Beth Johnson: A change agent to watch

By Citizens Staff

Seizing opportunity and being open to leveraging her skills and strengths in ways she hadn't anticipated at the start of her career, allowed Johnson to step into high pressure positions with ambitious goals.

Johnson shared how her journey took her to Citizens in 2013: "I got a call from Bruce (Van Saun) saying 'Do you want to come to Citizens and become part of the biggest bank IPO in U.S. history?' And after thinking about it for a while, I said to myself: Take a risk and jump on board."

Johnson did come aboard, joining Citizens first as Head of Corporate Strategy, then becoming Chief Marketing Officer and Head of Virtual Channels. Her deep expertise in financial services and customer-led growth served her well, and in January of 2020, she embarked on a new role, Chief Experience Officer (CXO).

As CXO, Johnson accepted the challenge to deliver better and faster experiences to meet the ever-changing expectations of current and future customers. In addition to digital experience design, Johnson also oversees customer advanced analytics, organizational transformation, payment strategy, brand and advertising, and communications.

Despite the many multisyllabic words involved, Johnson’s department really has one goal: drive progress for our customers.

Made Ready to take action

Johnson’s growth mindset, vision, and leadership has helped Citizens make prudent, future focused investments in which human centricity is at the root of every action. Since taking the role of CXO in 2020, Johnson led the push to invest in best-in-class data and analytics capabilities and one of the most comprehensive intelligence platforms. Relentless in identifying top talent, Johnson built up one of the industry’s most advanced analytics teams, averaging over 10 years of banking experience. With the right tools, architecture, talent and deployment, her vision has come to life, creating better experiences in every step of our customer’s journey.

Johnson’s passion for establishing positive and lasting impact goes beyond serving our customers and shareholders, as demonstrated by her emphatic focus on community. As Head of ESG, Johnson has helped Citizens accelerate our ambitious environmental, social, and governance agenda, recognizing that by developing end-to-end integrated ESG strategies at the enterprise level we create an opportunity to use our reach, innovation, and insights to drive meaningful change.

Citizens has made impressive strides towards reducing our operational impact on the environment, understanding and managing the risks presented by climate change and resulting regulatory and market changes, and supporting our clients and customers as they plan for and manage risks and opportunities intrinsic to the transition to a lower-carbon economy.

To learn more about Citizens’ sustainability efforts, please read the recently released 2022 Environmental Social Governance Report, which highlights enterprise-wide initiatives that advance the our commitment to corporate responsibility.

Necessity is the mother of reinvention

As the mother of two young women, Abby (19) and Nicky (17), Johnson understands the need to make customer’s lives easier by making their transactions simple, quick, and digital. She also understands the many elements that need to be in place to enable women to take on challenging leadership roles at top companies.

"I'm part of a dual-career couple; while there've been challenges over time with that, it actually enabled me to take some risk because neither one of us has to rely solely on ourselves for taking care of our family," Johnson said.

While the glass ceiling is starting to break, evidence that it persists comes from research showing that only 7.4% of Fortune 500 company CEOs are women. Additionally, twenty percent of CEOs in the financial services industry are women. If you picture a filled with 500 CEOs, the number of women would barely fill out the orchestra section.

Johnson shared why more female representation at the top seems to be coming slowly.

"I think that in order for true diversity and inclusion goals to be met, whether that's women, whether that's people of color, there just is a tendency from all of us to sponsor, promote, and help people who are more like us." Johnson said. "And I think people have to continue to understand the value that diverse views, opinions, upbringings, and gender, can bring to an organization."

Johnson went on to say, "The data is so clear on this. More diversity tends to lead to better performance… there’s still a long way to go for people to fully understand that and embrace it."

Along the course of her career, Johnson is no stranger to being the only woman at the table.

Years after she had moved on from her role at Goldman Sachs, one of its most senior traders stopped Beth and her husband on a plane to say hello. Having not seen each other for many years, Johnson finally had to ask. "I was a 22-year old analyst. And I was only there a year. How do you know who I am?” He said, "Beth, everybody knew who you were."

Being one of the only women on the London trading floor whose job title was Financial Analyst, rather than Assistant, helped Beth get noticed. But Johnson said that standing out in that way can have its plusses and minuses.

"I also got asked by someone who was visiting from the outside to get coffee," Johnson shared.

Ready for what’s next

What advice does Beth have for women (or anyone) just starting out in their careers:

Want to join a company that champions women?

Citizens trains future generations of leaders with our Early Career Development programs, Business Resource Groups focused on diversity and inclusion, and a culture of mentorship. To learn more, check out our open roles.