Hicksville, N.Y.-based Flagstar Bank, N.A., announced the appointment of five senior technology leaders in what it is calling its next phase of customer experience modernization.
The five will lead the latest step in its Simple and Sophisticated Bank platform transformation that will reshape how its customers interact with, experience and benefit from the bank’s products and services.
“We’re not just modernizing infrastructure; we’re fundamentally rethinking how technology serves our customers and our bankers. Every system built, every integrated platform, and every strengthened control must pass a simple test: does this make the experience better for the people we serve,” Jason Pope, Executive Vice President, Chief Technology Officer, Flagstar Bank, said. “We’ve made strategic new hires to help bring this transformation to life because they’ve answered that question at scale, at institutions where the bar is set incredibly high.”
Reporting to Pope will be Christina Previti, senior vice president and head of Technology Product; Eric Gunn, senior vice president and distinguished engineer for Information Security; James Kratzer, senior vice president and distinguished engineer for Site Reliability Engineering; Robert Martin, senior vice president and distinguished engineer for AI and Engineering; and Justin Zimmerman, senior vice president and distinguished engineer for Cloud Services.
The team will expand Flagstar’s technology leadership with proven expertise from institutions like JPMorgan Chase, U.S. Bank, MUFG, and Mastercard International. Previti previously held leadership roles in strategy and technology product operations at JPMorgan. Gunn, an inventor of multiple U.S. patents, has a demonstrated track record of translating advanced research into enterprise-grade security and was previously at U.S. Bank and Mastercard.
Kratzer has more than 15 years of experience with regulated financial services and global content delivery networks, while Martin has served as director of technology strategy and incubation at MUFG, and Zimmerman led the governance and AI-driven compliance initiatives across AWS and Azure as principal engineer for U.S. Bank.
“Technology transformation at a bank this size is ultimately a customer experience transformation. The systems our customers never see—identity management, disaster recovery, data governance, cybersecurity—are the systems that determine whether their experience feels effortless or frustrating,” Chris Higgins, Executive Vice President, Chief Information and Operations Officer, Flagstar Bank, said. “With these leaders in place, we’re accelerating our ability to deliver a unified, intelligent, and secure banking experience across every channel and every product line. That’s what S2 is about, and that’s what becoming a top-tier relationship bank requires.”
The S2 Initiative is the bank’s multi-year, comprehensive program to replace the complexity of three legacy banking environments with a unified, modern technology foundation. The initiative reimagines the bank’s technology architecture around the customer journey, and was designed around the idea that every customer touchpoint should be seamless, intelligent and personal.