This Pittsburgh leader found a fulfilling balance between home and work life at PNC

Raman is the head of consumer and small business lending technologies for Pittsburgh-based PNC Financial Services. His job is to lead and drive technology modernization for PNC’s unsecured lending products — auto, credit cards and small business loans.

Raman joined PNC in August 2021 after 10 years at another large banking organization, where he held various leadership positions, including his role as head of digital transformation for issuer services.

The COVID-19 pandemic ended Raman’s frequent work trips to New York from Pittsburgh. During lockdown, he realized he wanted to spend more time at home with his family and two daughters. He perked up at the thought of a Pittsburgh-based role at PNC, especially one that would allow him to be innovative and forward-thinking.

“My day-to-day is coming up with new solutions, new products and delivering business needs,” Raman said.

Raman spoke to Technical.ly about managing multiple products, building a bond with his team and why he is at PNC to stay.

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Looking back, how have you adjusted to your first year at PNC?

When I first joined at PNC, I was working fully remote. Since then, I’ve been able to come together with other people and really witness our people-first culture. I’ve been warmly welcomed into PNC’s inclusive and collaborative culture.

I’ve been amazed at the empathy I’ve experienced from my fellow employees since joining PNC. My mom is sick, and I had to go to India to see her. So many of my colleagues followed up with me, asking “How are you doing? How’s your mother doing?” Their concern really touched me.

Overall, I feel like I get to spend a lot more time at home with my loved ones instead of traveling, which helps me bring my best self to work.

Thinking about your own teams, how have you developed your management style?

I have multiple teams with multiple products, so I work with my product owners and product managers. We partner with each other to tackle the products’ different capabilities.

As for my management style, I’m always aware that we spend more time at work than just about anywhere else. For me, it’s all about building and maintaining relationships.

People talk about servant leadership, and people talk about culture, but what’s important is understanding what people need to be successful. That understanding is driven by forming cohesive partnerships. My mentors told me the most important characteristic of a leader is being transparent. In my own leadership, I’ve always prioritized transparency and found it’s enabled me to form amazing relationships with my team members.

Are there any projects, in particular, you’re excited about?

We are building a microservices-based app architecture. Our goal is to build components that we can reuse across PNC. Our vision is to build micro components that we can use across products to digitize end to end processes.

Building new projects sounds exciting, but what are some of the challenges you face?

There’s always a challenge when you’re trying to modernize old technology. It can’t just be all about focusing on the new.

We partner with external experts and various market research consultants to keep up with trends and best practices. Our subject matter experts refer to the history of how we developed within our ecosystem to build off of what we’ve created before. We have to document old technology, understand how it works and how it might relate to new technology.

The best way to tackle our challenges is to find the right people to work on them and continue building a strong team.

What types of people are you looking for to join your team? 

Fundamentally, we want to hire people with the right attitude. You can learn skills and gain knowledge, but attitude is different. If you are energetic and positive, PNC looks forward to helping you grow so we can drive the business forward together.