Leading through market change: A Q&A with Everbank COO Lindsay Lawrence

A version of this article first appeared in the December BAI Executive Report: The 2025 banking landscape. Within, industry peers share the strategies and potential solutions for meeting customer needs, preparing for market uncertainty and streamlining operations to preserve margins.

Everbank’s Lindsay Lawrence thinks of herself and everyone who taps financial services as a consumer first.

And it’s the consumers who’ve been shaped by a digital world who will continue to lead what’s next for this industry, Lawrence stresses. That doesn’t mean this long-time executive leader ever strays far from the foundations of banking.

“It’s a fine blend because first and foremost, we’re in the risk business, we’re regulated and we’re talking about people’s money, so we need to make sure that we’re super focused and prudent on that part, always,” she told BAI in a recent interview.

“At the same time, finding that balance is important because we all, as consumers, have devices that we can’t live without, that probably know us better than our spouses do by now,” she says. “And so, I think it’s important for banking leadership to pay attention to where the fintech industry is going, and to know where the broader technology space is going as well.”

Lawrence, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for EverBank, has a career in both retail and commercial banking. Over that time, she’s overseen everything from deposit operations, direct banking and treasury management to digital product delivery channels and payments offerings.

She was previously COO at First Foundation Bank. And earlier in her career, Lawrence held executive roles with Umpqua Bank, and its predecessors, Sterling Savings Bank and Opus Bank, as well as leadership positions with Sunwest Bank, Vineyard Bank and Commercial Capital Bank. She was named to American Banker’s Most Powerful Women in Banking: NEXT list in 2019 and currently sits on the board of Clearinghouse CDFI.

BAI sat down with Lawrence to get her views on proactive leadership, change management, evolving market conditions and more of what’s top of mind as 2025 looms. Answers were edited for length and clarity.

Across your roles, you’ve guided commercial and retail market shifts that embraced digital and payments capabilities while aiming for healthy deposit funding and what some might consider more traditional banking hallmarks. Talk about the necessity of change and, yet, how banks fundamentally have not changed.

What I find so interesting is that, in the commercial space, for instance, we’ve gotten away with being slower to the game for longer. And we joke around about that slowness to a degree. I was meeting with, I think it was PwC, and they were talking about how CFOs [across business] are just predominantly younger now, including gaining that role earlier than historically. Well, those younger CFOs are used to faster-changing technology. For their whole career at this point. They don’t want to have everything be on Excel spreadsheets or be limited to COBOL. They know what’s possible. They want API. They want better integration between their accounting systems and our banking systems. They understand what open banking is. The reality is, they’re asking questions that they didn’t ask before.

We don’t want to be a fintech, but how do we start to leverage those pieces to make the experience better on our side? I’ve always been a huge fan of fintechs and the world that they’re in. I’m also a huge fan of banks. I don’t think it’s ever going to be either/or. It’s both. I love watching the partnerships that are starting. They can, at a minimum, help us vet what’s real, what’s not, where things are going.

Financial services leaders play a critical role as technology continues to reshape the industry. For instance, artificial intelligence (AI) can upend so many processes, for the good, proponents would argue, freeing up human capital, allowing smaller competitors to scale and so on. How can leadership deliver a clear organizational message of balance between change and tradition?

In a former banking life, before we were talking about AI, we were talking about bots. We were rolling out chatbots for customer assistance. But I got internal feedback about real fear around ‘being replaced by robots.’ And it was unexpected, but I took a beat and really understood it. Any fear is legitimate fear, because those are real feelings.

I will argue until the cows come home that the human element remains critical in banking; in fact, it is the most critical piece. What I find so exciting about technological advancements, including AI, is how it will change menial tasks. The ‘check the checkers’ kind of work. It’s not sexy. It’s not wild AI taking over the world. If we can get an automated script or a bot’s answer, how much time did I just return to you to now think strategically? We’re so often firefighting in our daily job, right? What if we didn’t have to? But leaders need to communicate this differentiation.

Have you changed the search for banking leadership and future leaders as our industry competes with fintech talent?

To me, the best candidate is somebody who is open minded. And age, ironically, doesn’t matter. Is it a candidate who shows recognition that they will need to evolve? What’s hard is when you hear people that really emphasize, ‘This is what I’ve done… this way.’ Then I think, okay, I get it. There’s a process there. They’ve been successful. But can they think outside the box in this regard?

