Sathish Muthukrishnan, the chief information, data and digital officer at Ally Bank, has seen plenty of automation projects hit a brick wall, and can attribute this to three pitfalls: A lack of a clear vision; no sponsorship within the business; and not measuring the results of the automation.

“When I say results, whether it is productivity, cost or the bandwidth that you’ve created, you have to be able to measure all of that,” Muthukrishnan said. “Then you also have to measure how well the automation is running.”

Muthukrishnan spoke to Bank Automation News about how the $182.2 billion Ally avoids those pitfalls with its own automation. Muthukrishnan also discussed his IT team’s approach to intelligent automation, his most-anticipated automation trend, and what an automation hole-in-one would look like for the Sandy, Utah-based bank.

What follows is an edited version of the conversation.

Bank Automation News: To date, what have been Ally’s greatest automation strengths?

Sathish Muthukrishnan: We have several things that have contributed to the strength of automation at Ally. The first one was creating a center of excellence within the technology team that is purely focused on automation. They are working on creating a platform that will help enable automation, but the use cases that run on the platform are democratized to various technology teams and various business teams.

What that means is ideas about what to automate are coming from all corners of the organization, but the execution is happening at the center. That accelerates our execution, but more importantly, it helps us learn rapidly from every automation initiative that we do so we can apply that learning.

The other is the partnership we have with our functional and business leaders. There is tremendous support for automation from all of them. From a financial standpoint, they are able to help us prioritize automation initiatives that add to the bottom line of the company. How does it contribute to the profit and loss of the company? We focus on that.

Finally, our culture allows us to focus on our customers, shareholders and communities and do what is right by them. That makes it easy for us to prioritize what initiatives within automation should be focused on right now.

BAN: Walk me through the struggles of integrating IT practices into the bank’s game plan and how your team overcomes them.

SM: We have put an AI in front of automation for intelligent automation, which we categorize in three broad categories. The first one is robotic process automation (RPA). The way we see RPA is, are there mundane tasks that our colleagues do that can be automated? Those mundane tasks are not just within one team; it cuts across multiple teams.

The second pillar is workflow automation. What we attack here is the tasks that cannot easily be performed by a computer, but a human performs it. How can you apply intelligence behind it to make sure that you’re automating the end-to-end process? If you have an auto loan, the interest rate drops, and you want to rewrite your contract. Before we introduced automation, it used to involve collecting documents from the customer, a loan officer looking through the documents, providing you with a quote, then you accept and then we rewrite the contract. Now we’ve automated the entire workflow. What used to take over 30 days can now happen within a few hours.

The last one is contextual and conversational interface: This is where the bots come in. What we told our customers is the bot will only answer questions that it’s trained to answer. If it doesn’t know the answer, it will gracefully transfer you to a live person to help you. We started off by automating 6% of the intent, 6% of the time. We now have … close to 60% containment, where the bot can answer. We’re very proud of that.

BAN: What trends are you seeing when it comes to back-end tech, and where do you see opportunities to invest?

SM: What we are doing is what we call “platform-centric thinking.” What are the platforms that are essential to run Ally as a company? Customer communications is a classic example of a platform. If I’m thinking about customer communication, all of that should happen within this one platform. Ally has several financial products — we serve for markets, we serve insurance customers, we serve banking customers — you should not be building communications to these customers each and every time you have a use case. All of that should go through one platform.

It is driving our back-end technology to be modernized significantly. How can I run my applications on cloud and then trigger that application, based on which customer is connecting to Ally? That’s how we are modernizing the backend, which allows us to personalize the experience for our customers.

BAN: I’ve heard you’re a golf fan and that you’ve even shot a hole-in-one. From your perspective, what is the automation “hole-in-one” that financial institutions can offer their customers?

SM: We all live in a world where companies are winning based on experience. I call it the experience economy — treating every customer as if they are our only customer. If you are a mortgage customer then, and you have a relationship with Ally, then you come to Ally and say, “I’m going to create a savings account with an Ally, so I can buy the dream car that I want.”

We give you the opportunity to create savings buckets, so you can move your savings within those buckets, and we even tell you: To achieve your dream of buying this car, here is how much money you have to put within this pocket. AI may even suggest to you that your dream car is coming up for sale at this dealer.

Now you’re able to take the money that you’ve saved in Ally and go buy your dream car — that level of experience that treats you as if you are our only customer is what we are constantly striving to do. We are not there yet, but we’ll get there.

BAN: What potential ventures in automation excite you the most? How do you see these playing out in the next several years?

SM: Automation allows me to think of the platform as Lego blocks; it allows me to pick different levels from these platforms and create unique experiences and products for our customers. What will enable that and accelerate that is, from a technology standpoint, is 5G, edge computing and the collection of data is going to be accelerated.

If I combine that with, for example, quantum computers that can process the data at speeds that we cannot even imagine, then you unleash AI to personalize how the data output coming from quantum is being utilized. You end up creating the experience economy and treating every customer as if they are your only customer. That’s what we’re focused on and what excites me for the future.

Bank Automation Ignite, on April 13-14, is the event for inspiring automation initiatives and investment in financial services. At the virtual event, financial services professionals can discover new use cases and technologies that are accelerating automation in banking. Learn more and register at www.BankAutomationIgnite.com.