Name: U.S. Bancorp CEO on Reviving a Banking Icon
Uploaded: 2026-05-05T15:09:00Z
Duration: 19 min 41 s
Description: Gunjan Kedia discusses the marketing, financial and technological strategies she has implemented in her first year as U.S. Bancorp chief executive, and reflects on her journey from an engineering student in Delhi to a banking executive.

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Gunjan Kedia discusses the marketing, financial and technological strategies she has implemented in her first year as U.S. Bancorp chief executive, and reflects on her journey from an engineering student in Delhi to a banking executive. Photo: Nikki Ritcher for WSJ

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260505/88a15f0d-41c8-4511-a4f5-9954ae1833aa/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Gunjan Kedia discusses the marketing, financial and technological strategies she has implemented in her first year as U.S. Bancorp chief executive, and reflects on her journey from an engineering student in Delhi to a banking executive.

U.S. Bancorp CEO on Reviving a Banking Icon

So you run the largest regional bank in the US, the fifth largest bank overall. You took this job just a year ago, and so I went back and looked at how the journal covered your appointment back then and you told us, told one of my colleagues that you were at an inflection point a year ago. And so, I wonder right now, where are you? What does it look like a year in?

Well, it's been such a delightful pleasure, Chip. I'll tell you, when I was named the CEO, I must have gotten 10 books on how to be a good CEO. So they're all sitting in my bookshelf and they talk about the complexities of the job, but perhaps not, what an honor it is to lead a very well respected bank, which is what it has felt to me the last year. The point I stepped into the context was important to the agenda. What I found was it's 163-year-old bank deeply, deeply respected for our culture, for our business mix. But we've had a period, a short period of financial underperformance, and that had dampened confidence externally from my investors in our story, but more importantly from our own teams. So that helped me shape my priorities and my calculus became to put some points on the board quickly, to just build back the energy, restore some external confidence and really the positive momentum within our own team. So that's what the last year has been.

And so, points on the board, like what does that look like? How did you decide where to prioritize your time and how to get the team getting those early wins?

Early wins. So I thought about it in two sort of like steak and sizzle way. So the steak was just doing things that were in the core DNA of the company where you knew you would deliver results quickly, you would see an inflection in your earnings, your EPS. And those were for us, things like deep customer focus, driving productivity through digitization, interconnecting a product. So these are themes that our team is used to doing and that was about just giving it a burst of energy and urgency. But the sizzle was an important thing too because we wanted to do something that would create what I would say, forward excitement, some sparkle, you know, a bit of a calling card for the U.S. Bank of the future. So we did some interesting things. For example, we really cultivated the small business card mandate from Amazon's small business.

You have two cards from them now, right?

We have two cards from them launching here in a few weeks. And that was important for me even to understand what are we really capable of. I knew we had the product capabilities, but did we have the moxie to go after that? And then we did a very iconic partnership with the NFL, and that was just showing up in a meaningful way as a national franchise, really respecting our community roots, but also saying we are a very large bank and we want our brand to be loved and known everywhere. The NFL is loved and known. And we did a quick acquisition of an investment bank, and these are what I call like just forward leaning activities where we would like a product set is complete. So a little bit of what I call basic goodness and a little bit of fun.

Yeah, so when you look at the banking industry right now.

Yeah.

Where's your biggest concern? What worries you about the industry and how do you then think about sort of where U.S. Bank goes?

Yeah, so you know, when you think about highly regulated industry like banking and one of, you know, it's considered the second oldest profession in the world. So you will often get... See, the audience is agreeing with me. You will often get a sense of time is infinite, except it's not. And we are right now on the precipice, I believe, of the most significant changes in the banking industry since the financial crisis. And these are the moments where market share shifts rapidly and real winners and losers will be created for the next three, four, five decades. So that's our mindset going into it. And so what is happening in banking? We've seen the first rollback of supervisory intensity that is helpful to the incumbents, but it's also invited a very different type of competitor. We are seeing the twin impacts of stablecoins and AI, very transformative technologies, plus everything that's happening externally. So I think it'll be very fun in the next few decades to see how people position differently. That's what we are leaning into.

And you've got, you're working on it, a stablecoin effort, one of the few traditional banks to do so. Do you think in the future, will you have physical branches? Do ATMs still matter? How do you think about sort of just some of these kind of old line approaches to making that we all know of? Or do those kind of go away in the coming years? Or how do you sort of approach that?

You know, they don't, because checks haven't gone away. America is the only country that just hangs on to its checks. And everybody talks about that we would be very glad to be rid of checks because it's fraud, it's difficult, it's physical, but habits die hard and money is very, very personal and it creates enormous distrust, Chip. I have to tell you that large institutions vulnerable in institutions for many of the disadvantages that brings also brings trust and confidence. So I don't think the old channels go away. The new channels do come. It is truly an omnichannel world. So our view with stablecoins is, I mean, I'll tell you honestly, we don't have somebody walking into a branch and saying, hey, I can't buy a donut. I need a stablecoin. It's not obvious what the demand is in all sense, but there's so much energy, the technology is so promising that we are, you know, piloting it and being ready for it. Yeah.

