Scaling Innovation: How Tangerine’s COO, Lora Paglia, Is Turning AI Into a Tool for Empowerment

By Sarah Walker

Throughout her career, Lora Paglia has looked at the challenges she faced as an opportunity to innovate. It’s a mindset that crystallized into a philosophy that has defined her journey from the contact centre floor to the C-suite: “We can either choose to disrupt ourselves or be disrupted.”

Today, as the Chief Operating Officer at Tangerine, one of Canada’s leading digital banks, she applies the same guiding principles to her leadership – encouraging her team to look at cutting-edge technologies as tools to advance Tangerine’s strategic goals. She regularly reminds her team that true disruption isn’t only about technology; it’s about mindset.

AI – the enablement tool

This reframing mindset is exactly how Lora approaches AI transformation. Rather than imposing top-down mandates on her team, she empowers each person to become their own disruptor. Lora is driving Tangerine’s current mandate to scale personalization and enhance productivity using AI and cloud-native technologies. She sees the impact AI technology can make to organizational success.

“I am energized when I see the team’s reaction as we start to demystify the capabilities of GenAI and showcase ways it can help support them in their day-to-day work,” she says.

Her approach is practical: “If there’s something that takes up part of your day that is not the most productive use of your time– that’s something that you should experiment with having AI do.”

While AI may seem intimidating to some, she frames it as an enablement tool. “You’re disrupting yourself and your day, but in a positive way, because you’re taking more control of your time.”

When employees embrace this kind of technological enablement, she notes, it scales across an organization and encourages them to seek further innovation. Individual transformation becomes organizational transformation. When people use these tools to eliminate mundane tasks, they suddenly have time and energy to focus on what truly matters: creating meaningful experiences for their clients. The ultimate goal is building the kind of innovation that sets the bank apart from its competitors and truly makes clients’ lives easier.

That kind of innovation is not new to Tangerine. The Bank was recently awarded #1 in Client Satisfaction among midsized personal banks by J.D. Power for the 14^th consecutive year*.

This is where Lora’s commitment to disruption is a critical leadership mindset.

Lora knows that staying ahead is about continuing to be innovative and keeping employees energized so they can put that innovation to work to serve clients.

“We start every one of our management meetings with client stories and examples of recent client experiences, good and bad,” she says. It’s a simple practice that keeps everyone focused on how we are innovating for our clients. “Because at the end of the day, our clients provide so many insights – through the ways that they’re leveraging our services and our products and the feedback that they have about their experiences with them all.”

She adds: “Banking is complicated, but it doesn’t have to be. What’s more complicated is life. So how can we help people with their lives in the least complicated way possible?”

The ripple effect of proactive disruption

At the end of the day, Lora returns to the theme defining her career: enablement through disruption. “Whether you’re helping a contact centre agent solve a client’s urgent need or leading AI implementation across a major financial institution, the principle remains the same,” she says.

Her favourite way to empower individuals is to help them reframe the challenges they are facing. “Most problems have a relatively simple solution.” She also sees skeptics as valuable allies. “They’re giving you an early warning signal about how others might perceive your idea – enabling you to solve that problem before it becomes a real issue.”

For women navigating their careers, her journey offers a powerful blueprint. “Embrace change before it’s forced upon you, build frameworks that multiply your impact and don’t back down when you see an innovative solution,” she adds, “and never forget that behind every process improvement is a human being whose day you’re making better.”

“Choose to disrupt or be disrupted,” she says. “At Tangerine, we know that the future belongs to those who are bold enough to shape it.”

* Tangerine Bank received the highest score among midsize banks in the J.D. Power 2012-2025 Canada Retail Banking Satisfaction Studies, which measure customers’ satisfaction with their primary bank. Visit jdpower.com/awards for more details.