From Data Overload to Decisions: Citizens Bank’s Playbook for Simpler, Safer Banking

AI Summary

In an era of VUCA, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, banks are swimming in data yet struggling to make meaningful decisions. This episode explores how Citizens Bank, led by Catherine Lynch, Head of Digital Experience and Human-Centered Design, is reimagining the role of data, design, and empathy to create simpler, safer, and smarter customer experiences. Hosted by Greg Palmer of Finovate and featuring commentary from Brett King, this conversation dives deep into human-centered innovation, digital transformation, and how financial institutions can thrive amid cognitive overload.

When More Data Doesn’t Mean More Clarity

HOST (Greg Palmer):
We’ve been talking a lot about VUCA, volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. When we face these conditions, the instinct is to add more: more dashboards, more reports, more committees. But that often leads to less clarity. How are you helping Citizens cut through that?

CATHERINE LYNCH:
That’s exactly the paradox. We’ve never had more access to customer data, yet it’s harder than ever to see what really matters. The temptation is to collect everything, but that can paralyze decision-making. What’s critical is filtering signals from noise, using human-centered design principles to understand what data points truly connect to customer needs.

• Overreliance on dashboards can lead to decision fatigue.
  
• Simplicity becomes a competitive advantage when customers feel overloaded.
  
• Leaders must shift from data accumulation to data interpretation through empathy.
  

QUOTE: “The question isn’t ‘what data do we have?’ It’s ‘what story is the data telling about our customers’ lives?’”

What Does Human-Centered Innovation Look Like in Banking?

HOST:
You lead digital experience and human-centered design at Citizens. What does that mean day-to-day?

CATHERINE LYNCH:
Human-centered innovation is about starting with empathy, not technology. We focus on the customer’s lived reality, what frustrates them, what delights them, what confuses them, and then we build from there. Whether someone is moving money, protecting money, or just checking their balance, the experience should be intuitive, emotionally intelligent, and inclusive.

• Three core needs define every customer:
  
  • Seeing their money
    
  • Moving their money
    
  • Protecting their money
    
• Citizens’ design teams observe real users in real contexts to pinpoint friction.
  
• The approach draws from behavioral science and cognitive psychology to simplify complex interactions.
  

QUOTE: “Empathy is our most advanced technology.”

Inside Citizens’ Innovation Engine: Green Pixel Studios

HOST:
You mentioned Citizens’ innovation lab, Green Pixel Studios. What role does it play in turning insights into outcomes?

CATHERINE LYNCH:
Green Pixel Studios is where ideas meet implementation. It’s part R&D, part customer lab. We bring together technologists, designers, and frontline staff to co-create and test prototypes in real time. We can take an idea from sketch to customer test within weeks.

• Rapid prototyping accelerates learning and reduces risk.
  
• Observing customer behavior fuels iteration and adoption.
  
• Collaboration between business and tech teams ensures scalability.
  

The lab’s culture prioritizes experimentation over perfection. It’s about testing quickly, failing intelligently, and refining based on feedback.

QUOTE: “Speed and empathy are not opposites, they’re partners in innovation.”

Why Simplification Is the New Strategy

HOST:
We talk a lot about innovation, but simplicity seems to be the hardest part. How do you design for simplicity in an environment full of complexity?

CATHERINE LYNCH:
Simplicity doesn’t mean removing features, it means reducing cognitive friction. Customers today are dealing with financial stress, information overload, and limited time. We focus on making decisions feel easy and experiences feel effortless.

• Simplification requires ruthless prioritization, knowing what not to build.
  
• Human-centered design guides which solutions deliver real value.
  
• AI and automation play supporting roles, not starring ones.
  

Citizens’ approach aligns with behavioral design principles, helping customers focus on what’s most important to them at each moment.

QUOTE: “The future of digital banking isn’t about more features, it’s about more focus.”

Leading Through VUCA with Clarity and Empathy

HOST:
You’ve been in banking and consulting for over two decades. What advice would you give leaders trying to innovate during times of volatility?

