Payments are spread across just about every line of business in banking, but SunTrust Banks is taking steps to pull them together.

The bank is developing an enterprise payments hub that will tie the payments arms of different areas of the bank into a central location. From that location, SunTrust can deploy payments solutions along various payment rails.

The hub is the fruit of SunTrust’s payments council, which meets periodically and draws experts from all areas of the bank to discuss pressing issues around payments today, SunTrust Chief Information Officer Anil Cheriyan told Bank Innovation. About 15 segment leaders join Cheriyan on the council.

“The payments council meets on a periodic basis to determine what’s the strategy, what’s the investment,and keep the lines of business focused,” Cheriyan said in an interview with Bank Innovation.

The hub allows front-end, client-facing areas, such as the mobile app, to work seamlessly with back-end payment rails. All payments of the bank will eventually flow through the common hub to the payment rails. Cheriyan described the hub as like a piece of middleware surrounding the bank’s transactional core that allows vendor systems and new client-facing functionality to easily plug and play.

The bank’s core, like most in the industry, uses batch processing, but because the middleware or service layers are so sophisticated, it will still be possible for SunTrust to take part in a “faster payments” scheme, when — or if — such a service arrives from the Federal Reserve. Cheriyan said that based on what the bank has heard from faster-payments discussion, such a reality is still years off, but the bank is preparing for it nonetheless.

“We’re in the middle of implementation,” he said. “We made the decision, took the leap, and the work is well underway.”

SunTrust has a history of being out in front with payments. It was one of the first large banks to commit to sending EMV cards to all relevant account holders, and was part of what Cheriyan called “the second wave” of Apple Pay adopters. It is currently in an evaluative phase with Apple Pay’s Android competitors.

Role of the CIO
At that center of SunTrust’s innovation efforts is Cheriyan, and he is emblematic of the new role for CIOs in banking. Since digital technology touches on nearly every aspect of the banking business today, the bank CIO must be engaged in far more strategic decisions than in the past. For example, Cheriyan said his role is not just about “building the right application; it’s helping structure what businesses need to do to leverage technology.” This is a broader mandate that includes a healthy chunk of strategy.

“The CIO role is all about making enterprise-wide connections,” Cheriyan said. “How does digital technology tie in with payments and lending? It’s about looking at line-of-business strategies and technology needs and asking how it connects with an enterprise view? There are choices that need to be made — these choices are the essence of strategy formulation. They are dictated by who we are and how we view ourselves – i.e., our strategic differentiators.”

The second piece of the puzzle is that there are “limited resources,” or, to put it more bluntly, there is only so much money available for technology initiatives. Lastly, there is the legacy infrastructure that must be worked with — or around.

One area where Cheriyan spends a good deal of time is in cloud computing. Cheriyan said the bank was “expanding everything into a ‘cloud-ified’ arena,” and that this work was well underway. But he indicated the bank has so far maintained a “strong preference to not to have anything on the public cloud — we’re not there yet,” he said.

Cloud computing and the payments hub are both sophisticated way of working around the transactional core legacy platforms. Work is also underway at SunTrust to redo the banks’ lending systems, including mortgages, commercial and personal loans.

SunTrust also keeps an eye on the fintech startup landscape via its investment banking arm, SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, which has a “very strong tech, media and telco practice,” according to Cheriyan. “Fintech has been one of our bigger practices. We’re actively in the game.”