play out. When we did that socialization at the most senior level of the bank, it backfired. People got involved, started looking at things, and even though we knew there was still time to make changes, what they saw, they assumed was going live with clients the next day.

They reacted, and it swirled, and I was suddenly putting out fires. I had to shift the thinking to say, let’s not get ready for launch, let’s get our leadership comfortable with what we’re building. We got a lot of noise, even though we’d said all along, this is part of the process, your feedback is important, we still have weeks to go before launch. But in that moment it became very real, and it was pretty significant, putting out internal fires. I did a lot of thinking afterward about what I could have done differently, what the team could have done. We’d followed our process: internal socialization, reveal to leadership, get feedback, adjust, refine, launch. But I reflect on whether there was a better way. In this kind of role, you don’t have full direct authority over everybody, you’re building through influence, bringing people along the journey. Could I have been more transparent about what the stage gates of our development process actually were? I think I could have. I did ask our leadership to be part of the journey with us, to understand that nothing is perfect, that’s the power of the channel, you can refine, you can take feedback, you can adjust. So that was a significant transformation effort that faltered, but we got through it, and to this day, it’s been about ten years, and I’m still somewhat proud of it. What we built ten years ago is still what exists for WebsterBank.com, even though the bank has gone through a couple of mergers since. The bones of what we did are still solid. But the socialization of it, bringing people along the journey, is so critical to what we do in this career. I could have done a better job on that part of the project.

Alex Jiménez: Yeah, and ten years ago, a lot of executives weren’t really comfortable with digital anyway. I think things have changed quite a bit, but not entirely. It’s much easier to say, here’s a brand-new branch, people can drive up and look at it. And—

Todd Purcell: Very different. Very different. And you’re right, I spent a lot of time trying to make the digital experience as real as possible. We’d sit in a room dissecting the WebsterBank.com experience, but when you go home and go to a website or do things digitally, it’s your entire life, it feels so different than when you look at it in that room. It was always interesting: you lead a digital life outside this organization, but when you’re inside WebsterBank.com, it’s the same customers, the same expectations, the same kind of conversation you’re having digitally elsewhere, just financial services instead of, say, going to ESPN.com to read about your team. It’s the same concepts. But it was hard to bridge that.

Alex Jiménez: When I was heading digital at a community bank, whenever we made an upgrade or a replatform, I’d always have to spend time with the executives and the board walking them through it. In some cases, when we first rolled out mobile, we’d sit down with board members who weren’t digital in any way, and show them how to download the app, give them some coaching on how to use their mobile devices. This was, what, fourteen or fifteen years ago, so a very different world, for sure.

Todd Purcell: But I’m sure you still come across this still. There are still those conversations. And that’s what’s so interesting.

Alex Jiménez: Yeah, you mentioned digital being the business, but the head of digital doesn’t drive overall strategy for the bank, right, not the whole strategy. So how do you work with your peers in functions outside of digital to drive change across the organization?

Todd Purcell: I go back to my first experience at Chase, when I sat down as a junior person on the team but knew quickly that as the business, strategy, and experience person, I needed to connect tightly with two teams: technology and operations. That’s stayed true to what I do today. In my role, I don’t have broad, horizontal accountability across every line of business, the store channel, the contact center, legal, security, fraud. But what I think I do well, Alex, reflecting on my time at Chase and other roles, is that we’re connectors. We’re storytellers. I talk about this as a critical competency for my team: we’re storytellers, we’re connectors, we have a horizontal purview that gives us a different view of things than any one line of business has on its own. But we’re also in service, and I make it very clear that as head of digital strategy, an honor to be in that position, we’re in service of the line-of-business P&L owner, in service of our other partners, to work together to develop the experience. So, it’s storyteller, influencer, connector, but clearly knowing our role is in service, which doesn’t mean we’re subservient. My team and I are experts in what we do, but the P&L owners are experts in the product, and at the end of the day, they’re the ones out there with the profit-and-loss statement. I think that is critical. When I joined TD two and a half years ago, I’d already been in this space over thirty years, I know what the challenges are, you have a blueprint. I came in very purposeful about being that storyteller, painting a picture of the future, spending time socializing it with leadership, especially those who weren’t native digital folks, bringing them along and socializing, and socializing again. I think I told our digital strategy story probably a hundred and fifty times, but you have to do it with passion, like it’s the first time you’ve ever told it. And I think that’s critical. It builds organizational connection and excitement. But I think our job, people in the digital space, because as you said, we don’t have direct authority over everybody, the entire organization doesn’t report to us, is we’ve got to build it through influence, storytelling, and the art of the possible.

Alex Jiménez: I remember I used to have a digital strategy deck that I kept updating almost weekly, and every time I’d present it people would say, oh, this is new, and I’m thinking, it’s still the same deck. It just kept evolving and changing, and it was probably the same file the whole time.

Todd Purcell: Exactly.

Alex Jiménez: So, nowadays everyone’s talking about AI in financial services, and it’s certainly impacting what we’re thinking about in digital. Where do you see real capability, and what’s still noise?