CATHERINE LYNCH:
In moments of uncertainty, leaders must resist the urge to add complexity. The real work is creating clarity, both for teams and customers. At Citizens, we encourage cross-functional collaboration, continuous testing, and a shared commitment to simplicity. That’s how we navigate VUCA, by staying grounded in purpose and people.

• Leadership in VUCA means balancing agility with intention.
  
• Clarity emerges from aligning data, design, and decision-making.
  
• Empathy scales innovation across the organization.
  

QUOTE: “When you design for people first, clarity follows.”

Closing Reflections: From Overload to Opportunity

BRETT KING:
What stands out is how Citizens aren’t trying to out-tech everyone, they’re out-listening. They’ve built a system that values human context as much as machine insight. In an industry chasing data, Catherine and her team remind us that meaning is the real metric.

Raw Transcript:

Welcome to Breaking Banks, the number one global fintech radio show and podcast. I’m Brett King. And I’m Jason Henricks.

Every week since 2013, we explore the personalities, startups, innovators, and industry players driving disruption in financial services. From incumbents to unicorns, and from cutting edge technology to the people using it to help create a more innovative, inclusive, and healthy financial future. I’m J.P. Nichols, and this is Breaking Banks.

Every bank leader I talk to is wrestling with the same paradox. We’ve never had more data, and yet it’s never been harder to know what really matters. Budgets are tight, initiatives are stacked, the market sends mixed signals, and somewhere in there we’re supposed to stay relevant to real people with real jobs to do.

When the world feels like that, full of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity, and we just did a show on all of that, VUCA, the temptation is to add more, more dashboards, more projects, more committees. But adding more rarely creates clarity. What creates clarity is learning faster.

Not necessarily talking to more customers, but learning more from them. Not planning harder, but adapting sooner. Roger Martin defined strategy as an integrated set of choices that compels desired customer action.

And any strategy is strengthened by two disciplines that reinforce one another. First, the discipline of discovery. Having a better process for learning about customer needs and jobs to be done, so we uncover patterns instead of just collecting opinions.

Second is the discipline of adaptation. Turning volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity into advantage by shortening the loop from, we noticed, to here’s what’s changed, to here’s what we’re doing about it. If you can do those two things consistently, you start to replace uncertainty with evidence and complexity with focus.

And that’s where today’s conversation comes in. Greg Palmer, host of our sister show, The Finnovate Podcast, interviews Katherine Lynch, who leads digital experience and human-centered design at Citizens Bank. What’s distinctive about Katherine’s approach is not the slogan, everybody says human-centered these days, it’s the operating system behind it.

It’s the way her team observes real behavior, frames problems in customer terms, prototypes the smallest viable improvement, and then learns out loud with the business. It’s the discipline to move roadmaps from opinions to evidence. The simplicity of boiling money down to three universal jobs customers ask us to help with, help me see my money clearly, help me move it easily, and help me protect it confidently.

If you’re leading a bank or credit union, that lens can be liberating. It keeps you out of feature bingo and keeps you anchored to outcomes. It also gives you a way to sequence work.

What improves clarity this quarter? What reduces friction next? What meaningfully reduces risk without adding cognitive load? You’ll hear that in how they test. You’ll hear it in how they partner. FinTechs are great at sharp, bounded problems, accelerating a payment step, verifying identity with fewer keystrokes, automating a painful onboarding moment.

But financial institutions excel at trust, scale, and a set of non-negotiables that keep the entire system safe. The trick is knowing when to build, when to buy, and when to partner based on the outcomes you’re trying to change, not the demo you just saw. Catherine’s team is thoughtful about the math.

What metric moves? What will it take to integrate and maintain? How do we de-risk in stages? That’s not vendor management. That’s strategy. Another thing I appreciate is how design and risk show up as partners, not adversaries.

