In this monthly Q&A segment, Bank Innovation directs five questions to executives and industry thought leaders who highlight technology and innovation trends in financial services, exploring strategy and best practices in leading financial institutions.

PNC Bank is “sick and tired of fast following,” according to Ganesh Krishnan, executive vice president and chief information officer of the bank’s corporate and institutional banking business.

“We can lead in different ways but the one way we can lead is by innovating and becoming disruptive with technology and by choosing our own sweet spots, and not to just innovate without any purpose,” Krishnan said. “But remember, innovation does not equal technology, it’s about the business idea and not the technology.”

In Krishnan’s quest to leapfrog the six U.S. banks that outpace PNC by asset size, he’s flipping the Pittsburgh-based bank into “a technology company that happens to be in the business of banking, and not a bank that uses technology.”

Krishnan oversees corporate and institutional banking (C&IB) technology vision, strategy and execution at the $410 billion dollar bank, as well as the bank’s internal staff services technology. He spoke with Bank Innovation about “platformification,” how the bank brings new concepts to life at a rapid clip, and key leadership advice that guides his management style. What follows is an edited version of the conversation.

Bank Innovation: How do you build and maintain your innovation pipeline at PNC Bank?

Ganesh Krishnan: We came up with this idea when I took on the CIO role at PNC Bank of a 90-day innovations pilot, which means when a new business idea emerges, within 90 days we will ideate, prototype and have a pilot launched. We were pretty successful as we launched more than 20 new ideas in that first year in 2017. Our ultimate goal was making innovation part of our DNA in C&IB.

We started hosting monthly C&IB innovations forums, we welcomed all ideas big and small. All across business, technology, sales, relationship managers — anyone who had new ideas — could come pitch their idea in the first hour. We would then rate that business idea as high, medium or low value and right there we would approve moving forward with a proof of concept or prototype in our 90-day innovation concept, or we’d decide to put that idea on hold, but still keep it on our list, or ask the idea to be more refined. If the idea had merit, we tested quickly with limited investment and if the outcome from early testing was positive, then a greater investment of time and resources was considered later. The second hour was all about demos of business ideas previously approved, as that generated more thoughts when tech and business folks would see the idea live in action.

In 2018, we started running focused ideation sessions with all our business units across C&IB. We used concepts of design thinking and got our business, operations, techs and relationship managers all together in a room for about five- to six-hour sessions. We consistently generated more than 100 ideas in each of these sessions then we prioritized the top ideas and presented it back at our monthly innovation forums for the proof of concept and prototype. All the ideas stayed in our backlog so we could pick it up for execution at any time.

BI: Could you tell me about an emerging technology that excites you, that you are exploring for integration at PNC Bank?

GK: Within C&IB technology I’ve been driving this concept of “platformification” for more than a year now – and please don’t search for this word, I came up with this name a year ago. The best way to explain this is through the Apple platform.

A traditional business builds products that it sells to customers and there are revenues and profits. However, a platform business operates with a more open, shared and collaborative model. And the example is Apple’s app store. In this case, Apple built the iPhone and iPad platform and invited developers to create applications on top of it. It’s a win-win-win: Developers earn revenue by creating new products, Apple earns revenue by sharing in the revenue associated with the apps and the customers have access to every imaginable product right on their devices. Truly the ecosystem effect, it’s a platform strategy that leverages a shared and open financial infrastructure to connect and enable an ecosystem of participants to promote mutual value exchange. That’s what I call “platformification” at its best, because even Apple couldn’t have built all these apps themselves if they tried.

Take that notion and how do we take that platform concept and apply it to banking and PNC? How do we transform from our products to a platform and turn C&IB, from a siloed, product-oriented world, to C&IB as a platform? That’s what we’ve been working on for the past year or so. The entire paradigm has changed nowadays. Our commercial and corporate banking customers and strategic partners want a platform on top of which they can innovate and offer experiences back to their own customers.

BI: What’s your favorite piece of leadership advice you’ve received?

GK: One of my very close mentors told me to be totally authentic and genuine, and not to replicate someone else’s leadership style. That’s probably one of the best pieces of advice I’ve got because I really thought I should try to step into the shoes of my previous CIO. But Day 1, I got that advice and I’m glad I did what I do and stayed Ganesh rather than tried to be someone else.

Also, having empathy and empowering people was probably the other advice that I really follow close to heart because the best vision and strategy will go for a toss if we don’t have the right people to execute that vision. My dad, my biggest mentor, used to always tell me it’s all about the people; you take care of them and they will take care of everything else.

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

GK: The new digital experiences that we talk about, we can’t become a digital bank without automating a lot of internal processes so we can’t put a shiny layer in front of our customers without automating our inefficient back-end processes. So we put robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence under an umbrella called “Intelligent Automation.” The outcome of that program was to drive operational efficiencies, accelerate cycle time, increase productivity and straight-through processing. We made tons of progress with that program with various use cases throughout retail, C&IB, wealth management, and finance and risk. We have more than 100 bots in production since we started this program a couple of years back, and they’ve been highly impactful in reducing the risk as well as reducing our overall cost. We also have a pretty deep pipeline of bots to be executed for our businesses.

As an example, we identified 89% of our risk controls are manual, and for one of the business use cases there were 300-plus employees manually creating daily accounting journal entries in our finance department. That was a slam dunk to go and create a bot and get rid of that.

The latest example is when the Paycheck Protection Program came up with the small business loan funding, we quickly created a bot before we created APIs to book loans with the SBA.

BI: What’s something your employees would be surprised to learn about you?

GK: I grew up in Mumbai, India; I always wanted to be an international cricket player and represent India. I never, ever wanted to be anywhere close to computers, software or technology, but as fate would have it, I’m here now. Not really successful at what I had planned for myself originally, apparently my planning and execution haven’t gone hand in hand. I still play competitive cricket here in Pittsburgh with about 18 teams and it is my stress buster as I totally forget about everything else while playing cricket. And I’m pretty aggressive on the field. You wouldn’t believe it, but I won’t leave an inch on the field for my opposition team.

Bank Innovation Build, which takes place Sept. 9-10 as a virtual experience, is a must-attend industry event for professionals overseeing financial technologies, product experiences and services. Register here.