Todd Purcell: You’re right, just look at, a year ago this wasn’t even, I mean, obviously AI’s been around for a while, but it wasn’t top of the conversation, even less than a year ago, and now it’s changed dramatically. As I talk to a lot of my peers, I think there’s a push to say, we’ve got to push AI, we’ve got to make sure this feature or this experience is AI, how do we get it going, how do we develop an AI solution. I think it has to be broader than that. It has to be, this is how we operate as a business. I think we’re still in that storming, norming, forming phase. We’re still thinking about what the AI opportunities are, what the AI projects are. We’re training our staff internally to make sure they’re conversant in the terminology. I don’t think there’s been a truly clear sense yet of what our operating model is, how an organization needs to fundamentally change with AI. I haven’t answered that, I haven’t solved that, the organization hasn’t solved that. We’re thinking more about how we apply AI specifically to a journey, and I’m super excited about the work we’re doing at TD Bank specifically around developing an intelligent virtual assistant. I know we’re a bit behind there, but we’re making progress, stay tuned. We’re developing a truly conversational IVA that sits in front of the digital experience. It’s the entry point into the digital store, that engagement layer, and I think that’s something we couldn’t have done with a deterministic chatbot, an FAQ chatbot of the past. Partnering with some really amazing AI platforms, we can now have true conversational banking. AI lets us take that IVA and make it the guide, the advisor, the seer, because it can now do things more quickly, understand things, understand context. It’s something we couldn’t have done just a few months ago. I’m super excited about the potential, I don’t know how to harness it just yet, we’re going to make more mistakes initially, but there’s so much more technological capability than we’ve ever had before.

Alex Jiménez: Yeah. I’m excited about that too. And you’re not behind. You see Erica, for example, getting a lot of play, and my buddies at Bank of America do a great job with PR, but as a customer, Erica isn’t there, it’s not even close. Yes, lots of sessions, but like you were saying, it’s a deterministic model, it’s still not an LLM. Capital One is the same thing. It’s still early days, and I think everyone’s a little nervous, particularly around applying large language models. But yeah, I’d say you’re not behind yet.

Todd Purcell: Good. Thank you. I reflect on what happened with OpenAI, and Perplexity’s partnership with PayPal, and I know adoption’s been rather light initially, and that’s really where I get most concerned, because whatever LLM or platform you’re using, I spend a lot of time in Claude, and I tend to share information about my life with Claude. Claude has real context on my personal life. Think about that personal-life context, and then add financial context on top, that’s a pretty powerful opportunity. TD Bank, and every other bank, should know everything about you, about Alex Jiménez, they should know your products, your activity, but they may not know about your personal life, what keeps you up at night. If you can bring that information together with your financial life, it’s a much richer set of recommendations we can give you. That’s where I think banks should be concerned, because OpenAI and Perplexity have that context on your personal life. Marry that with financial data, and that would make Erica even more powerful. That’s what I’m thinking about.

Alex Jiménez: Let’s change gears a little and do a quick lightning round, whatever comes to mind. What’s one thing banking leaders need to stop doing right now?

Todd Purcell: They need to stop thinking about products and start thinking about journeys.

Alex Jiménez: Knowing you, Todd, that sounds like a Todd answer, so that’s great. What’s a challenge you’re currently excited about tackling?

Todd Purcell: Really delivering an intelligent virtual assistant-driven engagement, not an FAQ chat, “what’s my routing number,” but how do I help with your financial life. That has to be solved quickly by us.

Alex Jiménez: What’s the one skill you believe every leader should master?

Todd Purcell: Going back to what I said a few moments ago, the art of storytelling. The ability to tell a passionate, big story succinctly, whatever level you’re presenting it to, a junior person or the CEO, and to tell it as if it’s the first time you’ve ever told that story.

Alex Jiménez: What’s one thing you’re listening to or watching that you’re excited about, not banking-related?

Todd Purcell: Not banking-related. Well, I just finished Cape Fear on Apple TV. I’m a voracious reader of anything Stephen King, that’s my mindless escape. I also consume a lot of information from our knowledge partners, going back to work. The challenge is staying relevant after thirty-two-plus years in this career, still learning as much as I can, and that’s what I spend a lot of my time doing.

Alex Jiménez: Last question. Community bank or credit union leaders listening right now, what’s the one thing from your career across these institutions that they should act on?

Todd Purcell: That discussion I had when I first joined Webster: you have a few less zeros in your budget and a few less people to make it happen. Understanding that, but also understanding you’re competing with the biggest banks, you can’t do it all. Be ruthlessly focused on what matters most. You know your clients, your customers, and your community better than anyone else. You know your strengths as a credit union. You can’t do it all, but find out what matters most and do that as well as you possibly can. That would be my advice to those folks.

Alex Jiménez: Great. Well, thank you, Todd, for joining us, and I’ll invite you back in maybe a year and see where you are, hopefully with some news about your AI developments.

Todd Purcell: Amazing. There will be. Thank you so much.