Fifth Third Bank is enhancing its AI strategy by increasing the amount of data ingested by the language model it uses to build conditionals into the bank’s mobile application and messaging platform improving customer experience and self-service options.

The $206 billion bank will update its language model in June to ingest more than 2 million data elements, up from 20,000 that the language model collects now, Jude Schramm, chief information officer at Fifth Third, said last week at Bank Automation Summit U.S. 2023 in Charlotte, N.C.

The updated language model allows the bank to understand and express more of its data, while maintaining the speed of transactions and experience customers expect through machine learning, Schramm said.

The AI strategy update follows the bank’s 2021 acquisitions of two digital finance companies, Provide and Dividend Financial, and the relaunch of the bank’s mobile app which went live in November 2022.

“We’re looking at expandability of data, accessibility of data across the entire footprint to be really one of the key drivers to our strategy,” Schramm said, noting that cloud storage for data must be “thought very well through” for the protection and portability of data.

Data in the cloud

The bank has prioritized its data movement and accessibility by building new core data centers, which will be completed later this year, Schramm said.

“We have had to connect [the data centers] directly into the backbend of the internet to make sure we can store data securely on the edge on our premises to actually get it to the cloud as fast as we can and bring it back as fast as we can,” he said.

Storing data in the cloud and on cloud-computing provider Snowflake allows the bank to access data for AI, messaging platforms and mobile, he said. “It’s a significant part of our strategy that underpins how we are thinking about architecting the future of the bank from an on-premise versus off-premise scenario,” he said.

Fifth Third uses the FIS Modern Banking Platform as its core provider, according to market insight provider FI Navigator.

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