Executive Summary
When banking channels migrate to a digital screen, how does a leadership team evolve the concept of “trust”? In the premiere episode of Next Best Action, Scott Hurlbert, SVP of Digital Channels at Provident Bank, sits down with us to tackle a critical question facing community banks and credit unions: how do you deliver impactful relationship banking when there is no branch and no banker in the room?
Drawing from his 19 years of building digital banking experiences, Scott outlines the hidden advantages community institutions hold over $2 trillion megabanks, the critical need for tight technologist-to-product collaboration, and why a stellar customer experience relies entirely on over-indexing on internal culture and employees.
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Key Takeaways
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Trust is a Constant, but Delivered Digitally: In a pure digital sense, relationship building isn’t about constant “wow” moments; it is built on daily data protection, system reliability, and proactive services like Positive Pay that save customers from critical fraud events.
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The Big Bank Vulnerability: Megabanks can build highly relevant and convenient features, but their sheer scale prevents them from delivering a truly unified personal, commercial, wealth, and insurance experience. Community institutions can win by staying closer to the customer and designing around their unique agility.
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Keep Transactional Spaces Sacred: Do not clutter a functional user journey with irrelevant digital distractions or cross-selling noise. Build digital products strictly around what the customer actually needs to accomplish.
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Over-Index on Employee Adoption: A major roadblock to digital transformation is back-office or front-line staff who do not use the bank’s own technology. To fix this, look toward interactive engagement platforms, bite-sized learning, and behavior-driven incentives.
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M&A Culture Rules: Having navigated over a dozen bank mergers, Scott’s core mantra remains clear: if you don’t take care of your people, they won’t take care of your customers. Focus heavily on the human aspect, establish transparent playbooks well ahead of legal notifications, and never introduce a new system change—like tight security overhauls—in the middle of a baseline core conversion.
Related Reading: Building digital trust is an active strategic choice. For more on navigating these industry shifts, read our deep dives on why Inaction Is a Decision and how to protect The Deposit Relationship That Almost Was.
Full Episode Transcript
Alex Jiménez: Welcome to Next Best Action. Our guest today is Scott Hurlbert. Scott is SVP of Digital Channels at Provident Bank in New Jersey, right?
Scott Hurlbert: That’s right. Absolutely. Provident Bank.
Alex Jiménez: Yeah, in 2022, M&T acquired People’s United where you were at, and you left there and joined Provident since. But overall, you’ve been in digital banking for 19 years, which seems crazy. We didn’t call it digital banking 19 years ago.
Scott Hurlbert: No. Yeah, we’ve been inventing it ever since, I think.
Alex Jiménez: Exactly.
Alex Jiménez: I remember when I got into digital, we called it “alternative channels.”
Scott Hurlbert: Alternative. Yes. Direct. All kinds of things.
Alex Jiménez: I tried to change it to “remote,” but my boss was like, “I don’t know what that means.”
Scott Hurlbert: It’s too distant. Yeah, right.
Alex Jiménez: Yeah. So, I want to talk to you about the role of digital in relationship banking and community banking. Whether it’s a community bank or a credit union, we all talk about how building relationships and building a sense of community is very important to us. But here we have a channel that is very important now, and it’s remote—it’s not a branch anymore.
Traditionally, relationship banking meant a person who was going to give you advice and help you in your situation. But now that you’ve spent 19 years building digital experiences at People’s and now Provident, how do you define relationship banking in that digital context? What does it actually mean when there’s no branch and no banker in the room?
Scott Hurlbert: Well, it’s still trust. It’s still trust. And the chances are, let’s say if you’re a business owner, it’s still likely that someone you trusted got you there to begin with and that you’re counting on those people to get you where you need to go next. It could be in very small ways—like “How can I log in today?”—or a major business plan, something significant, or a life event for your family.
Certainly, trust in a pure digital sense is all the little things that we show up every day to do in terms of protecting your data. It is a bank, first and foremost, so the reliability of those things matters. You need to be able to show up for your customer when they need it. Not every day is necessarily a “wow” day, but I’m thinking of times where we’ve had customers say, “I thank God that you had positive pay service for us because someone stole checks out of our mailbox and we would have been out hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Now, this digital experience deepened that kind of relationship. There are many things like that for sure, but certainly trust comes down to empowering your people to fix it. Look, everyone has problems. Some people recover well, and that’s what people tend to remember.
