In consumer finance, customers judge institutions on small, simple moments. A statement arrives on time, a payment is posted correctly, the app shows the right limit and rewards, and a support agent sees the same information the customer sees. When integrations are rushed, people notice in painful ways: duplicate statements, misapplied payments, a card that suddenly declines at checkout.
Shalini Mani, a Senior Director at Discover and an IEEE Senior Member, has built her career around making that invisibility deliberate. She now leads Discover Card’s merger integration with Capital One, and treats integration as a product discipline rather than a one-off technology project. Her operating principle is straightforward: align platforms and portfolios so that customers experience one coherent journey instead of the seams between systems.
Integration At Scale, Anchored In Customer Journeys
That perspective is being tested now as major issuers combine portfolios and platforms at global scale. The worldwide credit card payment market reached about $690.6 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow to roughly $1.316 trillion by 2033, which means every large merger touches millions of active accounts and day-to-day payment decisions. When those accounts move, authorization logic, rewards posting, and dispute workflows all have to line up so customers do not see the transition as a downgrade in reliability.
Inside that environment, Mani’s work as Senior Director of Merger and Integration at Discover focuses on uniting Discover and Capital One credit card portfolios with the platforms that support them while migrating more than $100 billion in outstanding balances into a single combined portfolio. She manages a team of around 20 specialists across product and technology who own integration planning, launch readiness, and operational performance. In practice, that means mapping statement cycles and rewards rules, then walking through servicing journeys before any data moves so that the merged system respects how customers already use their cards.
“Large integrations fail when teams treat them as spreadsheet exercises instead of lived customer journeys,” Mani observes. “If a customer never has to ask why something changed on their statement, that is the clearest sign we did the work properly.”
Modernizing Loan Platforms Without Losing Control
Once portfolios are aligned at the card level, the next test is whether lending platforms can evolve without creating new friction. The global digital lending platform market was valued at about $10.91 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach around $114.72 billion by 2034, growing quickly as banks push origination and servicing into digital channels. That growth is not only about speed. It is about building systems that can support real-time validation and compliant decisioning while keeping communication clear for borrowers.
In that context, Mani’s earlier work directing product strategy and operations for Discover Student Loans shows how modernization can support both growth and discipline. Between 2022 and 2023 she led the end-to-end modernization of the student loan digital application platform, moving to a microservices approach with event-driven integration and using API orchestration so that credit decisioning and identity verification could rely on validated data in near real time. That program helped deliver a $100 million annual uplift in application-to-loan conversion and supported more than $1.2 billion in private student loan originations each year, while keeping eligibility logic and regulatory controls intact. She still remembers an early pilot where call center volume dropped in the first week after launch but approval rates stayed stable.
“Digital lending works when speed and clarity show up together,” she says. “If a student can understand the decision on their screen and the bank can audit every step behind it, the platform is doing its real job.”
Designing Experiences That Quietly Prevent Problems
Yet large financial transformations are fragile. Analysis of transformation programs in financial services shows that more than 40 percent of unsuccessful efforts suffer serious financial or operational damage, around 60 percent run over budget, and roughly 45 percent lead to senior leaders exiting. Those numbers describe what happens when big changes are not grounded in everyday customer journeys or backed by disciplined remediation.
As Senior Manager and then Manager of Product Development at Discover, Mani worked on closing those gaps in the student loan business. From 2015 onward she led efforts to enhance the electronic signature process so more applicants could complete documentation digitally, resulting in higher conversion rates and reduced call volume, which lifted completion rates and cut the need for manual follow-up. She then guided the transformation of the student loan application experience into a modular, component-based front end that allowed continuous testing and targeted experiments without destabilizing the underlying systems. Building and scaling a cross-functional team of more than 15 technical and product specialists, she tied issue resolution and remediation processes to strict zero-error tolerance so that any customer impact was fully corrected.
“Good experience design prevents problems quietly,” Mani notes. “If customers can complete an application, sign, and track their status without calling us, that is less noise for them and a cleaner platform for us.”
Aligning Incentives, Data, And Risk
Behind those visible journeys sit the incentives and controls that guide thousands of daily decisions across branches, operations, and risk teams. In 2024, fines for non-compliance with anti-money-laundering regulations reached about $4.6 billion worldwide, and North American institutions accounted for approximately $4.33 billion of that total, or about 95 percent of global penalties. Those figures underline how quickly misaligned incentives and incomplete data can turn into material losses.
At Capital One, Mani owned design, monitoring, and forecasting for retail branch incentives and proposed structural changes that redirected spend toward profitable portfolios, reducing overall incentive costs by about 8 percent while steering associates toward more loyal, higher-value customer relationships. Before that, at HSBC’s Private Label Credit Cards division, she led the data infrastructure group that built and maintained data marts for performance monitoring and marketing analysis and supported the risk teams that relied on the same information. She helped deliver Basel compliance reporting by engineering capital-adequacy pipelines tied to probability of default and exposure at default across the portfolio and by supporting loss-given-default models drawn from the same underlying data.
“If the scorecards, data, and controls do not agree with each other, people will follow the wrong signal,” she says. “The real win is when doing the right thing for the customer and reducing risk feels like the same decision, not a tradeoff.”
Where Integrated Platforms Serve Customers Better
As these integrations and modernizations compound, they sit inside broader shifts in how people bank and borrow. The global digital banking market is valued at around $35.3 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach roughly $79.4 billion by 2030, reflecting rapid adoption of online and mobile channels for everyday financial activity. At the same time, the global student loan market is estimated at about $4.20 trillion in 2024 and is forecast to reach approximately $8.42 trillion by 2034, growing at roughly 7.20 percent annually over that period. In a world where more customers manage their education and card products through digital journeys, and fold much of their day-to-day finances into the same channels, the institutions that win will be those that make large-scale change feel like stability, not disruption.
Mani’s work fits squarely into that future. From integrating massive card portfolios to reshaping student loan platforms and incentive systems, she treats scale as a responsibility to simplify life for customers rather than as a reason to add complexity.
“Integrations are not just about moving balances or decommissioning systems,” she reflects. “They are about earning the right to grow by showing customers that every change makes their financial lives clearer and more predictable, and therefore easier to manage.”
