Franklin Savings Bank Names First Chief Retail & CX Officer

What happened

Franklin Savings Bank has appointed Joe Todisco to the newly created role of Chief Retail and Customer Experience Officer, signalling a deliberate organisational commitment to placing customer experience at the executive table. The New Hampshire-based community bank announced the appointment through local outlet The Laconia Daily Sun, positioning Todisco as the senior leader responsible for shaping how customers interact with the institution across its retail operations.

The creation of a dedicated C-suite role combining retail leadership with an explicit customer experience mandate is notable for a community bank of Franklin Savings Bank's scale. Rather than folding CX responsibilities into an existing commercial or operations brief, the bank has chosen to elevate the function to its own executive position — a structural decision that reflects growing recognition that experience design is a strategic, not merely operational, discipline.

Why it matters

For community banks competing against digital-first challengers and the expanded retail footprints of larger institutions, the battleground is increasingly experiential rather than purely transactional. Customers choose — and stay with — financial institutions based on how interactions feel, not just on product rates or branch proximity. By naming a dedicated CX executive, Franklin Savings Bank is making an implicit behavioural-economics argument: that trust, loyalty and advocacy are cultivated through consistent, intentional experience design, and that this work requires dedicated senior ownership to be done well.

From a service-design perspective, the move also matters because it signals internal accountability. When CX lives inside another function, it competes for priority. A standalone Chief Retail and Customer Experience Officer can champion journey mapping, staff training, channel consistency and feedback loops without those initiatives being subordinated to short-term commercial targets. Other regional and community financial institutions in MENA and beyond would do well to note the structural logic here.

The Renascence take

Most coverage of executive appointments like this focuses on the individual's credentials. The more consequential story is the organisational architecture — specifically, what it means to fuse "retail" and "customer experience" into a single brief at the C-suite level.

Combining retail operations and CX under one executive is a quiet but powerful design choice: it eliminates the classic organisational dysfunction where the people who own the customer relationship have no authority over the physical and human touchpoints that shape it. The real risk Franklin Savings Bank must now manage is the temptation to treat CX as a rebrand of retail management rather than a genuine transformation of how the bank listens, learns and responds to customers. A customer-obsessed operator in Todisco's position should begin not with a strategy deck, but with a structured programme of frontline listening — because in community banking, the most valuable behavioural data is already sitting in every teller conversation, complaint log and branch exit.