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Citizens boosts tech spend, attacking back office and point-of-sale lending

Jake MartinbyJake Martin
July 22, 2019
in Banking, Strategy
Reading Time: 3 mins read
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Citizens Bank is accelerating its tech investments to speed up migration to the cloud, as well as to support new digital products and services. The bank will make a net investment of about $50 million over the next two years that will be put toward “reinventing” point-of-sale payment experiences and new digital offerings for commercial customers.

Citizens also is launching an efficiency and digital transformation program this quarter that it claims will help reshape its operating model. The purpose is to deliver a customer-centric, efficient and agile approach. The bank expects the investments to benefit its medium-term revenue growth over 2022 to 2025 if executed well, chief financial officer John Woods told investors on Friday.

The effort will entail modernizing the bank’s IT practices, accelerating migration to the cloud, “more ambitiously” using data and artificial intelligence, and digitizing end-to-end processes that previously were done manually. The bank expects up to $325 million in pre-tax run-rate savings from the program by the end of 2021.

Citizens already has made strides in upgrading its consumer-facing technology. Over the past two years, the Providence, R.I.-based bank has built up its presence in the point-of-sale loans space. It also is Apple‘s bank partner for its iPhone upgrade financing program (a tie-up launched in 2017), and the bank is expanding its point-of-sale loan product’s reach into other areas of retail, including home improvement brands and security companies like ADT. The bank’s differentiators include its line of sight into the customer’s bigger financial picture and its ability to partner with fintech firms when possible, Andrew Rostami, executive vice president of unsecured lending, previously explained to Bank Innovation.

The bank’s prior investments in technology already are bearing fruit. Citizens Access, the bank’s digital-only arm launched in July 2018, raised $5.4 billion in deposits through the second quarter of 2019, with an average balance of $5.1 billion, which was up $1.1 billion over the prior quarter. Total deposits with the bank this past quarter reached $124 billion, up 6% from $117.1 billion in the same quarter last year, according to the earnings report.

Also see: Why Citizens Bank Put a Special UX Team at the Heart of its Mobile App Revamp

Chairman and CEO Bruce Van Saun said the increased technology investment will help accelerate the migration of the bank’s back-office infrastructure to the cloud, although he did not provide a timeframe for when that might happen. “We’ve had some progress on that to date, but we’re really going to accelerate that over the next couple of years,” he added.

Another goal, Van Saun said, is to add functions and technology to get to market faster through an agile computing push. Through agile computing, software is developed in small chunks and in short spurts rather than in one large “waterfall” project. “We probably have 50 pods, as they’re referred to in the trade, up in our agile environment today,” he noted. “We’re going to quadruple that over the next couple of years, so it’s quite a significant change in terms of how we support and roll out new technologies.” The bank’s agile computing teams already have started using advanced analytics in areas including personalization.

A 2018 study by Celent predicted the financial services industry will spend about $296.5 billion on IT in 2021, up from $261.1 billion in 2018. About $114.9 billion of that spending is expected to come from North American banks.

Tags: agile software developmentCitizens AccessCitizens BankPremiumtech spend
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