Tracy Kerrins is the Chief Information Officer and head of Enterprise Functions Technology for Wells Fargo Technology, one of the world’s largest and most innovative information technology groups with more than 23,000 talented team members who help keep Wells Fargo at the forefront of America’s diversified financial services companies. As the head of Enterprise Functions Technology, Tracy is responsible for providing technology solutions for Human Resources, Corporate Risk, Finance, Technology, Audit, Legal, Marketing, Stakeholder Relations, Data, and the Chief Operating Office. In addition, she is a member of the Wells Fargo India Private Limited board of directors.
Episode transcription:
[00:00:00] Tracy Kerrins: [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Tracy Kerrins. I am an EVP group, CIO of enterprise functions, technology at Wells Fargo.
[00:00:20] Jahn Karsybaev: [00:00:20] Tracy, thanks so much for finding time to join us on the Ivy podcast on this Friday afternoon. Can you tell us a little bit more about your backgrounds, maybe kind of career timeline overview. That would be great to hear.
[00:00:32] Tracy Kerrins: [00:00:33] Sure. Hopefully as exciting as it has felt to me through the years, but I actually started off, I have an engineering degree from the University of Michigan, came from a long line of engineers, my dad, grandfather, et cetera. So I was encouraged early on to get interested in coding and technology overall. And kind of carried the torch forward with some family history there and coming out, I got a degree in industrial and operations engineering, and I was very lucky out of college to work. I went to PricewaterhouseCoopers and Big Five consulting was big at the time. But it was very lucky because I got to actually code for many years, probably the first seven or eight years of my career. At the time we were doing a lot of custom application development at a variety of companies, I started off working in the utilities industry. So I was doing a lot of app development for gas and electric companies, which at the time I didn't really appreciate how exciting that can be and really the potential for change. So what I was learning was not just coding and different technologies. I mean, I started off in PowerBuilder and did cold fusion and Siebel, but it was really learning to take kind of legacy outdated. Business processes and use technology to really transform those and thereby the business. And that's been something that really excited me early on that I've carried through my career and is now a really critical part of my job day to day as well.
[00:01:58] Jahn Karsybaev: [00:01:58] Well, that's super exciting and it seems like a very diverse background. And then it's also, I want to dive a little bit deeper into kind of the transition from the consultancy and then going into more of a corporate world. So to say, and then moving up the ranks from that perspective before we do that, can you share a little bit more around your current role? What falls under your purview and area of responsibility?
[00:02:19] Tracy Kerrins: [00:02:19] Yeah, absolutely. So, I'm the CIO for enterprise functions and what that entails. It's really all the technology that runs that company runs Wells Fargo for our employees. So that's HR, finance risk marketing, legal audit data for the company. It includes all your payroll benefits, everything that really runs the company for employees day to day. So often underappreciated in a way, because when it works, it seems like just very baseline things that we should have. But if it doesn't work, obviously people get very upset. But for me, that's the exciting part, right? Like high risk, high reward, being able to really kind of think [00:03:00] strategically and to the point around what else am I responsible for? So in addition to that technology, I aligned to the corresponding business leaders for each of those spaces. And at Wells Fargo, it's a really exciting time right now because across
