Azra Pravdic joins us now down here from the FinTech TV set.
She is the head of enterprise strategy at Citizens.
Thanks for being both at the New York Stock Exchange as well as for being on the show.
It's nice to have you.
Thanks, JD.
Thanks for having me.
Can you talk to me foremost about what brought you and your colleagues from Citizens down here, not just to visit us on the trading floor, but to get to ring the closing bell as well.
Indeed, it was thrilling.
It's great to be here representing Citizens, so we're here for an event.
Called She Means Business.
Together with NYSC Citizens partnered to invite about 100 girls, high school girls, young women who were here to learn about careers and finance and business today.
They had a full day of programming, and it was very energizing to be with them today.
Talk to me a bit more about She Means Business.
What is the spirit and really the subject of a lot of that programming for a lot of these students to get exposed to, maybe, maybe for a lot of them for the first time.
Indeed, I mean it's really meant to inspire these young girls who maybe sometimes feel they don't belong in careers in finance and business to consider careers in finance and business, and we really want to empower the next generation of female leaders.
What are some lessons in your own career in finance and business that you wish you had learned sooner or that you wish someone had been able or willing to teach you maybe at a bit of a younger age?
Well, it's certainly a personal issue.
I mean, I'm a female executive in banking.
I'm also.
A mom of 22 young girls, uh, in fact, so, uh, it's, it's something near and dear to my heart, and, and, you know, one of the messages that we wanted to leave the, the young girls with today was really that they belong and they belong in any room that they are willing to work their way into, uh, so they must be willing, they must be passionate, and they must put in the hard work, and then with the hard work comes the belonging comes the confidence, and then it really compounds and then in no time you're right. shaping the perspectives in the room, not just belonging there.
And all of our viewers saw the incredible enthusiasm that these young students brought to the closing bell ceremony today.
What's the sort of feedback, the excitement, and even a lot of the questions that they're asking you and other people that they hear from for a day like today when they visit a lot of them here to the NYSE for the first time.
Yeah, I mean, it's always great to see their energy, their confidence.
Maybe they're even more confident than we anticipated, which, you know, gives us a lot of optimism about the future.
You oversee corporate strategy along with areas like customer experience as well as innovation.
How do those things work together in terms of real effective long term strategy for citizens?
So at Citizens, we're proud to have a distinctive strategy.
We think of it as a three-legged stool.
So we have our transformed and differentiated consumer bank.
We have a commercial bank that we think of as best positioned among our super regional peers, and then we have a premier private bank, a franchise that we've been building over the last few years.
Years and if you think about it, the core of that three legged stool is really client and customer and how we serve our customers and and and how we enable their experience.
Uh, we serve both their business and their personal needs, and we're very proud of the breadth of our capabilities.
Yes, you're a longtime veteran of the Space McKinsey, I believe, before joining Citizens.
Talk to me about some of the ways, really the industry writ large has evolved even over the course of just the years in your career.
Yeah, that's right, I joined about 10 months ago.
Uh, it's an institution that really stands out.
I mean, we IPOed here about a decade ago, uh, 12 years ago, uh, so it, it's a, it's an institution, Citizens, that has existed for a long time but really kind of got reborn about a decade ago, and we're really thinking about our next decade.
It's an innovative institution.
We, we launched, uh, reimagine the Bank.
Which is a multi-year journey to think about how we incorporate new technologies, AI, agentic AI into really transforming how we operate.
That's amazing.
Azra Pravdic, head of enterprise strategy at Citizens, thank you for bringing so many incredible enthusiastic future leaders of financial America down here to the big board, and thanks for being on the show.
Thank you for having me.
