Scott Case has a big job — a $499 billion job, to be precise.

As the chief information officer of Truist Financial, Case is responsible for overseeing the 2019 merger of SunTrust and BB&T banks, and is accountable for the technology strategy, day-to-day operations and the execution of the merger itself. The job becomes even heftier as Case sets his sights on a simultaneous architecture and infrastructure revamp at Truist, the sixth-largest bank in the country.

“As we’re working through the merger, we’re taking the opportunity to modernize as we go, wherever we can,” Case said in a conversation with Bank Innovation about how he is undertaking the modernization and fusion of legacy systems and how APIs and open banking fit into Truist’s technical roadmap. What follows is an edited version of the conversation.

Bank Innovation: Tell me about your strategy to modernize Truist’s back-end tech, and where you see opportunity.

Scott Case: The aspects of modernizing our infrastructure are really a combination of modern architecture and modern infrastructure. And what I mean by that is really on the architecture side, we’re driving toward the enablement of more open banking capabilities and we’re doing that largely through the rewrite of applications in terms of APIs — I put that in the software architecture grouping.

On the more classic infrastructure side, that’s where we’re coming up the curve on capabilities like CI/CD pipelines or moving toward DevOps capabilities, which really for us gets into the automation aspects of, ‘How do you move software from left to right quicker,’ and reduce friction and automate your pipelines. We’re really doubling down on automation — automation of our software engineering capabilities.

[Editor’s note: CI/CD refers to continuous integration and continuous delivery, the practice of automating the software testing and deployment process. DevOps is the cultural practice of integrating development and operations for rapid deployment of applications and services.]

BI: Where are you in your API journey? Are certain systems riper for that technology than others?

SC: Broadly speaking, we’re approaching the point where half of our technology ecosystem is supported with an API kind of framework. When we get through the merger integration, I think you’ll see that accelerate and we’ll probably approach two-thirds of our platforms having API enablement in the next few years.

We’re at the beginning of that API journey, for us across Truist, and we began it in earnest in the digital application space, so that’s mobile banking, online banking. We also started in areas where we were connecting with third-party platforms that had to come into our firewall, so to speak, and grab client data from the core systems, like deposits or mortgage processing.

I’d say digital channels, origination platforms, those are areas where we’ve really started to accelerate in the API journey. If you think about where it’s harder, it’s a little bit harder if you’re trying to drive an API strategy around your mainframe platforms, but we are doing that. We’re starting to connect more into our core deposit platform more and more with APIs, so I’d say it’s been more of an opportunistic strategy, though.

BI: What about open banking? How does that capability fit into your larger innovation strategy, and what new experiences are you hoping to glean from that?

SC: Open banking is one of many things that we’re doing to drive toward serving our clients the way they expect. When you think about open banking, they want to be able to, maybe as an example, have a home buying experience — or it could be purchasing a car — where the origination process is convenient and smooth. Having that capability or toolkit also allows you to more easily move outside of the industry, in this case the Truist domain, to plug and play with other providers. It could be a car dealership; it could be a home services and home goods provider.

Open banking techniques allow you to connect between different lending instruments like a credit card or a home loan. And behind the scenes, that technology architecture that open banking is really built on is that API mechanism. I talk about it traversing these different ecosystems so it’s really about how do you organize your data to travel around those different ecosystems.

BI: Looking ahead to 2021 and 2022, what are some exciting technologies you are exploring for Truist?

SC: The whole artificial intelligence breadth of capabilities — so AI ranging all the way from pretty fundamental process automation all the way up to more advanced analytics and cognitive computing. So AI capabilities, and there is a range of them, we are moving pretty aggressively into those types of platforms to best support our clients.

The other aspect is just broadly leveraging our clients’ data, but making sure we have a really strong data strategy that feeds our analytical platform and our AI capabilities that we’re going to depend upon.

BI: Can you give us a hint about any AI-related upgrades we can expect to see in the coming year?

SC: This year we’ve done more and more in terms of chatbots and engaging with our clients in more real time, and I think those things are becoming more table stakes expectations. We are working behind the scenes right now with more advanced analytics platforms, where it’ll offer a much deeper insights into our clients’ behaviors, expectations, transactions and really their consumer behavioral patterns. I’d frame it up as more AI-enabled client experiences