Alabama’s Citizens Bank and Trust is upgrading its core account processing platform to offer real-time payments and better automate with the help of third-party providers — a move that more banks may pursue, given Fiserv’s first-quarter earnings report of increased sales today.

The $700 million community bank is pivoting to Fiserv’s DNA core, which uses an open architecture that allows it to leverage APIs for integrating with third-party providers. That’s a key reason why DNA won out over other cores, said Sam Pate, a senior vice president and chief information officer for the Guntersville, Ala. bank.

“One of the things that, as a community bank, we struggle with is having a core system that has open APIs for the innovation in real-time process,” Pate said.

The ability to use APIs to tie into the fintech ecosystem supports automation and is a key selling point for DNA, said Chris Van Der Stad, senior vice president and general manager of DNA at Fiserv.

Sales are booming for the core and financial services provider: On today’s first-quarter earnings call, Fiserv reported sales were up 42% year over year. It was mixed news, however, with Fiserv reporting a companywide flat revenue of $3.76 billion.

Among the sales were 10 new core accounts, five of which are on the DNA platform, said Frank Bisignano, president and chief executive at Fiserv.

DNA integrates third-party solutions into the employee experience, giving employees access to data from other systems through the core rather than requiring them to log into different systems, Van Der Stad said. That allows banks to partner with DNA for automations. For instance, employees no longer must manually update customer addresses in multiple places since DNA connects to other applications and acts as a central repository for that data.

DNA also will provide automatic notifications to employees about potential services that bank customer service representatives (CSRs) can offer the customer, Van Der Stad said.

“Our CSRs are going to have time to have more conversation with our customers,” Pate said, adding this allows the reps to “sell” the bank,” instead of having to just constantly gather information and say, ‘Our system is slow, please bear with me.’”

Another automation the bank plans to adopt is Fiserv’s virtual banking assistant, which supports more natural conversations with customers. Right now, Pate said, the bank’s voice solution speaks more to bankers than customers.

Citizens Bank and Trust also plans to implement solutions for digital banking, electronic bill payments and person-to-person payments.

The bank is hoping that the new digitalization and automations will help it avoid new hires, Pate said. Guntersville is a suburb of Huntsville, which recently announced 50,000 new jobs will come into the area during the next two years. That’s good news for Citizens Bank and Trust, which has grown by almost $200 million in the last 18 months, said Pate.

Shares of Fiserv [NASDAQ: FISV] were trading at $121.78 as of market close, down 3.86% from market open. The core solution company has a market capitalization of $81.10 billion.