- The status of technologies when I joined Citizens
was that there
wasn't a very good relationship with the business.
The technology organization was very highly outsourced
and they didn't have necessarily the deep engineering
skills to compete in today's environment where
really our competitors are fintechs, not even other banks.
And if you think about what we're really trying to achieve
from a business perspective,
we wanted to improve the stability
of our environment or improve the customer experience.
And we really wanted to improve our time to market.
And so we really created five pillars
around those business transformations.
The first pillar was moving to agile.
Secondly, we created this platform approach.
Thirdly, and then probably one of the most
critical things was really developing a really
great engineering talent base.
The fourth was around how do we transform the costs
of technologies?
And that was all about moving to the cloud.
So the fifth pillar was all about protecting the core
and that was around making sure that there was no impact
to our customers from a stability or cyber perspective.
The next generation technology program is only successful
if it really delivers business value.
And we have some terrific examples now
across the bank that we can really showcase where
this new technology is adding value.
We built this lending as a service environment
and it truly is a platform in previously
we brought a number of lending package solutions.
So we had a lending solution for student loans.
We had a lending solution for HELOCs.
We had a lending solution for credit cards.
We had a lending solution for regular loans, for mortgage.
What we've built with this lending
as a service platform is a true platform that can be reused
across those different verticals.
And what we're able to do now is reuse those components
build, build them once, but reuse them many, many times.
And I think that's a huge difference
from where we were before, where frankly
we were operating in a, in a waterfall environment
where it would take months to write requirements.
Then at the end of the day
you would deliver projects that potentially
would take years.
In fact, our release time was
was something like 340 days in the past.
And now our average release time is under 90 days.
We've taken $30 million out of our cost base.
We've reduced a number of outages significantly
and we've improved our mean time to recovery
from something like nine hours to two and a half hours.
There's been a huge change
in the perception of technologies at the bank.
We are now at the table with the business.
(upbeat music)