Alex Jiménez: Yeah. But at the end of the day, digital is primarily a transaction channel. You check your balance, you move money, you pay a bill. How do you deepen that relationship in real practice? Yes, people are going to reach out, but they’re going to reach out in the contact center, or maybe chat. How do you present relationship building directly inside the digital channel?
Scott Hurlbert: Well, I think you’ve got to keep certain spaces sacred, if you will. If a customer is attempting to do something that is transactional, don’t fill it with distractions or things that are not relevant or necessary for that customer. Your brand is essential in terms of the delivery of that brand promise.
There are also things you can do in your product suite that deepen those relationships. We’ve done some work to provide more open access through APIs for data, for example. Upon delivering that, our customers loved it, brought us more business, and deepened those relationships. When you design your products around what the customer needs to do, it engenders the likelihood that they want to do more business with you, whether that be on the consumer personal accounts side or the business side. When you genuinely care about being purpose-built, that’s really helpful. You just commit to it every day.
Alex Jiménez: When you do have those relationships and when you open technology to what we call open banking, there’s always a concern from the bank side that you’re sharing too much information and that it might lead to a customer leaving. Having been in those discussions, that is a difficult conversation to have? How do you answer those kinds of questions?
Scott Hurlbert: Are you doing right by this customer and your relationship with them? Is there someone in the room who represents the customer in the conversation? If the answer is no, then you’re probably on the wrong track to begin with. What are you in business to do? Are you in the business to sell software to customers, or are you in the business of gathering deposits, making loans, and providing services? Taking the long view with a customer tends to work out in the long run for banks. Most of the time, it’s pretty clear what the right thing to do for the customer is, as long as you have the right people in the room.
Alex Jiménez: I agree. When we talk about relationships in the digital world—and being at Finalytics, we’re all about personalization, so of course we’re going to talk about that—we hear the JPMorgan Chases of the world say they’re investing heavily in personalization to serve up the “next best action” or “next best product.” How do community institutions actually use data to compete with the megabanks? Aside from using Finalytics, of course, but that’s besides the point.
Scott Hurlbert: Well, a couple of things. One, I salute those organizations and the things they’ve done; it’s neat to see and it has helped the industry move forward. Companies such as Finalytics and others have brought forward interesting solutions as well.
But I would just challenge bankers to understand what the word personal means. Some of those large banks have problems to solve simply because they’re so large, and you may not have those same problems. Just because something is a little bit more relevant or convenient doesn’t necessarily make it personal in an emotional connection sense. Some of the largest institutions can’t effectively bring you one unified bundle of personal, commercial, wealth, and insurance together seamlessly. Don’t lose sight of the fact that you have the opportunity to be a lot closer to your customer. That’s an important mindset. Design what you’re going to do around your particular capability to bring that forward, because you aren’t solving the exact same problems as a $2 trillion institution.
Alex Jiménez: That’s a great point. We all complain about our core systems, but it is very interesting going from a very large bank like BofA to a community bank. At BofA, we had several core systems, but going to a community bank, we only had one. To me, that was amazing! The people at the community bank didn’t understand why that would even be an issue, but just by the fact that you have a single core system, you have an advantage that a BofA or Wells Fargo may not have.
Scott Hurlbert: Absolutely. It really sets you up to say, “Okay, we do need to invest here.” Anyone would say you have to invest in your data to make any of those things work well. The next step is the orchestration of that data.
What people tend to talk less about is that you have to have your technologists partner with your product managers or business teams in ways where they can really communicate. As a smaller institution, you can’t do everything that could be done, so you really need to pick and choose where your focus should be. Those types of collaborations are critical.
Talent is very difficult to find, especially when we talk about AI and how that will impact this space. But that is also an opportunity because there are a lot of hungry people within your own organization today who might not be getting a lot of visibility, but who are ready to put in the time, energy, and effort to learn and build this as we go. That’s how most of our careers started—these things didn’t exist, so we went out and built them. For community institutions who partner with vendor companies, the strategy shouldn’t just be taking something out-of-the-box and sending it to customers. Have a strategy about how you’re going to make it your own and continue to take care of it. That requires people to mind the store; it’s not a “check the box, bought the product, plugged it in” situation.
