Laura Miller is EVP of Consumer Strategy and Digital at Frost Bank. An employee at the bank for almost 20 years, Laura first joined Frost Bank’s IT group, supporting it in its bid to build an inaugural version of its digital banking platform.
Today, Frost Bank has built and manages its own consumer banking platform, as opposed to leveraging the support of a third-party reseller platform. Its proprietary platforms include a mobile application too, another area where Laura has supported development.
Throughout her tenure Laura has held numerous roles, including managing digital marketing and leading product, before shifting to her current position in digital and strategy.
“My role today sees me create strategies around emerging technologies and digital experiences,” she says.
Frost Bank: A part of the Texas growth environment
Based in Texas, Frost Bank is part of a booming growth environment locally, where population growth is almost double what it is in the wider country at 16%.
“With more than 1,000 people a day moving to Texas, there’s a growing opportunity to serve our communities and existing customers and prospects,” Laura says.
“Frost Bank is a relationship company, so one of the biggest challenges is to ensure we remain a relationship company as Texas continues to grow at the pace it currently is.
“The ability to be a part of the community and spend time talking to our customers to help make lives better, at a time of rapid expansion in Texas, is something that helps drive our entire organisation.”
Frost Bank’s strength in a growing Texas market is its long-entrenched presence. Operational for more than a century, the organisation is continuing its journey as one of the fastest-growing consumer banks in the country. Today, Frost is one of the top 50 largest banks in the US by asset size.
For Laura, “the real secret isn’t in the size of the company, but in our belief in relationships and our ability to continue growing them even as the bank continues to scale.”.
She continues: “I think any company that’s growing is going to find maintaining service levels and relationships a challenge. When firms reach this scale, clarity around who they are and their purpose is vital. Having a clear purpose is why Frost Bank is here, and how we have sustained our growth throughout the years.
“We know who we are and have faith in our ability to take care of the people in our communities. And, because we’re growing, we can reach even more Texans than ever before, continue building branches and expand our market presence in Houston, Dallas and now Austin too.”
Frost Bank: Leading the way in digital CX
Taking a leading role in fintech investment, Frost Bank leverages some of the leading fintech technologies and can boast exceptional net promotion scores in digital and CSAT, which consistently sit at 95% or higher.
“Our customers love banking with Frost and that really matters to us,” Laura continues. “They have tremendous experiences digitally and with our call centre and in-branch teams, and we look to extend that service into all of our product offerings.
“Delivering that Frost Bank personal touch relationship experience in digital and helping our customers understand that they can have the best of both worlds — which is very unique in our industry — is definitely a contributor to the organic growth of the company.”
Keeping its product design teams in-house, which Laura leads, allows Frost Bank to tailor solutions to the specific needs of its clients.
“Our designers, product managers, product owners and operations teams all spend time in the communities we serve so we can get a better understanding of the digital tools and capabilities our customers are looking for,” Laura notes.
“Firsthand observation and understanding real-life experiences is a major differentiator for us. We believe customers can and should be able to tell their financial services company what they want and need.”
Encouraging customer dialogue not only helps Frost tailor its services to its customers’ specific needs but also fosters a greater culture of financial literacy at a time when financial knowledge and wellness are at an all-time low.
“We’ve found our customers are after beautiful, simple digital experiences, which for us means curating the right features, experiences, accessibility and inclusivity into our digital channels at the right time for our customers,” Laura continues.
Meeting specific customer needs
For Laura, it is not just pooling what Frost’s customers are seeking from their bank, but also understanding that the specific needs of its clients will vary.
The key to achieving this for Laura is to place humanity at the heart of the digital transformation experience.
She says: “When I think about digital transformation, I don’t think about scaling digital services but more so how to scale humanity and ensure that inside any device is a human that is ready, available and willing to take care of you and your specific needs.
“We have a chat feature in our mobile app which is fully staffed by humans 24/7, 365 days of the year. This enables both our retail customers and clients from our business segment to chat with an agent so they can have their immediate needs served.
“This is not only more convenient for the customer but it also helps us learn more about what our customers want from us.”
