With Allie Carey, Chief Strategy Officer, SEI Private Banking and Wealth Management
When large organizations talk about “innovation,” it’s usually a euphemism for more meetings. This episode is what it looks like when innovation becomes a repeatable system.
As Chief Strategy Officer at SEI Private Banking and Wealth Management, Allie Carey has helped transform a 50-year-old financial technology company into a repeatable engine for growth.
Under her leadership, SEI went from zero structured idea flow to three fundable experiments per year and even launched a new, revenue-generating venture in just 18 months.
We built her playbook live on this episode of “Beyond the Core.” Here’s what we learned.
Every growth journey starts with a realization that feels uncomfortable but liberating. When Allie joined SEI, she and the leadership team came to a simple conclusion:
The core business wasn’t going to deliver the growth targets they had set.
As she put it: “We have to do something different. It’s non-negotiable.”
That statement became the catalyst for everything that followed, because until leadership agrees that the existing system can’t produce future results, there’s no reason to change.
This alignment didn’t come from a burning platform or a crisis. It came from ambition.
The CEO and executive team set big goals, and the natural question was, “How are we going to get there?”
The answer: by building new ventures beyond the core.
Getting leadership aligned is one thing. Getting 7,000 employees aligned is another.
Allie realized that SEI’s innovation strategy couldn’t live in PowerPoint decks or town halls. It had to be participatory.
She and her team created a company-wide idea challenge, backed by leadership and real incentives. Employees were invited to submit proposals under two categories — efficiency or growth. Each submission had to meet strict commercial thresholds:
The results were staggering: SEI went from zero actionable ideas to over 30 fundable submissions in the first cycle.
But what mattered most wasn’t the number of ideas. It was the culture shift.
Teams that had never been asked to think commercially were suddenly learning how to pitch, quantify impact, and defend new concepts in front of senior leadership.
As Allie put it, “Alignment has to happen every day. It never stops.”
Most corporate innovation programs die in the name of governance. Allie flipped that on its head.
She introduced a lightweight, transparent review system that brought leadership into the process early, not as gatekeepers but as sponsors and judges.
Executives sat on judging panels. They were accountable for choosing the winners and, by extension, for funding and supporting them.
Each team went through structured coaching before their “Shark Tank”-style pitch.
They used a one-page business plan template to clarify the opportunity, the problem, and the path to validation. In doing so, Allie created a shared language between innovators and executives, one that made risk feel measurable.
It’s a reminder that structure doesn’t slow innovation down. The wrong structure does.
When we asked Allie how SEI actually increased decision speed, her answer was refreshingly simple: “We made smaller decisions.”
Instead of forcing leadership to greenlight $10M initiatives, Allie built a process that broke growth bets into six-month experiments.
Each experiment had:
If it worked, they doubled down. If it didn’t, they captured the learning and moved on.
The result?
One of SEI’s winning ideas (a new solution for community banks) went from concept to paying customers in 18 months.
That idea had been floating around for years. The difference this time was focus, structure, and a clear runway for experimentation.
Speed doesn’t come from skipping governance.
It comes from making smaller, faster, evidence-based decisions.
The playbook Allie built became a cultural forcing function.
It redefined how SEI thinks about experimentation, risk, and value creation. What started as a single business-unit initiative has now scaled across the enterprise.
Hundreds of employees have participated. Dozens of new ideas are in the pipeline. And SEI now runs three full experiments per year, with measurable throughput.
But maybe the most important outcome is harder to quantify:
The company now has a shared belief that new ideas can come from anywhere — and a system to prove it.
Allie’s approach shows what real corporate innovation looks like:
Or, as Allie put it: “We don’t fail fast. We learn where not to spend big money… and that’s success.”
Most corporations simply lack a system to act on ideas. At SEI, Allie Carey built that system.
This is what happens when strategic leadership meets design thinking, when governance turns into growth, and when innovation stops being a buzzword and starts becoming real businesses being created.
If you’re leading innovation inside a large enterprise, take this playbook to heart:
That’s how you build an innovation engine that lasts.
To listen or watch all these ideas in full, please check out the full episode of “Beyond the Core” wherever you get your podcasts.
— Ben & Marcus
We always enjoy conversations about innovation and startup building so please get in touch.
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