Citizens Bank is accelerating its digitization plans for commercial banking, shortening a five-year deadline to three years as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the “Balancing automation and human intervention” panel at the Banking Automation Summit, presented by Bank Innovation, on Tuesday, Joanne Wyper, executive vice president and head of operations at Citizens Commercial Bank, spoke about the need to meet client expectations. 

“We sat in there way before COVID with the immediate realization across the world that we need to give our clients the most simple way of engaging with us as possible,” Wyper said. “Never forget that the customer wants to engage with you the way they want to engage with you.”

According to Wyper, the bank’s plan includes 500 unique technology initiatives, of which 35 are related to software. The rest, she added, are a combination of process engineering and robotic process automation (RPA) to simplify processes for employees and clients.

During an earlier session of the Banking Automation Summit, Provident Bank Chief Information Officer John Kamin had said that while RPA can be helpful, it is a short-term solution. “You can paint yourself into a corner because it’s really a Band-Aid and not a solution,” Kamin said. “It’s a great way to bridge the gap until you truly automate what might be a manual effort. When you think about it, you’re just having a machine manually do something faster.”  He added that Provident Bank is overhauling its commercial lending practices to make them more efficient through certain automations as the pandemic has exposed manual processes that needed improvement.

See also: Citizens CX report drives tech enhancements 

Wyper agreed that RPA is only one tool for meeting clients’ needs, and not a comprehensive solution. She stopped short of calling it a Band-Aid, however, saying the technology has benefited the bank’s clients. Providence, R.I.-based Citizens, which has $179 billion in assets, measures the success of its human-digital balance through client satisfaction and metrics, like net promoter scores. This feedback is gathered through yearly market surveys as well as individual surveys for particular client interactions.

“We’re getting tens of thousands of responses on a monthly basis that really allow us to hone in,” Wyper said. “Our clients are happier with the speed to resolution. The clients are happier with how long it takes to onboard them. That is all a benefit that has come out of our RPA program.”