Voice of Experience: Secil Watson, SVP, Wells Fargo Bank
by Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)
Secil Watson, Senior Vice President of Customer Experience, Money Movement, and Mobile Banking with Wells Fargo’s Internet Services Group, may not have had a sense of herself after graduating from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, but that’s certainly not the case anymore for the thirty-seven-year-old mother of three. “I now know what I value in life and my priorities reflect that, but after graduating from college I didn’t know what kind of person I was; what my strengths and weaknesses were. I was just a sponge soaking everything up,” Watson said.
Admittedly, most college freshmen have a lot to fear. Many times they are far from home, in a new state, completely out of their element, and forced to somehow gracefully transition into a parentless world, where attending class is arguably optional, and their futures are in their own hands for the first time. For Watson, college was about all of those things and more. The native of Turkey had never stepped foot in the United States before when she was dropped off by taxi, in front of her dorm at Cornell University where she would complete her undergraduate degrees in international relations and economics. Watson, then only 18, had two suitcases in hand and not a clue as to how to navigate through this new country and its unfamiliar culture.
“This may sound like a bad thing, but I had no expectations when I first arrived in the United States. I think a mistake a lot of people make is having too many expectations of a new experience, which sets them up for disappointment. If you have no expectations, you’re bound to be surprised by anything that happens. Coming here for college proved to be a very positive experience and I obviously learned a lot,” Watson said.
After college, Watson worked for management consulting groups in the early 1990’s in Manhattan, Melbourne and London. After business school, she settled in San Francisco to experience the dot com boom of the late 1990’s. “I think it’s a good idea for anyone in financial services to start with consulting. You’re working double the hours, which is difficult, but it also means you’re learning twice as much in a shorter period of time. Consulting helped me a lot because it allowed me to gain experience much earlier than I would have otherwise, but it definitely was not a sustainable lifestyle for me,” Watson said. After the dot com bust, she was ready for something more stable.
In 2002, Watson was able to find the stability she craved with Wells Fargo, which took her on as the vice president of Online Customer Experience, Research and Design. Though she still performs similar work, a larger number of responsibilities have been added on to her original workload, including product management of Bill Pay, Online Money Movement and Mobile Banking.
“When I first began at Wells Fargo, user-centered design was not in place yet. I wanted to change the way our customers interacted with us; I wanted the internet experience to be driven by users and not by technology,” Watson said. After all, there is a reason why Wells Fargo is consistently ranked high in customer service and it’s because Watson and her team make it their goal to address their customer’s needs through the design of their online and mobile banking. The company, its senior vice president of customer experience, and her team are so dedicated, in fact, that their voice-of-the-customer process is inclusive of visiting customers at home and at their place of work in order to find out what they can do to help manage finances in a more efficient and helpful way.
“The best advice I could give anyone starting a new job is to know your customer from all angles; know how many you have at all times, know their demographics, know what tasks they do. You must know everything, from the qualitative data to the quantitative; from the statistical to the personal. The goal of any company, but especially those in financial services, should be to have a clear understanding of what you’re needed for and what you’re providing. This is why it’s so critical to know your customers well because everything starts from there,” Watson said.
If coming to a new country as an inexperienced eighteen-year-old girl and ending up as a senior vice president for one of the nation’s largest institutions isn’t testament enough to Watson’s determination and adventurous spirit, just consider her hobbies. “I used to be interested in learning new languages, scuba diving, and traveling, but now I have a husband, an eight-year-old, a five-year-old, a seventeen-month-old baby, and a dog,” Watson said. “Now, I mostly just go grocery shopping, attend birthday parties for people who aren’t my age, and eat pizza.”
Many women severely struggle with maintaining a work/life balance. Trying to meet each and every work obligation while also tending to children, family, and responsibilities at home can be an endless source of frustration, exhaustion and worry. Watson realized early on that having her specific priorities would require that she make sacrifices, but she wouldn’t have it any other way.
“My family comes first. I’ve made them my top priority and I could never work for a company that had a problem with that. Just because work comes second in my life does not mean that I’m not successful or dedicated to what I do. Different times in your life call for different priorities, so stick to them because your career isn’t a race, it’s a marathon. You’ll be able to make up for anything you missed out on professionally later on in life, but you can’t make up for lost time with your children,” Watson said.
Many things have changed since Watson’s mother was a college student in Turkey. Of 300 students in her accounting class, she was one of two females. As Watson was quick to point out, men and women are now given equal opportunity in terms of schooling and they receive the same education in college – it’s simply a matter of what they choose to do with it and how far they decide to go. That being said, ambition, drive, and having the courage of one’s convictions doesn’t hurt either, just ask Secil Watson.
