Listen: How cloud helped manage a modern merger at Truist

Truist Financial was formed through the 2019 merger of BB&T and SunTrust — the largest bank merger in the past 20 years — and is the first substantial merger with a full digital component. The Charlotte, N.C.-based Truist faced the added challenge of merging just before the pandemic started, Ken Meyer, Truist’s chief information officer of consumer technology, says in this episode of “The Buzz” podcast. “We were officially three or four months old when everybody went home,” Meyer tells Bank Automation News . “We were just getting to know each other and getting started on this journey, and then everybody got sent home.” Meyer led the hybrid cloud migration strategy, which combined both public and private cloud, during the merger. In this podcast, he dives deep into the technology challenges Truist faced, including the migration of 9 million-plus clients onto its mobile platforms. Learn how the bank used what Meyer calls a “digital straddle” approach, driven by application programming interfaces (APIs) that bridged the gap between the two heritage cores and modern microservices as Truist underwent its core conversion. Bank Automation Summit, taking place March 1-2 in Charlotte, is the first and only event to focus solely on automation in banking. The event will feature the brightest minds from across financial services on intelligent automation strategies and deployment. Learn more and register here for Bank Automation Summit 2022 . Subscribe to The Buzz Podcast on iTunes , Spotify , Google podcast , or download the episode .

