Eastern Bank has hired Ashley Nagle Eknian as its new chief digital strategist to relaunch the bank’s fintech efforts and head Eastern Labs 2.0.

Eknian comes to Eastern after serving as a managing director of the emerging technology center at State Street. The Boston University alum is also the current program development chair of digital innovation for fintech at Brandeis University.

The bank launched the first iteration of Eastern Labs under entrepreneur Dan O’Malley and created a new platform targeting small businesses that could approve loans of $100,000 and less in just minutes. Eastern Labs 1.0 would eventually spin off into its own company called Numerated Growth Technologies.

This time around with labs 2.0, Eastern’s CEO Bob Rivers is looking to take a more holistic approach that is more collaborative with the fintech community.

“The new team in Labs 2.0 will look at a variety different technologies and applications towards more partnerships, as opposed to developing our own applications in-house,” Rivers told Banker & Tradesman in a recent interview. “Our chief digital strategist will be charged with looking at what is going on in areas such as artificial intelligence, cryptocurrency, blockchain and other developments within the payments space. Boston is blessed with real strong fintech ecosystem, so we are looking to better network on multiple fronts as opposed to just one.”