The evolution of human interaction with digital transformation is the real challenge for Frost as it continues to scale.
“Customers that use our app may have a banker assigned to them, and these banker’s’ business cards are located within the app so customers can email, text or call them directly.
“With our known caller feature, clients can reach our customer service agents via call within the app without having to reauthenticate and go through other points of friction.
“Looking forward, we are adding additional ease of access into the app across the next six months, with new experiences that will be unique to the industry and move our efforts forward significantly.”
New ease of access for the app comes as Frost looks to further accessibility for all of its different customer types.
This includes meeting Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Standards for Accessible Design, and adhering to inclusivity compliance laws for all Frost Bank customers.
But, for Laura: “It’s more than just meeting the minimum ADA compliance. It’s a passion of our design, product, quality and engineering teams, and we’ve done a lot to not just build efficiencies with automation and accessibility testing, but spend a lot of time with customers who have additional needs when it comes to digital banking.
“For us, it’s about caring for these customers on an individual level and speaking to them regularly.”
The goal is not just there to make sure screen readers work, but also employs leading innovations — such as those built by Apple and Google — to stay ahead when it comes to mobile device and app accessibility.
Frost Bank’s digital core
The services Frost now provides to its clients are made possible thanks to its digital platform, which has been built and managed in house for almost 25 years.
Bringing this tech stack in-house at the bank has been pivotal to Frost Bank’s success at keeping customer-centricity at its core, removing any middlemen between it and its customers.
“We have complete control of the architecture, platforms and technology, which enables us to curate and deliver the user experience we want,” Laura notes.
“We’ve created a centre of excellence around this technology, designing end products in parallel with this to ensure we can deliver on our unique Frost Bank brand and experience.”
What’s more, the bank has gone through a recent transaction data cleanse, enriched it and given customers an easy-to-understand view of what is flowing in and out of their accounts.
This has helped Frost simplify the information and data that a customer interacts with, so it can self-service and not have to rely on a banker to explain a transaction or provide additional details.
“The beauty of having our own platform, architecture, data warehouse and data centres and a lot of really strategic infrastructure at Frost is that we find ourselves at a point in time where we are free to explore partnerships and technologies that are emerging on a daily basis including Gen AI,” Laura says.
Partnerships have been forged thanks to open banking, and Frost customers can log into the mobile app and control the account connections they have through Plaid, for example, to have complete transparency around who has access to their data and information.
“The other thing that is really important to our customers is the ability to easily switch,” Laura adds. “We prefer that they're switching to us, and we've done work to make sure that their employer direct deposits and their payments can be easily switched with the help of our fintech partner, Atomic.”
Atomic is a strategic thought partner as well, supporting Frost in payment experience planning based on their deep industry expertise.
Frost Bank’s live chat capabilities – the key connector between bankers and customers – are powered by the SaaS solution provided by LivePerson.
“Not only has LivePerson been a great partner in helping us deliver a unique chat experience that is human-driven and human-focused, but they are also open to conversations about how we want to use their product in a way that other customers aren’t and helping us innovate around user experience in a way that makes it uniquely Frost.”
Looking ahead to a technological future
As Laura and Frost Bank plan ahead for the next 12-18 months, like many financial institutions, they are working on understanding how best to implement Gen AI as top of the agenda.
“Our focus for AI is utilising the technology to improve our customers’ experience and solving issues that can’t be achieved by people alone,” Laura says.
“We're focused on delivering real-time, instant money movement, and also on furthering our human connectivity and making sure that customers can even more simplistically access the humans at Frost.”
Continued expansion is front of mind for Laura too, with a greater presence in Austin, a fast-paced, tech-driven environment, which is a key area of focus for Frost.
“We’re innovating on small business digital experience. Small businesses are a great example of a group that warrants deep understanding and personalised, unique experiences depending on the growth stage of the company.
“It’s no secret that the marketplace is tough for small- and mid-sized businesses right now. We want to do everything we can to make sure that the small businesses in Texas have the support they need to not only survive current market conditions but to thrive and grow in Texas.”
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