Truist Financial is planning to launch its own robo-advisor by yearend, the latest development in the bank’s technology roadmap to highlight its investment in artificial intelligence (AI). Truist is the result of the merger of SunTrust and BB&T banks in a deal that closed in December 2019.

Currently in pilot with a small set of heritage SunTrust clients, the robo-advisor product is backed by an algorithm-based mechanism that will allow customers to invest, with automatic portfolio adjustments also being applied, Dan Massey, head of enterprise digital banking at the $509 billion bank, told Bank Automation News.

For the new product, the Charlotte, N.C.-based Truist has tapped FutureAdvisor, a BlackRock-owned registered investment advisory firm that also provides digital advice tech for financial institutions. FutureAdvisor will work in partnership with Truist’s wealth management team to develop the algorithm and the core engine, Massey said. The onboarding flow is a combination of internal builds and partnership elements, he added, and it will be heavily integrated into Truist’s digital experience.

Truist is looking to highlight the offerings of both its digital experience and its employees’ know-how with the robo-advisor venture, Massey said. The bank is exploring ways to match up advisor services in concert with the robo-advisor to create a hybrid relationship model that would provide enhanced services to customers. It’s similar to the high-touch, high-tech approach of Marcus Invest, the robo-advisor solution launched last week by Goldman Sachs’ consumer banking brand, Marcus.

The robo-advisor pilot is Truist’s latest AI venture. This year the bank is also slated to launch a virtual assistant and a platform to deliver insights around customer saving and spending patterns, both of which are piloting with heritage BB&T customers.

“This is just a little bit of divide and conquer; we wanted to be able to get new experiences and pilot those things ahead of the main core bank conversion,” Massey said.

The bank will push the robo-advisor to market once it merges the heritage SunTrust and BB&T digital platforms and initiates the core conversion. The core conversion encompasses the technical integration of both banks’ tech stacks, and is slated to begin around yearend.

Divide, conquer, integrate

Since the 2019 merger, Truist has deployed a team of engineers to develop patent-pending technology that will speed the integration of the two separate digital platforms into the single Truist platform.

The new tech, called “the digital straddle,” will inform the core conversion systems whether the customer comes from the heritage SunTrust or BB&T organization, and will intelligently route the customer to the right source systems through an API-based architecture, Massey said. Essentially, it will help streamline the migration of BB&T and SunTrust customers to the new Truist platform.

The technology “creates a foundation for the future,” Massey said. “Between that modern architecture and our methods of working with agile methodology and advances in automation around continuous integration and continuous delivery on the engineering side, we will be able to move very quickly.”

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