In a lot of places, make it easy and keep it safe are two competing slogans. But done right, they’re the same thing. Clear intent and fewer clicks often mean fewer errors, fewer exceptions, and fewer downstream fixes.

That’s not just a better experience. That’s a better P&L. Cognitive load for customers is high.

Life is busy, money is messy, and the financial internet has made everything possible, which can feel like everything is required. But winners reduce that load. They make the next step obvious.

They make progress feel doable. They make protection feel built in, not bolted on. When we talk about digital plus human, that’s really where the bar is.

It’s not about replacing people, but reserving them for the moments that matter because we’ve eliminated the friction everywhere else. So if you’re listening as an executive, here are a few prompts to keep in mind as you listen. Where are we still validating our assumptions instead of discovering what’s true? If our customer conversations mostly sound like sales calls or satisfaction surveys, we’re rehearsing.

Where could we shorten the loop from insight to action? Most institutions don’t need more ideas. They need more validation. What would it take to ship a smaller improvement sooner, measure it, and iterate? Where does our roadmap fulfill how to see, move, and protect money? If a project can’t be traced to one of those jobs or to a customer metric that would change, it’s probably just clutter.

Where are we partnering for acceleration instead of delegation? The goal isn’t to outsource judgment. It’s to compound capability. And finally, how are we telling a single, simple story from the branch to the app? When your frontline and your product teams describe the mission the same way, everything else, adoption, cross-sell, service recovery, gets easier.

Catherine brings a builder’s mindset with a pragmatist discipline. She’s operating in a complex environment at scale, but the instincts translate whether you’re running a community bank or a national franchise. Organize around human outcomes, measure what matters, and let evidence settle arguments.

In a VUCA world, that’s how you convert uncertainty into advantage. So with that bit of monologue, let’s dive in. Here’s Greg Palmer with Catherine Lynch of Citizens Bank.

Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Finnovate podcast. This is Greg Palmer, and joining me today, we have Catherine Lynch of Citizens. Catherine, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you, Greg. So to kick things off, it’d be great just to get a sense of your own background. Can you give us about 60 seconds on yourself and your journey into Citizens? Absolutely.

From my accent, you may be able to tell that I’m Southern-raised, and we don’t like to talk about our age, but facts are facts, and I have been in banking well over 20 years now. Prior to that, I was in management consulting with Accenture, and I worked at a high-tech startup when I lived in Austin, and I actually did research and development for a paper company that had a division, an electronic voting division, back during Bush v. Gore. So if you look at the totality, though, of my career, you’ll see a body of work where I have been leveraging technology to solve customer problems.

And it was basically user experience before it was called user experience. I basically was making prototypes and PowerPoint with boxes straight out of grad school before UX as a formal experience practice existed. Within banking, and specifically Citizens, which is a super regional, my work is focused on digital channel strategy and experience work.

Yeah, I mean, I feel you on the PowerPoint one. These kids today don’t even know, but PowerPoint used to be so much more of a headache than it is now with all the auto-formatting features. So talk to me about Citizens itself.

Obviously, you’ve been there for a little while now. Can you give us some background on who your customers are, where you’re located, all those types of things? Absolutely. Citizens has approximately 1,000 branches, primarily in the Northeast.

We’re what some people call super regional. We also have a location in District of Columbia. We have about 220 billion in assets as of March 2025.

And our customers, we have customers actually across the country. And when you think about the way that we approach customers and the way we would define them is we are in service of the customer that we sell to, and that we support. We have many stakeholders that we may work with that support those customers, but across our company, we support consumer customers, which include mass market, mass affluent, corporate and commercial clients that might include commercial real estate, treasury management, CM&A.

We also have private bank and wealth management. So we cover the breadth of banking customers across those different geographical locations. Yeah.

And I think this is one of those things, obviously, a lot of different types of customers. And even with the sort of, you know, super regional, there’s still quite a few different types of people. How would you categorize their needs when it comes to, you know, what it is they’re looking for from you? And I think the maybe more relevant question is how those needs shifted over the last couple of years.