The following is a transcript generated by AI technology that has been lightly edited but still contains errors. Loraine Lawson Welcome to the Buzz, a Bank Automation News Podcast. I’m Deputy Editor Loraine Lawson and in this episode, I talk with Ken Meyer, executive vice president and Chief Information Officer of Consumer Technology at Truist, who lead the hybrid cloud migration strategy through the merger of BB&T and SunTrust. We take a deep dive into the technology underlying the merger and the role cloud played. Ken Meyer Yeah. So I think first, I would tell you that we are a little bit different, given the fact that we are in the middle of going through what was the largest, you know, bank merger, and in the last 20 years or so. And when you think about it, the merger of BB&T and SunTrust, the form truce is really the first large scale merger that had a more of a digital component to it. If you go back to a lot of the big mergers that were done in the early 2000s, I mean, mobile apps and things like that, I mean, there was some online banking and text banking and things of that nature. But there wasn't really a full blown digital channel type of experience that banks had to worry about in previous mergers. And in this one, clearly, you know, 9 million plus clients on you know, mobile platforms as an example. And that's a big deal. And that's, that's the front door to our experiences for Truist. And so when we, if you go all the way back to the decision of, are we going to leverage one digital platform or the other, we felt really strongly that, you know, our clients deserve the better client experience. They deserve better features, more availability, more security. And we really felt like in order to do that, we needed to think about the entire technology stack. You know, we had, we have made progress on both heritage companies prior to the announcement of the merger, where, you know, our heritage BB & T platform was an award winning platform, it was very feature rich, but it really wasn't built architecturally, you know, in with a with a cloud architecture in mind. And you think about the need to create much more granularity in your APIs and micro services. We just didn't have that there. And on the flip side, at the heritage SunTrust, we, you know, we started, we actually migrated in 2018, the SunTrust, mobile and online banking into a into a cloud architected, native build on AWS. And so we had that, but we didn't have all the feature richness that we had at Heritage BB&T. So what we did is we decided that we were going to really adopt what we refer to as our fit for purpose, strategy. And what that meant around cloud specifically was, look, there are certain capabilities that the cloud brings to the table that makes a ton of sense for us right now. And, you know, there's a lot of people that will argue that you should move everything, and you should do it yesterday. But the reality is, is that there's a lot that comes with with a cloud migration, you know, whether it's your talent, your your risk, posture, your control environment. And so where we were, we decided that we really wanted to understand the different use cases. And in this case, when it came to migrating our clients to a new digital platform, we felt like leveraging, you know, a native cloud architected build would make the most sense. And for us, when we talk about hybrid specifically to answer your question, right, if we think about both public cloud, private cloud, you know, SAS hosted solutions, on premise solutions. So we really are trying to think holistically about, you know, those and then also in the sense of what we had to do, you know, we had to connect experiences, and re architect things, you know, in a more modular way, because not only were we building, you know, native cloud, architected front end APIs and solutions, but we had to connect it to things on premise We had to connect it to SaaS providers. So, you know, when you really think about what we've done today with our architecture, it was really driven with, hey, what's the best solution for what we were trying to accomplish at that time, given all of the other constraints or parameters that we had to live within. And we've, we've architected a pretty nice solution, and happy to go into more. Loraine Lawson Yeah, I wonder, before you go into that how much your core figures into this in terms of was the core sort of a lot of cores are sort of dated, you know, and they're older now? And I don't know, the situation with your core, was it difficult to connect the core to this, the cloud environment, or were there things you had to change? Ken Meyer Well, so it's funny you say that. So what I would tell you is that we have kind of a, an evolution tech strategy when it comes to our core, at Truist right now. So, you know, we have when you think about, again, big mergers, and you think about the sequence of doing a big merger, the core is usually the most important part, especially historically. Because that's really your system of record for your products and services, right. And you usually have a large big conversion that you have to do to connect all that data and move it from one system to the next. And then your channel applications would then start to consume that data from that target stay core, and you would make your channel changes after you completed that big core conversion. We did the polar opposite. Especially when it came to our digital channels. So what we did is we created what we refer to as our digital straddle. And if you really think about it, we built a set of APIs at the UI level, that allowed us to create a common new user interface. And then what we did is we created another set of APIss that kind of operated as an air traffic controller. So those APIs allowed us to say, hey, Ken Myers coming in as a heritage BB &T client. So we're actually going to direct all of those micro services over to what is the heritage BB &T core that lives over here in data center A. And if you were a heritage SunTrust client, it would direct you and all of your microservices over to the heritage SunTrust core that lived in datacenter B. So what that allowed us to do is it allowed us to migrate 9 million clients over a period of time, and also deploy our new application based on those client profiles, whether you were a wealth client or a retail client or commercial client, and and ultimately deliver in a very agile way, our new front end user interface, based on the features that were required to support those clients. And so, you know, we didn't want the the age or the limitations of the core to ultimately slow down or create a an experience that was negative for our clients. And when you really think about it in 2021. You know, we've we've established we've completed a number of our migrations, but we will not be complete fully with our core conversions until February of 2022. So if you go back to what I was saying earlier with how those, you know how those those big mergers were done in the past, we wouldn't have introduced Truist digital to our clients until well after February of next year. And in 2022, when you're out there saying that, you know, we want to be you know, digital first and better technology and better experiences. How what would that tell our clients if we were continuing to run on older platforms, and it would have been two plus three plus years before they would have even seen a Truist app. So that's one the other thing that this this architecture does that we've created, Loraine, is it allows us to potentially and possibly play with some more modern technology and some more core banking systems. So similar to the fact that we were able to straddle a heritage BB&T and a heritage SunTrust core. There's no reason why now in a future architecture, if we decide to launch a new product on a new core platform, potentially, that's a more modern core. We have the ability to consume those services and those APIs from that new core just as we did to older cores. So it's really, you know, strategically we're trying to set ourselves up to be able to be not only Agile in how we develop software, and technology, but also from a business strategy perspective, it puts us in the opportunity to, in the future, maybe not have to do a big core conversion from an old platform to a modern platform, but just start to introduce new. Loraine Lawson That's, that's really smart. So, I do wonder, though, were there challenges you faced along the way? Particularly from a technology standpoint? Ken Meyer Yeah, I, you know, I think there's a lot of challenges. And they're both from a technology standpoint, and I would just say challenges in, you know, in the middle of doing a merger. You know, mergers are hard. And mergers are equals are even harder. It's not like there's a winner and a loser, or where, you know, you just consume one set of technology and the other one goes away. We, we took a very intentional strategy around picking different applications within both heritage companies to put together what we felt was best in class. And in the case of our digital