Phil Beck, Head of Treasury Management at Capital One, is almost a year into his job at the McLean, Virginia-based bank, where his focus has been getting commercial banking up to speed with the digital economy.

This entails transforming legacy platforms, products and capabilities into industry-leading technologies and approaches using a mix of artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud, and just plain rethinking. A former banker coming off a 20-year stint in the tech industry, and most recently serving as senior vice president of payments and financing at SAP Ariba, Beck was up for the task.

In an interview with Bank Innovation, Beck discussed his approach to adapting treasury management at Capital One to the realities of an economy where speed, accuracy and convenience are crucial to survival. An edited version of his conversation with BI follows.

BI: What are the biggest gaps between what businesses are wanting or expecting and what the bank is providing?

PB: Businesses, in general, are moving to full digital experiences that are happening in realtime, and the banking infrastructure that most banks use that was built back in the 60s, 70s and 80s — mainframe systems, batch processes — are really not built for that sort of realtime environment. That is a challenge we all have to overcome, and I think it’s part of why we’ve seen the fintech investment and focus we’ve seen in the last seven, eight or nine years, to try and stimulate or take advantage of that opportunity that people see in the marketplace.

BI: What’s happening in the areas of Capital One that its customers don’t see, and how has it changed how customers interact with the bank?

PB: There is a hard push within Capital One and more largely in the marketplace on user experience and of getting it to more of a consumer-grade digital experience. We’re especially making investments when it comes to how you leverage data and information to ultimately improve that customer journey and experience. I want to have an elegant interface and experience for customers when they’re on the platform, but for all the documents and information they have to submit, can we use AI and ML to really innovate and change that process — to speed it up or make it easier? What sorts of data and information can be used to bring customers insights, or bring them leverage as a financial user of our platform, whether that’s a treasurer or a CFO trying to understand cash positions or future cash flows? Those data and insights can give them that picture. Those are the kinds of things that happen behind the scenes but result in a user experience benefit.

BI: What are some specific ways that Capital One is already using AI and ML in commercial banking?

PB: We’re using it in most areas. We use it in areas to try and help us streamline and approve that onboarding experience for our customer. We’re using it to help with things like our credit card, our commercial card product for our B2B and commercial customers, by using those sorts of AI/ML tools to help us in the underwriting process and thinking through how we’re leveraging the onboarding process there. So, I think there’s a lot of areas that they tie directly into. Again, they happen to be, in many cases, behind the scenes, but they’re helping accelerate and move forward the overall customer journey and customer experience.

BI: How do you design that customer experience? What kinds of metrics or feedback are considered?

PB: It’s based upon user empathy interviews by our designers and our product people sitting down and understanding what the customer currently experiences, what they’re looking for, and how might we change it. Then we’re going to rapid-prototype them in innovation to actually create and then quickly update and change. The same way you would find any fintech or best-in-class cloud company going through that process, we’re developing software for our user experience in that exact same fashion.

BI: How does Capital One decide when to do something in-house and when it’s time to bring in a partner?

PB: Most importantly we look at our overall strategy of where we’re going as a bank and the user experience we are looking for. If there is a piece of that platform and experience that we believe is strategic and important from our customer experience, user experience or adoption standpoint, we ultimately want to own and control the development of that, and the cadence and speed at which we innovate that. We believe we’ve got a tech team, a design team and a product team that’s equal to or better than any fintech out there in the marketplace. So, for those key attributes and those key areas, we do prefer to drive that development cycle ourselves and to own that. But that being said, there are plenty of other areas that are extensions to the core. It could be a for a feature function, it could be for a specific market, it could be just because it’s not deemed kind of core to our long-term strategy, where we believe using a fintech and partnering with a fintech is absolutely the right approach, and we will certainly pursue those. It’s a balanced approach.

BI: What do you think has been the most impactful innovation in treasury management recently?

PB: I think one is just moving to a full online account opening experience for our customers. Even for the most basic things out there, like opening checking accounts and basic banking depository accounts, those processes have historically been very manual, very paper-intensive and very slow. We have fundamentally rethought this and used our design teams and our engineering teams to rethink and build a true cloud application to speed up and make that a fully online process.