Are you seeing any big changes in terms of what people are asking you for or maybe what they’re demanding? Absolutely. When we think about, you know, the breadth of types of customers, I kind of just talked about across, you know, the industry. All customers, though, have three basic servicing needs and they’re incredibly sensitive about their money.

Doesn’t matter if you’re a consumer or a corporate client, but you have three basic jobs to do. When you think about it in the jobs to be done type of perspective, customers want to see their money, they want to move their money, and they want to protect their money. And it doesn’t matter if you’re a commercial client or you’re a consumer, your needs start to fall into those three overarching categories.

And when you think about needs and how have those needs shifted over time, when you think about data currently shows that people are suffering from cognitive and information overload. There’s a lot of stress in the world right now due to, you know, the economic environment and economic questions that might be surfacing, personal safety concerns. And we have a reduced connection to community.

And when you think about, look at some of the data, you can see a real significant drop off in church attendance in the last 10 years. That is a proof point of that type of a disconnection between community. People are moving more, right? They’re further away from their family.

They may not be as close. They have a need for things to be easy because you’ve got people that aren’t as connected and you have people that have this cognitive overload. So it’s really important for them that things are easy to do and that the basics are done right.

So that is something that over time, how needs have shifted absolutely has shifted in a more digital way because of the technology that has evolved. Even since I’ve arrived at Citizen, I’ve been here about going on eight years. It has changed so much just in those eight years.

But even when I think back to when I started in banking, the technology changes that has enabled the customers that it goes back to the core needs though, it’s quicker for them to see their money and move it. And they want to take faster actions to protect it, but they want it to be easy to do. They want to be able to understand it.

And they don’t want to have to be the one doing all the hard work to make it happen because they’re walking around a little tired and overwhelmed already. Yeah. Yeah.

I think this is one of those things where we’ve certainly seen the FinTech industry recognizing exactly what you’re talking about here, recognizing that people want it to be easier. They want it to be faster. How are you approaching FinTech as a means of giving your customers what they’re asking for here? What’s Citizen’s overall strategy when it comes to engaging and deploying new FinTech solutions? Well, when you think about it, solutions that we may need to deploy to our customers.

When we talked about the needs that customers have and the influence of digital, our customers are coming to us as well with expectation of ease and simplicity and integrated ease and simplicity from not just financial institutions. They’re bringing that to us, that expectation with really well done, high-tech, sophisticated interactions. If you want to think about some of the big players like Apple or Amazon.

And so our solutions that we deploy are tapestries of service that really help customers solve their job to be done. FinTechs are working on specific customer problems in really exciting ways. And they’re focusing on specific areas of needs that are critical to plug into that tapestry solution that we on our own would not have the time and the resources to explore all of those needs by ourselves, but we can partner with someone to bring that solution in and help serve our customers’ need.

Yeah. And I think this is again, very similar to how a lot of people are kind of approaching FinTech from similar size financial institutions. One thing you and I were talking about, which is not something which everybody else is doing, you guys are running an innovation lab.

Can you talk a little bit about what that is, how it’s structured and some of the value that that’s been able to bring to citizens and more importantly to your customers? Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, when you think about, you know, one of the lessons that you can kind of get from working with FinTechs is that they really co-create solutions as well with their customers.

And so one of the things that we have is we have an in-person research lab that’s part of our Green Pixel Studios experience design internal team that I was part of building out with an amazing team of UX leaders, where we are really able to be close to our customers and prospects. And we learn directly from them in both an observational way and a qualitative investigative way. But we have capabilities to really dig into watching how they might utilize a digital experience, how it can interact with their offline experiences.

We will also send people from our research team out into the field to watch and observe people in the field and then bring some of those ideas back into the design team and have them work through building a different way of doing it and then go back out and test it. Either we’ve tested with colleagues, we’ve tested with customers, we’ve also looked at prospects to get them to help us understand if they would understand what we’re building as well. And I think this is one of those things which is so often overlooked because when you ask your customers for that type of feedback, when you can watch them in the wild, so to speak, it’s really enlightening because it’s so difficult as somebody who works inside of a financial institution who’s obviously extremely comfortable with all the processes that you’re offering to watch an outsider engage with it and see where they get stuck.