We have been hiring from the tech world, from the core-provider world, and it continues a trend from my past roles. It might be from FIS or Fiserv, just as examples, some of the big guys, and those candidates know banking, which is great, because you do need to understand banking. It’s hard to have someone totally rogue.

My thesis has always been, the core is important. The core is the Chevy or the Ford. Sometimes we try to over-engineer the core to be what it’s not intended to be. But there are a lot of tools out there that we can utilize, and if you have the right kind of integration levels, that’s where we can start doing the fun stuff, you know. And so, I think having people that can understand an, almost hybrid, ecosystem is an important piece. But we’ve got regulators, we’ve got risks, we’ve got regular audits, and so you want to find that blend of understanding from candidates. I’ve been really optimistic about the talent I’ve seen.

What are some keys to sustained growth for financial services as competition heats up and as the regulatory climate potentially shifts? Does the pursuit of sustained growth lie with smart consolidation and dealmaking? Is it fintech and banking combining to take on traditional tech? Is it more about niche and specialized services?

I think there’s a lot of opportunity that we haven’t seen before because the ecosystem is changing. I mean, I think there’s a fear, too, that the fintechs will lose their “fintechiness.” Their edge. Because they have the luxury of just going into a garage and building and being creative. Will that get stifled if they’re within a banking environment? I think that’s where you see more partnerships, maybe even acquisitions, in that regard.

But I can tell you, even bank-to-bank [combinations] is becoming trickier. Before if you had two core systems and needed to smush them together, you picked one and typically it was the acquirer. Customers didn’t see all of that behind-the-scenes Wizard of Oz peddling and all was well as long as everything looked good in your statement a month later. Today? Multiple asks in real time. Multiple devices. App glitches when a customer goes to pay a bill. Today there is so much more transparency. That’s good. It’s just complicated for merging systems. There are way more components (of possible tie-ups) to evaluate than before because of the great job a lot of these banks have started to do to become more consumer and commercial friendly.

As for niche, I think technology can also create opportunity and so maybe banks don’t have to limit themselves. Let’s say you want to target high-net- worth individuals when you previously had not. Now, with partnerships, you can plug into a robo advisor and not have to build one yourself. I always think one of the most overwhelming but also wonderful conferences is Money 20/20. It’s fascinating to walk around a big exhibition hall even these days and ask yourself, why didn’t I think of that? But it’s also asking yourself, vaporware or real? This has to get by Washington. Let’s be realistic here. But we should all be thinking of what’s next. It may take two years, five years, 10 years.

If consolidation continues to shape the industry, do you have best practices as an experienced leader to help organizations create healthy transitions?

It’s always been about transparency. We joke, almost, here that we routinely have to prep the teams for cramming five years of change into two years. People laugh, initially. Then the projects and timelines line up, and it does become our reality. But there’s been no hiding that. We let the whole team know, we’re going to ask a lot of you. Engage all stakeholders from the beginning: Where are we headed? Why? And show them when and how they’ve moved the needle. Celebrate wins, too. Not just the final product.

I think this starts from day one and maybe this speaks to the hiring question earlier. I really value transparency when you’re bringing folks on board. I let candidates know, look, if you want a big mahogany desk with a blue leather chair and you want to maintain and manage, this is probably not the place for you, and that’s okay. If you desire entrepreneurial spirit, which may take a little side-by-side building and growing pains and trying things out, this could be a great fit.

With an eye to 2025 and beyond, what issues are leading your conversations?

Certainly lots of topics but the singular issue is fraud. Including how banks need to adjust to the fact that abuses emerge from social media recruitment of would-be fraudsters who think they’re saying yes to a part-time job of sorts, to old-school check kiting. And we’ve talked already about a human and technology mix. That includes fraud. We need technology fight fire with fire when it comes to fraud. But the role of universal bankers can’t be stressed enough.

Let’s empower staff for educational and advisory roles that are much different than even 10 years ago given the deluge of competing information. Consumers get so much information from so many sources. Not all of it good, in fact, most of it questionable. When mostly younger people in the headlines in recent months thought that they had scored an ATM loophole on check-based cash advances, they had to be informed, it seems, that this in fact was no loophole, rather fraud. But banks can play a vital role in parsing what normal client behavior is and what is not.

I’ll will add this about looking ahead to the new year, there’s also knowing what you don’t know. We can’t always predict. We can model scenarios, we can run stress tests. Most important I think, is to remain prudent and don’t stray from end goals.

Lindsay Lawrence is Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for EverBank.

Rachel Koning Beals is Senior Editor with BAI.