Citizens Bank has accelerated its transformation of the bank’s core system, turning to creative workarounds to respond quickly to changing consumer behaviors amid the pandemic.

At the heart of the transformation is the bank’s data-driven personalization engine, which has played an important role in customizing pandemic communications for the bank’s more than 5 million customers, according to Chief Experience Officer Beth Johnson.

“We’ve created what we call a ‘data intelligence platform’ that pulls together information on our customers, but sometimes the analytics is the easy part,” Johnson said. “We not only did the analytics foundation but we did the hard part of actually linking our channels through that platform.”

Connecting the siloes of communication channels with the data intelligence platform was challenging, Johnson said. “Like most banks, we have a lot of legacy systems, so we do have to make sure the different channels for the different legacy systems can talk to each other to effectively leverage that data in a smart, efficient way without re-platforming the entire bank.”

As a workaround, Citizens connects the data intelligence platform, which brings the data together and delivers it through the different channels, with a “service layer,” Johnson said. Linking the layer with the platform allows Citizens to make the connection, via the intelligence platform, into the bank’s different systems without changing the legacy tech stack.

With the patchwork infrastructure, Citizens has sent personalized messaging to customers, based on certain factors like geography, preferred communication channel, and the products the customer uses. It’s also given employees across the organization access to the bank’s centralized customer information hub, from call centers to branch locations. Providence, R.I.-based Citizens, which has about $177 billion in assets, operates 1,000 branches throughout its 11-state footprint.

“We can use that one tool to plug into different channels to be relevant to our customers with advice,” Johnson said.

Also read: Citizens Bank readies mobile app revamp after COVID delay

Citizens is not alone in its ongoing mission to update its core systems to facilitate agile innovation. Only 21% of industry executives were “completely satisfied” with their core providers, according to a Bank Director survey last August. The slow pace of innovative solutions or upgrades was cited as one of the most common complaints. Startup core providers have been cropping up as a result of banks’ frustration with rigid legacy cores. For example, Neocova, a St. Louis-based core banking startup that scored $9.5 million in a Series A funding round earlier this year, works with a handful of community banks, including Bank of St. Elizabeth, Coastal Community Bank and First Financial Bank, for a cloud-based core that allows for API integrations.

“It is something that we need to do in order to survive,” Brice Luetkemeyer, CEO of Bank of St. Elizabeth, previously told Bank Innovation. “The big core processing companies are inflexible; they are hard to deal with when trying to integrate other products and they tend to be very proprietary and keep you from using others’

The goal of the digital overhaul is “to really drive forward our digital agenda as well as an agile operating model to partner with data and analytics, marketing and some other functions to ensure we were transforming the way we go to market for our customers,” Johnson said. “That transformation is really centered around how do we respond quickly to changing customer needs — digital is the core of that — as we think about developing our services and products across the bank.”