So when we think about another new technology that we're all thinking about AI, of course. There's news out today, you know, Coinbase is gonna cut 14% of its staff, you know, mentioning sort of what AI can do to help boost productivity. How do you think about sort of just your headcount with AI? How to think about where to find efficiencies, what to do? Like what does that look like?

Well, let me give you a slightly nuanced answer because it's a very important topic and it's a multifaceted topic. And maybe just sort of confessing my age. I was a young associate at McKinsey in '96 when supposedly the internet was born and it felt a little bit like this. Everybody was doing internet strategies. All the jobs were gonna go away and it was going to be a brave new world. And indeed it was, but just in a slightly different way. So we are also watching the parallelism here. What happened in the '95 to 2005 timeframe, truly like travel agents went away and you didn't have call centers telling you what time your flight was leaving, but you also didn't anticipate that, you know, Google, Meta, PayPal, eBay, these millions of jobs would be created, you know, the e-commerce fulfillment, we just didn't know which industries would be created. So our thought on AI is certainly a determination to be an increasingly more AI native organization that'll create enormous client value, it will impact some jobs. But we are also watching for the new industries that will be created because the core mission of a bank, as you know, is to power the potential of other people's ideas with prudent capital. So I suspect we'll have business models, we'll have companies, we'll have a new type of employment. In that time between the internet and mobile iPhone, that 10 years was probably a period of most robust opportunity. So I think this will be a very transformative time for us and we should embrace the technology, not try to hold the old jobs back, but really work hard to bring our workforce along. I will tell you, the workforce likes AI today as much as they liked the return to office mandates after COVID. So this is not a popular initiative, but it is here to stay and we are working with it.

Is that just because people worry this technology is coming straight from my job, why should I embrace it?

Yep.

And so, how do you get them on board?

Well, you know, there's always a cutting edge of people who are excited about it. You know, the confident 10% or so, and they are showing the wins and they're creating some measure of confidence that this is going to make our own people. But you know, my view is it's a labor constrained world. If you just step back a little bit and look at the last 50 years, Chip. 50 years back, so much GDP growth was created because of what was happening with Labour India. China offshoring labor was coming on, women were coming online. We are in a declining labor trajectory for the next 50 years. You know, we've had less than population replacement growth rates almost everywhere other than maybe Nigeria and a couple of states. So you just have to remind people that we are gonna invest in training you for the new jobs, but we are gonna need people. If I could have twice the headcount and do twice as much for my clients, that would be a very good outcome.

So how do you avoid though the AI slop problem that I think a lot of companies are dealing with right now, where you can easily turn up memos and presentations and just like send this voluminous documents to your colleagues at all times? How do you sort of set some rules of the road and prevent people from just being overwhelmed with garbage?

Yeah, and like a lot of AI washing. So we started last year typically as a big bank does. We had an AI COE, we had experts and they were launching use cases and we got enormous benefit and fraud and contact center and software development. It has moved to a different type of set of a democratized, decentralized bottom-up approach now where the COE is really managing the studios, the LLMs, the guardrails, the risk management, and the creativity is coming bottoms up. Where I have moved personally is to have confidence that the tools are plentiful, the partners are aggressively creating use cases. So our focus is on two things. One is better documentation and simplification of processes. You know, when you are like a century old, you layer on processes and even AI models, however smart they are, find that a kind of counterintuitive as they are. So process simplification is sort of one part and then change management that we talked about. And the combination of two will be I think a non-linear acceleration of the program.

Yeah. So you mentioned, you know, you started your career not in finance, but in consulting.

Yes.

You were a partner at McKinsey. You've had this really interesting career. When you think about people trying to navigate their jobs now and navigate what comes next in their industries when there is so much uncertainty right now. Is there something that you've taken away from your career that you think could be helpful to others as they think about sort of how to deal with this uncertainty?

Well, there's so much, you know, I certainly didn't expect to be here. I grew up in Delhi, I was studying engineering and I got a chance to come to the US and really had no money, no networks, but I did have what I would say, a curious mind and a courageous spirit, and those are assets that are worth a lot. So, you know, one of the things that I would just say to people when they're thinking about career advice and what I live by as well, and you know, maybe I'll use Michelangelo's words. This quote is attributed to Michelangelo. It says that, "For most of us, the biggest danger is not that we aim high and fail, but that we aim low and succeed." And so, I just say to everyone, trust in your own ambition and stay optimistic despite all of the disasters that are always in the media. This is a country that's plentiful and gives chances to people with ideas. So that would be my sort of message is to stay optimistic, stay self-confident, and a lot falls in place after that.