And it’s almost never where you think they’re going to get stuck, right? It’s almost always surprising when you see somebody engaging with it in that way. Customer support in the world of financial services is hard. Between policy compliance, regulations, audit, security, and complicated customer queries, the stakes are high.

That’s where FIN, the best performing AI agent for financial services support, comes in. FIN handles high stakes performance and ensures policy compliance with no code controls. And if you’re wondering whether it really works, just ask the thousands of customers using FIN to provide end-to-end customer support every day.

To learn more about how FIN can handle the most complex financial queries and transform support teams, head to fin.ai slash breaking banks. That’s fin.ai slash breaking banks. Can you talk about any solutions that have come from the kind of research that you’ve done, the learnings that you’ve had here, anything that’s sort of gone directly from the lab into something customer-facing? Oh my gosh, there’s so many that I could choose from.

One of our recent experiences that was identified was a confusion around some transaction information that was showing up in the digital experience. And this was actually identified by our contact center, and they raised this issue. Our front-end agents raised this issue and said, this information is confusing, and it’s causing people to call in.

And so we have a problem. We know there’s confusion. But how we solve that problem, we could have solved that in a couple different ways, but it was really important to come up with a way to build an idea, get it validated, to ensure that we were solving that original problem so that the solution that we were then pushing out actually delivered on what the confusion was.

And actually, we did see a drop-off in the call center volume around that particular question. Wow, I think that’s great. You know, again, this is one of those things where when you have that type of confusion, it doesn’t have to come from some sort of massive source.

It’s not necessarily a structural problem. It’s just customers asking for a little bit of information in a moment where they need it or want it. And so being able to give that to them can make that process so much easier.

And obviously, it decreases the number of people who have to call in, but also it gives them a better experience. It gives them, coming back to our initial point, it gives them the information when they want it in a quick and timely way. So I think that’s just a really good example of the kind of thing that you can discover, which isn’t ultimately that difficult to fix once you know about it, once you have the systems in place, you kind of go out looking for it.

And this seems like a really good transition because I have to just call out, you know, the words in your title, you know, head of digital experience and human-centered design. I love seeing human-centered design there. I think that signifies a lot about what your priorities are coming from citizens.

But can you talk a little bit about, you know, what that phrase means to you, how you interpret it and why it’s such an important part of your role? Absolutely. When I think about human-centered design, it’s such a part of my DNA in terms of how I’m wired to operate. I really think about what it is that the jobs are that the customers are trying to do.

And when you think about that definition of human-centered design, right, it’s a creative approach to problem solving that puts customer needs and behaviors and experiences at the center of that design process. So when we think about some of those key principles of human-centered design, right, empathy, collaboration, iteration, problem framing, prototyping, and testing, you know, empathy is at the core. You know, that previous example I mentioned about that transaction detail, well, that was a call center agency.

That was frontline. That was them raising their hand and saying, this is a confusing experience. This needs to be fixed.

Right. We collaborated on how to solve for that. You know, iterated a little bit on what to do.

That one was probably maybe a little faster iteration than others, but that problem framing, you know, when we talked about like that type of transaction confusion, there’s a lot of data in the background that could have been used to solve that confusion. If we just said, oh, customers were confused about this. Well, what were they confused about? How was it being interpreted? Because that problem framing is so important to do because you could design and you could build, you could even prototype and get good testing on a really amazing design of something.

But if it didn’t really solve the problem, you’ve just made an amazing solution that didn’t solve that need. And so, you know, we do some things like we’ve done these sort of internal launchpad design sprints where we take, you know, that five-day kind of Google design sprint idea. Right.