experience is a great example of where we said, you know, what neither of them were where we wanted them to be. So we were going to build Greenfield. So you know, you're in the middle of merging multiple systems of record across all of your products, and all of your lines of businesses, and then you know, to make things more interesting, because that doesn't sound hard enough, you throw in a pandemic. And, you know, if you think about it, we were officially three or four months old, when when everybody went home. So, you know, you're, you're getting to know people, because there wasn't a whole lot that we could do pre merger, pre legal day one given, you know, the regulatory restraints there, and constraints. So, you know, we were just getting to know each other and getting started on this journey, and then everybody got sent home. And there's still people that we're meeting for the first time now, as we're opening things back up. So, you know, that's really interesting. And then I think, you know, you've got a mix, the hybrid piece is really interesting, because you are connecting on premise datacenters and SaaS solutions, and you're pulling data from that, or that batch data versus real time data, and you're, you're deploying on new capabilities and on on public cloud type capabilities, and building out your VPCs (virtual private clouds). I mean, there's quite a bit to do, I think, you know, never underestimate the data mapping exercises that go into these things. And, you know, we've learned quite a bit. I would also say, from a client perspective, you know, we did a tremendous amount of research to try to understand what client experiences we really wanted to, to extend to our clients. And and, you know, the good news about what we did was that we got an application in the hands of our clients fast, right, we didn't wait so long to get through all of our conversion, before we started to bring value to clients. The challenge is, is that we had to build a brand new application. And so there were features that we might have underestimated out the gate that were features that clients really liked. Right? And give you a great example. You know, we thought, hey, we could bring in something like a credit score, right, later on, we don't need that for our first MVP version. We could we could do it at a later time and it wouldn't be a big deal. People get their credit scores from everywhere. These days, I feel like everybody has signed up for 16 versions of credit monitoring at this point. There's a lot of things and we underestimated that. That was one of the biggest pieces of feedback that we got over the summer months, where people very upset about not having that credit score widget anymore. So you know, I think you never underestimate your client, you can never listened to your clients enough. And, you know, we had things that we obviously had to prioritize, and we've, we've converted a lot of clients already. Never underestimate client conversion to new platforms over communicate as much as you possibly can. But, you know, I think it technically, it's, it's what you would expect, right? You've got a mix of legacy and modern capabilities and applications. It's it's very complex. And, you know, moving to the cloud, per se is also it's something that's already hard doing it while like I said, you're in the middle of a merger and also a pandemic is you build some scar tissue overtime. Loraine Lawson Were there things that you decided? I kind of wondering how you decided what to move and when not to move it? Was it just regulation issues? Or was there a different issue? Ken Meyer Yeah, I mean, we've got a number of different flavors, right. And we've moved some different workloads. I mean, obviously, we we've been talking more at length around our digital platforms. But the reality is, is we have some workloads that are that are running, that are that are not in the digital space, we have some other capabilities with our contact center is an example and other things that we've decided to leverage that run more with a with a public cloud, you know, on our virtual private cloud. So really, I think it comes down to a handful of things. What is the type of capabilities that you need, right? You need burst computing? Is it stuff that runs all the time? Is it stuff that runs periodically that you can leverage? You know, some, you know, not to have an always on necessarily. There's other things around the the level of data, right, and the classifications of data. And for certain types of data, What's your encryption strategy? What's your security strategy? How do you ensure that, you know, we protect our clients data at all costs, right, and making sure so there were aspects of things even two years ago, though, that I would say, hey, we were not willing to put, you know, this type of data, whether it's PII (Personal Identifiable Information) or whatever classification into into a cloud environment, because at the time, we might not have had all of those controls and everything that we needed in place. But as we continue to mature, we're going to continue to relook at those decisions because that's what, that's what good companies do, right? They evolve, and they continue to grow. And they continue to, to, you know, learn along the way, and you learn in a very controlled, safe manner. I mean, we are a regulated industry, our client data is super important. You, we don't want to do anything ever to put our clients at risk. And, you know, but you have to continuously be a student of the game, and you have to continue to learn. So I mean, that's really where we started is we started with, you know, things that were not data in move are things that were data at rest, they were data in motion and certain levels of encryption, and, you know, certain client experiences or if you needed, you know, high availability. And, you know, we've built a large majority of our digital solutions in a multi region active active type deployment, so that way we could deploy whenever we wanted to, without taking our clients down for any purpose or reason, right. I mean, there's, there's business reasons, there's technology reasons, there's, there's all kinds of things. But you know, this is becoming a more complicated business than it might have been 20 years ago. Loraine Lawson Happy Yeah. Do you operate on AWS? Is that correct? Ken Meyer So we have a we have a multi cloud approach, we you know, we have workloads with AWS, we have workloads with Microsoft Azure, we've got you know, we're building out an API gateway for for open banking purposes, leveraging, you know, Apigee and hosted on GCP (Google public cloud). So I think, you know, again, the this fit for purpose concept, there are certain workloads that we feel are better to do in one versus the other. And at the end of the day, we want to use the right tools for the right solution, and the right problem. And so, you know, we we do have a a heart, again, back to your comment, a hybrid, or multi cloud or whatever buzz word the all of the consultants are using today, to describe to describe using the right tools for the right things. Loraine Lawson Are there new ways in which the cloud has helped you automate or will help you automate in the future? Ken Meyer Well, I think, you know, when people originally talked about cloud, it was a lot about, you know, cost savings of storage and compute costs, and looking at kind of traditional infrastructure and how to leverage, you know, that infrastructure in the cloud, what I think you know, is not always fully appreciated, is the how you do work is is really different, right? It's, it's building automation and pipelines and CI CD (continuous integration, continuous development/deployment) capabilities, and being able to introduce, you know, more, you know, security scanning, and, and those types of things that really automate the how we do work and helped facilitate a more agile way of working within our teams. So that way, code deployments and, and you know, things like that are not as, as not are not as difficult to do, compared to some of the ways that we used to do work. So I think, you know, if you really look at it, it's really about enabling your engineering community, and your product management teams and your design teams and everybody coming together to just work differently. And if you're not leveraging the automation, then you're missing the boat. Loraine Lawson You’ve been listening to the Buzz, a Bank Automation News podcast. Thank you for your time and be sure to visit us at finainews.com. You can also follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn. Please don’t hesitate to rate this podcast on your platform of choice.

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Listen: How cloud helped manage a modern merger at Truist

Truist CIO of Consumer Technology Ken Meyer dives into $541B bank’s cloud migration strategy

Varo Bank’s Pepe Porrata to speak at Bank Automation Summit

Fiserv touts bank and fintech partnerships, 11% revenue growth in Q4 earnings

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