Discover’s new CIO Jason Strle has worn a lot of hats in his decades long career, but he’s still an engineer at heart. “Everything I see is through the lens of how an engineer would approach a problem,” he told IT Brew.
Strle joined Discover in July after working as EVP and Group CIO at Wells Fargo for nearly six years. That stint followed 12 years at JP Morgan Chase, including as CIO of its consumer banking, business banking, and auto divisions. At both institutions, Strle focused on consumer facing technology like banking platforms and payment platforms. Before that, Strle worked as a software developer in the Ohio area, writing Java and C++ programs as a consultant.
He credits focusing on solutions for his success.
“I’ve gotten into a flow state of solving problems and making a lot of progress in solving the problems—a lot of opportunities would open up when I was in that mental model,” Strle said. “When I was in a mental model of trying to advance my career, I went nowhere.”
The systems problem solutions approach that comes from working as a developer translates to consumer experience, Strle said. He believes that organizations need to tilt more toward customer experience and adhere to their thinking; making integration a priority is essential.
Trust is also important.
“One of the things that’s somewhat unique about financial services is, I’ve worked in some very large buildings, and they don’t have any loading docks there,” Strle said. “We’re not manufacturing anything that’s tangible. Our product is essentially trust, and confidence.”
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The integration and trust needs to be internal to the company as well. Employees have to know they can access what they require to do their jobs correctly. Strle said he doesn’t want to see “HR separate from finance, separate from legal, or infrastructure,” but rather for employees to walk into work with everything that they need on the first day. And permissions need to be restricted in order to avoid unintentionally allowing threat actors access to internal systems.
“We need to be guarded against…operational risks that come if people have too much access, [when] they can inadvertently do something that they didn’t intend to do to cause an operational impact, customer impact, or what have you,” Strle said.
At Discover, Strle hopes to take that philosophy and apply it to how the institution approaches technology. He told IT Brew that while the company is forward thinking, there are issues ahead in how the finance sector integrates software and other technological solutions, in large part due to the “complicated relationship” banks and other financial institutions have to making things public.
Discover, however, is bucking that trend by publicly embracing an engineering-oriented approach to IT. And that’s something that Strle, with his background, can appreciate.
“We need to understand the risks that we have in our environment, and make sure that we’ve got the appropriate controls to manage those risks,” Strle said.
“We’re basically in the business of trust,” he added. “And we’ve got to maintain that trust as an absolute top priority.”