And come out with, you know, a prototype at the end of five days. And we’ve had, you know, an idea that was, you know, done. It was done in like a November of 2023.

And it was, you know, tested and there was a prototype and it was in the backlog and being worked on by the beginning of that year. And then it was in, parts of it were in customers’ hands by the middle of the year. And so when you think about an innovative thing and getting it out that door in that process, we’re really proud of that type of change and output to meet customer needs and ensure that we’re giving them something that really solved the problem.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is one of those things too, where, you know, I talked to an innovator who said the most nerve-wracking day for us is when our new technology has its first encounter with a customer.

Yeah. Because no matter how much you put into it, there’s always this possibility for something unexpected to come up. And so you sort of hope, you liken it to a boat that was going to run into an iceberg and you think the boat should be able to plow through this ice, but you just never know.

The first time it makes contact, it’s always a little bit nerve-wracking. And I think listening to the way that you talk about it and looking at it from this human-centered standpoint, you’re so much more likely to survive that initial point where the new tech, the new initiative does meet the real world. And I applaud you for taking that tack.

I see we’re coming up on the end of our time here, and I want to just kind of jump ahead to this really high level, looking at where we are now. You mentioned the amount of change you’ve seen over the past eight years has been immense. I think that’s pretty common.

A lot of us have lived multiple decades over the past 10 years or so. But when you look ahead and you think about what the future looks like for citizens, what does it look like five or 10 years from now? What do you think is kind of the big change that you expect to see, or how do citizens continue to grow over that next crucial five to 10-year plan? Gosh, there’s so many. I mean, when I think about when our customers choose citizens, they’re really selecting someone that’s committed to helping them achieve their goals.

And when I look at what we need to be thinking about and doing to meet where we need to be in five to 10 years, some of the ways that we really do that, stay sharp, is partnering with some of our collaborator groups and incubators that are out in that fintech industry space to help us stay connected to it, on top of it. I’d like to mention Mass Fintech Hub, because we’re up in the New England area, obviously, and in Boston, that that is a connector that’s a bridge between financial institutions, academia, startups, and the Massachusetts government. And when you’re starting to think about where we’re going to be five to 10 years from now, connectivity into all of those type of entities is so critical, because they really help think about, they’re the workforce of the future.

When you think about the academics, they’re the fintechs that are building some of the new solutions that are government that could help us either make things easier for us to operate within or harder. And there are other industry partners that some are in the same business as us, some aren’t, but we’re all solving some of the same challenges, and that we can really lean on each other and partner together to deliver something exciting. And I think those type of things are something that we have a really good understanding of those complex challenges, and we leverage partners and people that are working in that to help us deliver what we will need to do.

I also see us leveraging some of the capabilities that are evolving now, they’re causing some of that information and cognitive overload for our customers, that we’re putting that expertise and knowledge and testing into place that I think is going to help us deliver an amazing experience across what our customers are going to need in the future. Yeah, and I think ultimately this is what it boils down to, right? It’s broadening your community as much as you can, getting as much input from outside people as you can, people within the industry, people from other industries. And so I think the future is rosy for people who kind of adopt this strategy, again, focusing on the humans, focusing on growing and getting as much advice as you can from anywhere.

This has been a very enlightening conversation. Catherine, I want to thank you for taking the time to connect with me. I’m sure we can all expect great things from citizens and really appreciate you sharing some of your journey with us.

Happy to do it. Thanks for the time. That’s it for another week of the world’s number one fintech podcast and radio show, Breaking Banks.

This episode was produced by our U.S.-based production team, including producer Lisbeth Severins, audio engineer Kevin Hirsham. If you like this episode, don’t forget to tweet it out or post it on your favorite social media, or leave us a five-star review on iTunes, Google Podcasts, Facebook, or wherever it is that you listen to our show. Those actions help other people find our podcast, and in return, that helps us build an audience that can be supported by sponsorship so we can continue to provide you with our award-winning content every week.

Thanks again for joining us. We’ll see you on Breaking Banks next week.