Technology investment at KeyBank is nothing if not dynamic.

The Cleveland-based bank had a digitally driven calendar year, partnering with Laurel Road for an online lending platform in March 2021 and acquiring payments fintech XUP Payments in November 2021.

Internal activities were equally kinetic, with the $186 billion bank migrating its primary services to Google Cloud in February 2022 and its augmented programming team using robotic process automation (RPA) to streamline 450 worker processes in May 2021.

Central to KeyBank’s success is an automation approach that focuses on forward-facing innovations, Kim Snipes, consumer and digital chief innovation officer, told Bank Automation News.

“Innovation must be infused in every tech investment,” Snipes told BAN. “Key has a legacy of carving out tech investment to ensure we stay focused on what is next versus just the here and now.”

BAN sat down with Snipes to discuss the bank’s approach to automation. What follows is an edited version of the conversation.

Bank Automation News: KeyBank recently chose Google to help enhance its digital customer experience. How did you decide who to partner with?

Kim Snipes: Google had a very compelling strategy around developing new business services, focusing on resiliency and investing in a secure environment. Google and KeyBank have an established relationship co-developing services with Google already housing critical workloads for the bank, and there was a strong commitment to a successful migration to Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

BAN: What aspects of your banking operations have you recently automated within the last six months?

KS: We have increased the breadth of our automation in several areas — all of which were focused on creating improved client experiences. In alignment with clients’ potential financial restructuring needs, we made additional investments in our lending services. Given the influx of volume seen across the industry, we aimed to maintain our quality of service, reduce our time to complete a loan, and better enable our teammates to serve our clients.

We addressed automation needs from the front office to back office with our core lending products. During the last six months, we have also seen an uptick in fraud, causing client disputes to increase. Therefore, we streamlined our disputes process with the aid of automation to allow us to better manage the process end to end.

BAN: How do you build and maintain your innovation pipeline?

KS: At Key, we believe innovation must be infused in every tech investment. We are vigilant in assessing quickly shifting trends in the economy and industry and challenge ourselves to be nimble when reacting to emerging opportunities. Our digital default capability implemented in 2021 is an example of this innovation mindset. Key has a legacy of carving out tech investment to ensure we stay focused on what is next versus just the here and now, such as our rapidly maturing conversational [artificial intelligence] AI capability. We also encourage innovation via our long-standing annual hackathon event — open to all KeyBank teammates — that teaches the skill of taking ideas from a thought to a business value proposition to realization.

BAN: What will be the chief automation and digital focus points for KeyBank this year?

KS: In 2021, Key demonstrated that, with targeted digital and automation investments, we can position ourselves as an industry leader in digital capabilities. As we enter 2022, we will continue to place the client first while ensuring we automate our processes end to end through our middle to back office. We will continue to focus on accelerating our digital origination capabilities in areas where we are gapped, such as a frictionless digital credit card and mortgage origination experience for our retail customers and additional digital deposit and credit origination capabilities for our business banking customers. We are also focused on our digital originations for Key Private Bank and our unsecured lending products.

BAN: What are some digital transformation best practices for retail banks?

The following insights have come from KeyBank’s digital transformation journey and can be applied to all retail banks:

• The transformation must be comprised of cross-functional teams from all areas of the organization such as technology, digital, operations, line of business, marketing, and data and analytics;
• The transformation must always be focused on achieving business outcomes and meeting customers’ existing and anticipated needs. This focus ensures the most impactful priorities are focused on and invested in;
• The transformation must be informed by a retail bank’s digital and physical strategy. For example, in a relationship-focused strategy, how is digital leveraged to enhance and not supplant the physical relationship between the bank and the customer;
• The transformation will have maximum acceleration and impact when built on top of a modern technology foundation with application programming interface (API)-enabled core systems. Those financial institutions that have a legacy of aggressively implementing a modern set of core systems enabled through APIs will be able to turn new digital experiences into a reality for their customers at record speed;