Innovation at Scale

Purva Sule has done the thing most people only talk about doing: she left a top consulting seat to start a company, ran it for eight years through the funding scares that come with any startup, and then went back inside a large institution. Ask her which world she prefers and she refuses the premise. What she actually likes is a blend of the two, and she has a name for it — innovation at scale.

That phrase carries the whole episode. Sule leads digital platforms and strategy for wealth management at Northern Trust, and in this conversation with Advisor Ally host Vineet Mohan she lays out how a big bank gets entrepreneurial without giving up the two things startups never have: an established brand and a balance sheet that doesn't blink.

A career built on strategy, execution, and organizational behavior

Sule opens on the small talk that only makes sense if you know Chicago. It's a clear, sunny morning — which, she points out, means it's brutally cold, close to zero degrees Fahrenheit, the day after a snowstorm. She has lived there 25 years, in the suburbs, working in the city, and has made peace with layering up and waiting for spring.

The career itself reads like a series of deliberate jumps. She graduated from the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, went straight to McKinsey, and spent a few years in management consulting, which she still rates as one of the best ways to build foundational skills — problem solving, communication, analytics, and the habit of zeroing in on what matters instead of getting lost in the noise. From there she left with some fellow alums to start an offshore research and analytics firm, eight years of working in genuine ambiguity where the only person holding you accountable is you. Then came the large organizations — a long stint at BMO earlier in her career, then Northern Trust, where she led digital platforms for the wealth management business.

She sorts all of it into three themes. First, strategy and execution — moving from the top of the funnel, where strategy is set, to the bottom, where impact actually happens. Second, an accelerating focus on digital, data, and technology, which she argues you simply cannot be successful in financial services without today. Third, collaboration and influence, and here she quotes a business-school professor who told her organizational behavior would be the one course she'd remember once she got into the corporate world.

"You have to be effective downwards, sideways, and upwards. Without that, formal authority is never enough to actually get things done and achieve outcomes."

Mohan agrees, noting that organizational design is the class everyone in business school tunes out, only to learn its lessons the hard way years later when the tensions surface.

Innovation at scale, and why the mix wins

When Mohan asks about the shift from running her own shop back to a large firm, Sule reframes it as a question of individual fit — and then gives the episode its title. What she enjoys is the mix, and she calls it innovation at scale.

Her point is that large organizations no longer have the luxury of waiting. There isn't a five-year runway to watch how AI tools shake out before implementing them; the accelerated pace of change means you get a slice of the entrepreneurial experience inside the big institution. What the big institution adds on top is what a startup never has. There's a strong brand that clients already trust and have worked with for years. There's a strong balance sheet. And there's the memory of the alternative.

"In the eight years of being with that firm, there were always phases where funding dries up, you're sometimes working without pay, and you don't know where the next month will take you."

That financial security, she says, is what lets a large firm keep investing in innovation and development without every downturn threatening the whole enterprise. Add the rigor a large institution brings — a variety of talent, a variety of operating models, executed with pace — and you get her sweet spot: doing exciting, entrepreneurial things inside a corporate environment.

Today she sits on the wealth management leadership team at Northern Trust, leading digital platforms and strategy for a business she describes as transforming rapidly — built on nearly a decade earlier at BMO across strategy, retail banking, wealth, and digital. On the side, she stays close to the wealth-tech world, keeping her ear to the ground on what's actually working, and she advises a women's-health medtech startup and sits on a social-services board.

The unglamorous mechanics of transformation

Mohan, coming at this as a founder, wants to know how a large organization actually approaches digitization. Sule's answer is refreshingly unromantic. Every journey is individual to the organization, and digital strategy has to be rooted in the overall business strategy and the firm's own unique value proposition — not adopted because a technology happens to be in vogue.

Beyond that, she names the real challenge at scale: navigation and prioritization. A big organization's demands on capital run wide and deep, and capital is always limited. The trick, she's learned, isn't figuring out how to make everyone happy, because you can't. It's the process. Is everyone at the table? Does everyone have a voice? Then, crucially, how do you make the decision without sliding into analysis paralysis — with clear checkpoints, timing, and accountability? And once the money is allocated, everyone gets on the same side of the table. No relitigating whether your area got funded. You trust the process and go.

On the perennial build-versus-partner question — a topic she's passionate about, having helped kick off fintech partnerships at BMO years ago when the industry still worried fintechs were competitors who'd run off with the clients — her framework is simple. Capital is never enough to build everything well. A big bank has deposits, lending, advisor experience, client experience, investments, trust, operations, and contact centers all competing for investment. You cannot build deep, high-quality experiences across all of them yourself.

"Save your build dollars for something that is truly distinguished — something that is truly your core value proposition."

Document sharing between advisors and clients? Little reason to build that from scratch when strong cloud providers exist. Prospecting efficiency? She names FastTrackr directly as an example of a capability better partnered than built. But an investment experience that sits at the core of the wealth value proposition — that's something a firm might build itself. The other, less-understood responsibility is stitching the network of partners into one cohesive interface. Hand an advisor 20 different tools and disconnected logins and you've lost the user before they start.

Growing the pie, and the AI adoption curve

Mohan raises the tension between large financial groups and the steady stream of advisors breaking away to go independent. Sule doesn't see a zero-sum game. With the generational transfer of wealth, the expansion into private investments, and strong public markets, she sees the pie growing — more clients and prospects who can benefit from planning and wealth management than before. Within that, each firm doubles down on its DNA: Northern Trust's fiduciary brand was the first name clients thought of for long-term trust relationships; a universal bank's connected commercial and retail banking lets a client deepen an existing relationship into wealth. Whatever the tech, she insists, it's still a human business — human plus digital, both in capital letters.

Then the topic she's clearly most animated about: AI. What has amazed her most isn't the capability, it's the adoption. She contrasts it with the mobile platform 15 or 20 years ago, which took years to become the primary way clients interfaced with their firm. With AI, she's seeing genuine openness from providers to try tools and adopt them at scale — actually running them in their businesses, not just tinkering — which she reads as a signal of how good the tools have become.

Where it goes next, in her view, is from the advisor experience to the client experience. She points to agentic AI driving onboarding, paperless elections, and money movement — an agent taking the client's answers and activating them on the back end, rather than making the client wade through a seven-step form. She points to personalization: at Northern Trust her team built an AI benchmarking tool that showed clients what others like them do on sticky, private questions — how much to give children in their lifetime, how much to direct to philanthropy — the kind of guidance you can't get off the internet or from friends. And she points to planning, automating the inputs and some of the outputs with advisor oversight where needed.

"All of these pieces contribute to what I call the democratization of wealth management — serving more clients more effectively, in the interest of both advisors and clients."

Mohan likens the personalization idea to a Netflix recommendation engine for financial decisions. Sule agrees the client side is where a lot of the untapped value sits, and notes that once advisors trust AI in their own workflows, they'll be readier to extend it to clients.

Asked how the big firms are moving, she says activity is everywhere along the continuum, from small shops to giants like Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase making news with their in-house wealth tools. Mid-sized firms still tend to wait and watch, preferring to be quick followers rather than early adopters to manage risk and capital. The difference now, she says, is that "quick follower" no longer means five years. It can mean five months.

She closes on the personal note, on building 360-degree relationships and finding conversations like this one energizing, alongside the usual travel and reading. And she returns the favor with a genuine shout-out to FastTrackr's on-the-ground work with users — going as far as to say she sees a unicorn in the making. Coming from someone who has run the startup gauntlet herself and now sets strategy inside a bank deciding what to build and what to buy, it's a notable read on where wealth tech is heading.