Banco Bradesco has appointed Francesco Di Marcello to a trio of senior technology and customer roles, naming him Chief Information Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, and Chief Experience Officer simultaneously. The appointment was made in August 2024 and consolidates oversight of the bank's digital infrastructure, technology innovation agenda, and customer experience function under a single executive. The decision to combine three roles that are frequently held by separate individuals signals the strategic weight that Bradesco's leadership is placing on the integration of technology and customer outcomes as central pillars of the bank's competitive positioning.
Di Marcello joins Bradesco from McKinsey & Company, where he was a Lead Partner focused on agile transformation and digital strategy across Latin America. His work at McKinsey spanned large-scale organisational change programmes and technology-led transformation engagements, placing him at the intersection of strategy, operations, and technology implementation. The breadth of that experience was evidently a factor in Bradesco's decision to entrust him with a mandate that combines infrastructure oversight, innovation leadership, and the design of end-to-end customer journeys.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION UNDER CEO MARCELO NORONHA
The appointment reflects the accelerated digital transformation agenda that Chief Executive Marcelo Noronha has made a defining priority since assuming leadership of Bradesco. The bank has been investing heavily in technology infrastructure, data and analytics capabilities, and mobile and digital platforms as it responds to competitive pressure from digital-native fintech firms and from domestic banking peers that have moved earlier to modernise their core systems and distribution channels. The creation of a single executive with accountability across IT, innovation, and experience is an organisational design intended to eliminate the silos that have historically slowed the translation of technology investment into visible improvements in customer outcomes.
Bradesco is one of Brazil's largest privately-owned banks, with a retail and corporate franchise built over several decades and one of the most extensive branch and distribution networks in the country. That scale presents both significant resources for technology investment and substantial complexity in execution, as modernisation must be managed across a very large existing customer base and a workforce and operational infrastructure accustomed to established ways of working. Di Marcello's McKinsey background in agile and digital transformation at large organisations is directly relevant to managing that complexity.
LATIN AMERICAN BANKS ELEVATE TECHNOLOGY LEADERSHIP
The appointment is part of a broader pattern across Latin American banking, where major institutions have been elevating technology and digital leadership to the executive committee level as competition from fintechs, the expansion of open banking frameworks, and changing customer expectations have fundamentally altered the pace of digital adoption. Brazil in particular has seen a rapid rise in digital banking penetration, driven by the central bank's Pix instant payments infrastructure and by the growth of digital-only lenders such as Nubank, which has put traditional incumbents under sustained pressure to accelerate their own digital capabilities.
At Bradesco, Di Marcello's mandate covers both the underlying technology systems that power the bank's operations and the front-end experiences that customers encounter across digital and physical channels. The combination of the traditional CIO function with innovation and experience roles is an approach designed to ensure that technology decisions are always evaluated through the lens of the customer outcomes they are intended to produce, rather than being optimised purely for internal operational metrics. The appointment sends a clear message about the direction in which Bradesco's leadership intends to take the bank under Noronha's strategic agenda.