Citizens Bank has been exploring multiple uses for AI as it looks to enhance its digital channels and improve customer offerings. 

The $222 billion bank is working to roll out its virtual assistant for commercial banking clients on mobile this quarter with a goal of adding generative AI capabilities to the chatbot, Jo Wyper, head of commercial banking digital and operations at Citizens Bank, told Bank Automation News.

The bank is also using AI to predict customers’ needs so as to provide them with timely products that increase customer retention and engagement, Wyper said. 

While it is going through a digital transformation, the Providence, R.I.-based bank is planning to move all its operations to the cloud by 2025.  

Bank Automation News sat down with Wyper to discuss Citizens’ plan for the coming year with commercial clients and AI in mind. What follows is an edited version of the conversation. 

Bank Automation News: Which essential commercial banking segments are Citizens looking to optimize and digitize? 

Jo Wyper: Each segment of banking clients has different expectations. 

The digital plan that we have in place for the next three years incorporates and understands what those different needs are, and allocates those dollars appropriately. Our digital plan isn’t really about attacking segments, it’s about bringing many digital foundational tools into the organization that can be used across sectors. 

For example, one of the things that we’re going to be working on in the next quarter is an online know-your-customer project that really gives clients an online view into the onboarding process.  

A big part of our next iteration of our digital journey is about unifying the experience. We’ve created lots of great ways that clients can come and self-serve through multiple portals. The next stage for us is to unify that experience in one abstraction layer. 

BAN: How is AI helping Citizens to improve its offerings? 

JW: AI is already impactful. We have been bringing in AI at Citizens for a number of years.  

We recently brought in voice capability, and that’s a good example of AI that we didn’t have before. Before this capability, we had people scribbling notes, and they weren’t listening to what the customer needed from us when talking on the phone. Now we have artificial intelligence that transcribes that conversation fully into our case management system. So, there’s no keying, and the agents are listening to what the client wants. 

We also have far better ways of digitizing and ingesting information from documents, and we’ve been using some artificial intelligence there. AI allowed us to be able to ingest the information from loan applications quickly despite the information always not being on the same page. It is intelligent enough to know what it was looking for and scan the documents and all the information we needed.  

BAN: What uses of gen AI is Citizens exploring? 

JW: We’re exploring gen AI in terms of data. The place where it can happen is, for a large language model to work you have to have connectivities between datasets. Thats not just predictive, but from a prospect and perspective [point of view], understanding markets, understanding how we deepen relationships with clients. 

There’s a really good case for it around knowledge management. Across all the different teams that make up operations at Citizens Bank, we have lots of information internally on how we do our job to of information on a customer.  

[AI can be used as] a knowledge management tool internally, that will really help our colleagues access information very quickly and in turn take some friction out of day-to-day operations. 

BAN: What do you look forward to for the future of AI in finance? 

JW: The future is about generative AI. There’s no doubt that there are endless possibilities there and that the next iteration. Large language models have multiple use cases across all banks. 

I get excited about AI and the ability to anticipate a customer’s needs. That predictive capability that we as humans wouldn’t be able to process or digest. That means that we can absolutely start speaking to our clients about what they need before they even know that they need, it is based on the data that’s being crunched and analyzed. 

This is a moment in time where it would be hard for us to think about [a time of] not having the internet. [When] we look back over the next decades, we’re going to see how much generative AI suddenly became incorporated into most of the things that we do. 

BAN: What is the most important lesson that you have learned as a leader? 

JW: For me, it was about self-awareness, and it was about understanding who I was and being comfortable being myself. 

It’s actually about [what you are] bringing to the table: your authentic self, who you are, and understand. 

If you are fully self-aware, you will have development areas that you aren’t so good at. Make sure you surround yourself with brilliant people.