Fifth Third Bank is migrating from a custom-core legacy system to FIS Modern Banking Platform, a managed-as-a-service core banking solution, the companies announced earlier this week.

The migration will allow the $203.8 billion bank to reduce its development time and deploy new products to weeks, rather than months, Ed Loyd, Fifth Third director of public relations, told Bank Automation News.

“One of the key advantages for us is that we expect this will help accelerate our cycle time to develop and deploy new products — such as Fifth Third Momentum banking, which we’ve introduced to consumers in recent months,” Loyd said. “Instead of looking at seven- or eight-month cycle time, this will help us get that down to roughly six weeks, improving our speed to market and agility to manage demand changes or innovative features.”

Additionally, there will be greater opportunity for scale benefits as the bank continues its focus on expanding in the southeast market, among others, Loyd noted.

Rob Lee, head of FIS Digital and Banking, said shifting to a modern core will help support automations at Fifth Third.

“The advancements we’ve made with our Modern Banking Platform provide Fifth Third with a core banking infrastructure that supports rapid deployment of new and differentiated capabilities and services,” Lee said. “This agility will assist Fifth Third as the bank extends automation across functions, and will not only help the company to better serve the needs of its customers but help the bank react more quickly to market trends and expand its reach with less time to market.”

Fifth Third is also deploying FIS Unity, a wealth management platform that integrates with FIS trust accounting. FIS Unity incorporates automated cash management, multicurrency, and other wealth management functions that will allow the bank to customize and scale wealth and institutional offerings across each of its client segments, according to a release from the bank.

The move to digitize the core is part of a multistage effort to reduce more than 25% of legacy systems in the coming years, and which is “key to being able to establish the architecture we need to be opportunistic, optimize what the cloud can do and be cost-competitive,” Loyd told BAN.

Both FIS Modern Banking Platform and FIS Unity are cloud-native and offer support of open application programming interfaces (APIs), which FIS noted in the press release would allow Fifth Third to connect with third-party solutions available via the FIS Code Connect ecosystem.

Fifth Third shares were trading at $37.04 as of 10:38 a.m. today, down 1.99 percent from market open.