Alex Jiménez: How do you do that when community banks and credit unions generally have to rely heavily on vendors for that digital experience, and you don’t necessarily have the ability to change the journeys presented to you—whether it’s account opening or digital banking? How do you bake the brand promise and trust into a platform that may not be extensible enough to change?
Scott Hurlbert: Well, you can deliver it really well. It depends on the size of your institution, but I think the bar is a little bit lower than people think in terms of how you can partner with the right people to shape those things. At Provident, we do that, and we do it really well.
Even if you go further down-market, it comes down to how you are engaging all of the people who engage with your customers? Do they understand how to use the technology and what the value proposition is? Over-index on bringing the product to market to your own employees first, and then to your customers so they see it reflected through them. Given the closeness of that connection in smaller institutions, it’s a real opportunity.
Alex Jiménez: One of the challenges I faced when I headed digital was that a lot of our employees—particularly those talking to customers in the branches and, to a lesser extent, the call center—didn’t actually bank with us, so they never used the technology first-hand. They went through the training and had access to a knowledge base, but they lacked that personal experience. How do you entice your employees to be aware of all the things you offer, even experiences they might not interact with personally, like business banking?
Scott Hurlbert: I’ve done a number of things over the years. I’ve stood up engagement platforms for employees so they can do bite-sized learning, and run games and competitions to get people involved. Enabling assisted-serve models helps too; if you have a customer in front of you, you can both look at the same demo or value proposition together.
You also have to track and incentive behavior. If you want people to do things, center their incentives around it, get out there on the road, and be enthusiastic about it. It is human nature that if you’re in the back office doing something, the gap between what you think makes sense and what the field is experiencing is gigantic unless you are extremely proactive and intentional. You have to find ways to break those barriers down through leadership, opportunity, and incentives.
Alex Jiménez: Yeah, one of the things we have not done well as an industry is that the people managing digital in a lot of organizations aren’t customer-focused; they feel like they are back-office rather than front-office, so they manage it from a back-office standpoint. What I’m hearing from you is that you need to be out there constantly talking about the customer and what you’re offering.
Scott Hurlbert: Absolutely. At Provident, CX (Customer Experience) isn’t just a statement; it’s a dedicated team. We commit people and resources to the experience. If you’re not bringing those folks to the table when you’re designing, building, or rolling a product out, then you’re not doing your job. You have to do that in whatever way makes sense for your company.
Alex Jiménez: Shifting subjects a bit, you’ve gone through a couple of mergers in the past few years—the M&T acquisition of People’s, and Lakeland merging with Provident. How do you maintain and manage culture change when organizations are put together, particularly when it comes to digital teams and the digital experience?
Scott Hurlbert: Well, I think I had about 12 other mergers before those as well, so it’s been a constant. If you don’t take care of your people, they won’t take care of your customers. That rule is cranked up to 11 in an M&A space. It counts for the people who are retained and the people who are not. The very first thing you have to do is address the human aspect.
Secondly, identify your critical business relationships. Ensure those owners have an actual playbook to engage people well ahead of the legal system conversion notices and booklets. Make sure they are framing the change correctly and that lines of communication are firmly established.
From a process and technology point of view, my advice is: do not be the first people to try something entirely new during a conversion. Conversions are bumpy enough using tried-and-true methods; it is not the time to move your traditional bank to real-time processing in the middle of a merger.
Regarding employees—whether you are the manager of the acquired team or the buyer—talk to them and understand what their goals are. Some want a role in the new company, and some don’t. Find out what’s important to them and make that your number one priority during that period. Invest in their development without worrying about whether they will stay or leave. If you treat people right, they remember it, they do a better job, and they are the ones who come calling later when you have something else going on in your organization.
Alex Jiménez: I love that advice about not introducing something new. We once converted to a new digital banking platform and took the opportunity to introduce new security measures at the exact same time. It did not go well—there was so much confusion.
A few years ago, everyone talked about “omnichannel,” saying we were no longer talking about separate channels. Yet, we still fall into the trap of separating the branch, the call center, digital, and cards. Customers don’t think like that. If they call the contact center, they expect them to know what they just did in the digital channel, or see an application they started yesterday. How do we get bankers to think beyond silos, and what infrastructure do we need to put in place to actually achieve a true omnichannel experience?
