Paul Young

IT played a leading role in the globalization of Wyeth and I believe that IT-enabled globalization is separate from the decisions on whether to centralize or decentralize functions.
I have worked in global organizations that have a combination of centralized and decentralized functions. For example, many years ago I worked for the large…[Read more]

BYOD was rolled out at TD Bank in the US during the past year and is widely encouraged as part of our “Smart Efficiency” initiatives. Back office employees with company issued Blackberry devices had to turn them in unless they were classified as “road warriors” or had another valid exception approved by senior management. There has been an over…[Read more]

I would explain “the cloud” metaphor by using an example of our personal computer (pc) at home and in the work place. Historically, there was a need for storage and memory capacity that drove up the cost when we needed more of each due to storage of pictures and videos or business applications. We would get frustrated by slow response times and…[Read more]

The four major web services described in that case that are offered by Amazon are Simple Storage Service (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), Simple DB and Simple Queue Service (SQS).
S3 provides an interface for storing and retrieving data on the Web that developers can use to store and access unlimited data. EC2 is a Web service providing…[Read more]

Oh don’t get me going on Rex, Saqib. He definitely wasn’t thinking holistically when he put Sanchez in against the Giants late in the pre-season “Snoopy Bowl” with lineman that would never make an NFL roster …still can’t figure that one out. He fooled us with talk about Super Bowls but never really had the big picture view on how to get us…[Read more]

Steve – Great focus on the customer from your CEO and not surprising to see the terrific results. From an employee perspective, I can see the value proposition between going to see a customer in Hawaii vs staring at the logo on the outfield wall at a Milwaukee Brewers game:)

That’s a great solution Bruce – empower the DBC since the ELT needs the information and guidance to make the right decisions. Thanks

Hey Bruce – I think the problem with the pet projects is they tend to multiply quickly and evolve into a laundry list in an almost business as usual fashion that sucks up IT capacity and focus on the projects that have been prioritized. What I have seen then happen, is these business units then start to hire their own dedicated IT type folks…[Read more]

Hi Kevin – we honestly learned the hard way a few years ago when a managers for a project run at the enterprise level in Canada thought the US segment was picking up the US related project costs and the US thought it would all be funded from the parent. We now have a policy and set of guidelines on what constitutes enterprise vs local business…[Read more]

Saqib – sorry – i hit the thumbs down icon by mistake – mean’t to give you a thumbs up (what I get for doing this so late) but won’t let me change. BTW – I was a customer and fan of PNC for many years – they are a very tough competitor but have taken a much different approach than us recently by drastically reducing stores and staffing.

Steve – I agree and have seen that parent funding declined before. At that point, the company has to look at self-funding options to create an investment pool which can be tough if the funding problem wasn’t raised earlier like in this case. In most companies I have been in we are planning at a detail level three years out and high level through…[Read more]

Hi Jonathan, I agree with most of your post about Matulovic standing strong and not compromising his personal integrity or that of the process. I think your suggestion about other projects getting funded under certain constraints related to cost and time commitments makes sense in theory but proves more difficult in practice. I have seen this lead…[Read more]

Hi Bruce – I agree with you and others that recommended Matulovic hold firm. I think there is a slippery slope of letting folks go around the system – you lose all credibility and the hard work done on improvements goes down the drain (the trust issue mentioned by Vinay). would take it one step further than the ELT having a say though, I think…[Read more]

A few years ago, I led a project to review profitability of our stores at TD Bank. The project was a result of recently regulatory changes impacting overdraft fees and interchange fees which combined with what we viewed as a prolonged low interest rate environment, placed pressure on finding ways to reduce operating costs. We looked at everything…[Read more]

Hi Kumar – TD AutoFinance is the old Chrysler Financial that we acquired several years ago. We have made organizational structure and systems changes recently to integrate the product more into our core business as part of our priority to bring the whole bank to the customer. It definitely has taken too long but there were many unforeseen issues…[Read more]

Hi Saqib – Attached is a link to an article in the Philadelphia Business Journal about the new pilot store in Maryland that describes the ATM’s.

.http://www.bizjournals.com/philadelphia/news/2014/10/03/td-bank-pilots-teller-less-branch-concept.html?page=all

Basically, we are hoping to extend TD’s comfort and convenience model into the ATM…[Read more]

Channels Box
Over the past year, I led a comprehensive review and refresh of our strategy at TD Bank in the US. A primary area of focus was how we best serve our customers across all channels, or what we refer to as our omni-channel distribution strategy. Omni-channel includes physical distribution at our stores (that’s what we call branches), d…[Read more]

The project prioritization process was built from the bottom up, based upon benefits to the individual business units and alignment to the Next Round of Growth (NRG) strategic priorities. I didn’t read anything in the case about a top down review done to ensure all projects including those with global considerations had been properly reviewed.…[Read more]

My assessment of the new process for managing priorities at VW is positive and I think it’s much better than the old unstructured process. I have led the Corporate Strategy group at TD Bank in the US for the last two years and the changes made at VW are very similar to what we implemented. One of the major changes we made over the past year t…[Read more]

I think card security will increase as the US payments industry continues to progress through the transition to EMV (Europay, Mastercard & Visa) technology. These are cards with computer chips mentioned in some of the posts versus magnetic stripes. The information contained on the magnetic stripe doesn’t change so it’s more susceptible to fra…[Read more]