Former USAA executive Ameesh Vakharia has been tasked with aligning the regional bank’s brand experience with its digital product delivery.

In his newly created role at Huntington Bank, Ameesh Vakharia is overseeing the melding of marketing and digital efforts to create better customer experiences.

Vakharia was named chief marketing and digital products officer at the Columbus, Ohio-based regional bank Sept. 2. Previously, Vakharia was chief strategy and brand officer at USAA; he also held leadership roles at Truist and one of its predecessors, SunTrust.

Prior to Vakharia’s joining the bank, marketing at Huntington had been under a different leader, and digital products had been embedded within respective business units, he said; the two were brought together to create one team that supports all of the bank’s businesses.

With Huntington now holding $284 billion in assets and operating across 21 states following the acquisition of two banks last year, Vakharia’s role “makes a lot of sense” as the bank seeks to accelerate its pace of delivery and tell its story in new markets, he said in a recent interview.

“If you think about a consumer or prospect who's going to try and shop and browse for a checking account and then wants to, within a few minutes, be able to open that seamlessly on their phone and be on their way, that spans parts of brand marketing to product marketing to a digital storefront into an onboarding routine that starts to curate what the first 90 days are like,” he said during a recent interview.

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