Scott Hurlbert: Well, what is the actual goal of it? It can’t just be “I started it online and finished it in a branch.” That’s not enough. The way I’m handling it is by leveraging the same underlying technology in both places, which gives you massive efficiency that you can then reinvest into improving the experience. If it takes an hour to open an account in a branch, and you invest in an omnichannel platform that cuts that down to 5 or 10 minutes, you then have to train your retail teams on what to do with the remaining 40 or 50 minutes sitting across from that customer.
What you should do is use that time to talk about their needs, their relationship, and their connection. You can say, “Great, sounds like you’re interested in getting online with us, let me help you set that up right now.” In those inflection moments, get rid of all the friction so you can enable them to use the other channels or additional products they need. It takes time, effort, and money, which is why you have to pick omnichannel solutions to lower those costs, to invest in all that that needs to support that.
Alex Jiménez: That makes complete sense. I remember rolling out a digital account opening process that took 20 minutes—which felt super fast at the time, though Chime does it in about three minutes now. I tried to deploy that exact same system in the contact center, but compliance didn’t like it because it was optimized strictly for a self-service digital user, and they felt certain phone verification steps weren’t being met. I had to pull it out, and it took us a few years to finally align the branch, contact center, and digital journeys into a unified process.
Scott Hurlbert: It’s true, the contact center is unique and certain transactions are highly challenging. Contact center managers know all about the ongoing debates regarding whether you should allow an address or phone number change over a voice call. You’d better be absolutely certain of your risk controls before you execute those, let alone account opening.
Alex Jiménez: Looking back at your 19 years in digital banking at community institutions, where do you think the industry has made real progress in delivering relationship banking digitally, and where do we still need to close the gap?
Scott Hurlbert: Honestly, I think the financial industry has made significantly less progress than almost every other consumer industry we see. One thing in the bank’s favor is that when you ask consumers how they feel about all these slick digital experiences across their lives, most will say, “I actually feel more disconnected from organizations than ever.” That is why I love an institution like Provident, because we focus on bringing all the channels together at the right times and places.
The old, two-dimensional view that banks delivered—where we basically handed you a bunch of data and controls and said, “Here, you fly the plane, figure it out”— is finally transforming. It is turning into something where we can anticipate needs and present smart recommendations where you click, move, and go. I see that happening at various levels across large and mid-sized banks.
Where we have made massive progress behind the scenes is in fraud prevention and customer security education. There is a tremendous amount of sophisticated capability happening in the background protecting customers that they don’t even see. But across the broader industry, there is still a ton of work left to do.
Alex Jiménez: Let’s switch it up and hit a quick lightning round. First thing that comes to mind. Coffee or tea?
Scott Hurlbert: Tea.
Alex Jiménez: What’s the first thing you do when you wake up each morning?
Scott Hurlbert: Check my email.
Alex Jiménez: What’s one piece of advice you wish you’d gotten earlier in your career?
Scott Hurlbert: Look for the biggest, ugliest problems out there and be relatively unconstrained in your thinking when trying to solve them. Go get stuff done.
Alex Jiménez: What’s your number one leadership mantra?
Scott Hurlbert: Seek first to understand, and then to be understood.
Alex Jiménez: What’s the most valuable lesson you’ve learned from failure?
Scott Hurlbert: To truly reflect on it. Don’t protect yourself from the personal pain and anguish that comes with a failure, and don’t try to self-justify it away because that stops you from growing. Do whatever grieving you need to do, learn from it, and move on.
Alex Jiménez: If you weren’t in banking, where would you be?
Scott Hurlbert: I would be a guitarist in a very popular rock band, I’m sure.
Alex Jiménez: I love that! Final question, looking at the big picture: what is the one step forward you would challenge every banking leader listening to take after this episode?
Scott Hurlbert: Ask your teams if they actually understand what is most critical for your organization’s strategy to succeed? Whether it’s growing deposits, a specific business line, or an efficiency goal—what are we collectively trying to accomplish, and how do the daily decisions your people make help you get there?
Alex Jiménez: Great advice. Thank you, Scott, for joining us, and I reserve the right to invite you back to continue the discussion.
Scott Hurlbert: Thanks so much. Appreciate it.