In 2019, with the acquisition of Beneficial, WSFS doubled in size, from a $7 billion bank to a $14 billion bank. Clearly, it’s been growing, but it’s also changing internally, with a delivery transformation program that aims to bring most, if not all, of the company’s tech under the WSFS roof.
“We’ve been paying third parties to support some of these efforts, and we’ve realized that we need to make the commitment both from a technology standpoint as well as from an HR standpoint,” Corynn Ciber, SVP and chief digital officer for WSFS, told Technical.ly. “We don’t have a [testing] team right now, and we realized that we need one. So we’ve got a testing team and a testing lead in our plan to invest what we need to invest in order to grow.”
All in all, WSFS, which has been hiring throughout the pandemic, plans to add 18 new jobs this year in tech-specific fields, including business process analyst, junior data reporting analyst and Salesforce developer. All jobs are remote, at least for now.
Ciber hopes to hire locally for the jobs, which include entry level positions, senior roles and harder-to-find niche developers.
“We’d like to stay in the [bank’s] footprint,” she said, which at this point includes Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey and is expanding. With more people having access to coding programs like Zip Code Wilmington and Code Differently’s Return Ready program, thanks to Delaware CARES Act funding for workforce development, it’s another opportunity for recent grads, and Ciber said they’re keeping an eye on upcoming cohorts.
The transformation is one we’ve seen quite a bit over the last few years. Indeed, it’s fair to say that Delaware’s fintech boom, while includes companies like PayPal that have always been tech, has really been visible in the way banks have transformed into tech companies, rather than a boom of new Silicon Valley-style startups in the financial sector.
Ciber said she knows banks still have a reputation of being old and staid, but she stressed that the bank, which brands itself as homey and community forward, is changing the way its associates work.
“We have established a digital office, we’ve hired a chief digital officer — which is me — and we’re introducing new tools, new applications like Salesforce and MuleSoft, and we’re upgrading and enhancing our technical architecture to be able to support that,” she said.
Switching to in-house tech teams will also keep the company grounded, Ciber said.
“With [other] financial institutions, you don’t necessarily get the sense of ownership and responsibility and accountability that you get here,” she said. “We just published some of the best earnings around, we just got ranked top 10 in the Forbes list of [America’s] Best Banks, and every person, whether you’re a branch associate or whether you’re the CEO can look through the results and say, ‘That’s because of me.’ If we’re going to keep on this trajectory, in order to have that sense of pride and ownership, we have to start investing in our technology.”
To see what tech positions are currently available, go to the WSFS Careers page.
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