Mm-hmm, and I wanna go to the audience and ask for questions. But I wonder particularly for sort of early career professionals. I mean, we have graduation season here, we have a lot of, I think this has been a big concern with AI is like, what does it do to entry-level jobs? How should those folks approach it?

You know, I am studying this, I have two young boys and they're, you know, obviously, they're talented, they're going to good schools, they're studying good skills. But when I look at their sort of mental mindset and I learn a lot from even my early career colleagues who join us. What I'm really taken aback by is the deepening mistrust in that generation of almost any institutions, the church, the government, large companies, and the sense that, you know, the social media platforms are to be trusted far more than expertise. So I think we have to really unpack that for the new audience to say why are they anchoring the workforce at a time that should be of most idealism, most optimism in a deeply pessimistic, mistrusting way? And there is a lot to be learned around what happened to during COVID days, the isolation. But I think it's an important question. And I just want to say to them, you know, they're like our children, we love them. We will do our very best to take care of their careers and make a life for them. And the whole country has a vested interest in the success of young generations and I just hope they believe us.

Mm-hmm. Okay, let's open up to the audience and questions for Gunjan? We've got mic runners. Yeah, let's see. Got plenty of my own too, if there aren't any. But yeah, let's go right over here on the side.

Hi, there. This was a great talk. Thank you so much for being here. I'd love to hear a little bit more about your NFL partnerships, sort of what it brought, what brought that about, what you hope to get from it, kind of how you're evaluating it.

Yes, thank you very much. You know, when the NFL opportunity came, there was obviously the commercial aspects of a brand that has just become very loved. But what was really what cemented the partnership was the cultural alignment. You know, what I had not realized was how much the NFL is doing. What we are trying to do is to bring financial literacy to these young athletes. They're so young, you know? Mendoza who was the draft pick, and he's sort of a spokesperson for us. He's younger than my older son. So much poise. But their careers are so compressed and they make so much money before the natural wisdom that we all have to sort of make mistakes early on and then keep earning and saving. They don't have that. So we really wanted to partner together to create something which we are calling Financial Edge that says NFL, their families, their brothers, their young, how do you manage this type of financial success and physical partnerships? So our goal is to have them think about the discipline of financial planning in the same way they think about physical fitness and training. And of course, you know, like I said, we are in 26 states and we are a very large regional and we do want to use this to really sort of show up for all of America. You know, U.S. Bank is a name, it's very consistent, A logo is a shield as is there. So all of that came together to create a very interesting and broad ranging partnership. Thank you for asking.

Great. Other questions for Gunjan? Let's go in the back there if we could. Maybe in the, yeah, very back.

Hi, Gunjan. Thank you for coming. Go, Carnegie Mellon. So amongst the top five banks, you are a very large bank, but at the same time, let's say JP Morgan has embraced the media a lot. The CEO is on media a lot. You know, some other banks like Wells Fargo have ended up in controversies. What is going to be your place amongst those top five?

Well, thank you for the question. It's a very astute question. You know, we represent a client base that is very dear to us and it is unique from the east coast media presence. And every time I talk, a lot of these, a lot of interest in how is the small manufacturer of tires in Milwaukee dealing with tariffs. You know, how do you think about, you know, somebody who does battery films in a very unique way? How are they dealing with China and tariffs and the change in EV? So what we say is we are representing all of Americans across a spectrum of industries and a spectrum of sizes. And it's that genuine voice that I would like to be representative of because, you know, we've had periods, you know, especially when the China offshoring started happening, when big parts of the country got hollowed out and they're rebuilding in very beautiful ways and ways that people are not realizing. You see so many of our markets have this population growth where people are embracing industries. Well, that is what we would like our name to be. It's like a bank for all industries in all parts of the country and some places where media is not very interested in. But Chip's gonna cover Milwaukee, I know that.

Very interested in, I'm at western and myself very interested in all this. Quickly in our final couple seconds. When you think about sort of where U.S. Bank goes, I mean, do you wanna be a number four bank? Do you want to be, you know, much bigger than you are right now? And when at, you know, you mentioned that point about how your clients are feeling across the country. Like what's your sense of how the economy looks at the moment?

You know, size, whether we are national, these are all outcomes to how you run your banks. So I think about how we want to run a bank, and first, our priority is to serve customers very well and not be incurred in the past perceptions of what bank is. Now, let me ask you, you probably did not start your relationship with a bank by receiving a checkbook in the mail. I suspect your phone was your first interaction with the bank. Today, payments is the first and the most frequent interaction and it starts at the age of eight, nine, 10. So we are thinking very much about being a very reliable presence for my father, but also a very, very interesting and approachable bank for the youngest generation. So if we do that, I suspect we will cross a trillion or a bigger number. We will be national and the outcomes will happen.

Great.