Regions Bank is overhauling its consumer lending system to keep its competitive edge.

“We did quite a bit of investment in consumer lending over the last 10 years, but we feel like we might have to do a 2.0 of that, meaning completely net-new consumer lending omnichannel-enabled customer experience for our secured and unsecured lending,” said Amala Duggirala, enterprise chief operations and technology officer, during the Banking Automation Summit Monday. She noted the bank is also embarking on a deposit system replacement journey, but it was unclear when both migrations would be complete.

Birmingham, Ala.-based Regions, with $145 billion of assets, is feeling the competitive pinch as nimbler fintechs continue to push faster customer experiences, and is increasing its focus and tech spend on automation as a result.

“The way [fintechs] capture the customer is heavily on how quickly, how fast, how easy they make the application … how fast they give a decision back, and then how quickly they onboard the customer. That is where they’re winning right now, heavily,” Duggirala said. In addition to improving the ease and speed of its consumer lending system, Regions is ensuring that third-party integrations will be seamless.

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Omnichannel will be important as Regions moves forward. The bank this year introduced several AI-backed and automated capabilities to its call center; interactive voice response VR handles 85% of Regions’ call center volume and about 5% is handled by automated solutions. To serve the remaining 10%, Regions had close to 800 agents fielding calls. While the omnichannel implementation results were positive, there were some hiccups in developing the solution, Duggirala said. “Having an enterprise omnichannel to start with would have helped us more in our development effort and technical efforts,” she said.

Regions spends about 10% to 11% of its revenues on technology, Duggirala said — the bank brought in $1.64 billion in total revenue last quarter — and 45% of that is spent on net-new initiatives, which includes automation, self-service and bot-enablement initiatives. The bank has made it a priority for the last few years to modernize processes that directly touch customers, automating back-end operations through AI and system modernization.

As Regions improves its systems and processes, the bank is not thinking incrementally, Duggirala said, but reimagining the entire business and customer flow so that each step is designed for “exception-only operations,” adding “we are not designing manual, we will be managing manual only for exceptions.”