The role of the Chief Information officer when it
comes to customer experience is crucially important but we don't
talk about it enough. And today, on cxo talk, we're
speaking with Michael Rutledge. The Chief Information officer at
citizens Financial Group. When we talk about the role,
your role of the CIO and the role of it in customer
experience, can you give us kind of an overview of what's
involved? Step one is really understanding
the customer needs and I think citizens does a terrific job of
listening for customers. We bring customers in and, you
know, they give us advice on our mobile app.
We're constantly taking the pulse of our customers, both our
retail customers and our commercial customers.
And we measure that we also use outside surveys.
Like JD Powers where we get an awful lot of data about
customers sentiments. And that is really important.
It's really important to me as the head of it, that I really
understand what that customer sentiment is and how we can go
about improving it. You know, one of the
fundamentals, things, when I joined the bank was ability, we
weren't where we needed to be from a system stability
perspective, and it's been a really maniacal focus of mind.
The last four years, really improving that.
And we've been proved it by over 75 percent.
And that's one of the first things I heard both from our
internal colleagues and our customer base.
Let's make sure that the systems that we are building highly
reliable, highly resilient, and can withstand some of these
bumps in the night that you get occasionally to me.
The Gap. Is that your, your Focused in it
on systems and reliability. And yet customers, don't think
about that, from a customer perspective.
You know, if you go on the mobile app or the website, it
just has to work. And so how do you, how do you
bridge that Gap into really directly affecting customer
perceptions? If you think about what's
happened, the last few years, you don't more amore.
Or customer expectation. Is that everything can be done
through a mobile device. If you look at our own internal
stance, you know, that the number of people logging into
our mobile applications increased over 22 percent year
over year. The expectation is that people
can do a lot more through their mobile device.
Whether pain a check-in, you know, they want to do
automatically through their mobile device whether check in
their balance and, and it really has Being really trying to move
some of those what we call, assisted transactions, more,
self-service. Because really, that's what our
clients are really looking for. And to do that, it's really
important that the systems are architected in such a way that
you're able to remove the friction points from customers.
And we've been very sensitive to that, in how we're designing the
experience of all of our digital applications, How much of this
is technology and how much is understanding the nuances of
what customers want and then how do you how do you marry those
two sides together? For example, one thing has been
phenomenally successful. We rolled out was an easy way
for our customers to make an appointment at a branch to
check-in. Give us information before they
come to the branch. The type of services they're
looking for. And then when they get to the
branch, they're having that tailored discussion.
That talks to I want a mortgage. I want a home equity line.
I'm looking for a car loan. You know, my my daughter or son,
or about to graduate high school and I'm looking for a student
loan. So being able to tailor those
conversations is really, really important and the feedback we've
had from our customers. There has been really
phenomenal. Animal.
You know, we've been in that this journey to really transform
all of our branches. So, you know, when you walk into
a citizen of Branch today is very different, from what it was
before, there's less teller, you know, lines, there's more Open
Spaces, you can walk in you, don't necessarily have to go to
the line and putting your card in an ingenico device.
You does this in many of our branches.
Now, you know, our customer service reps have a tablet.
And you can do leverage e-signature to authenticate.
So we know it's you on that tablet without going to at a low
line. So, the response from our
customers has been really, really positive.
So that we're also seeing the same when I if I pivot a second
and look at our commercial customers, our commercial
customers to want to move more to self-service capabilities.
Once again, we're trying to make it very easy for them to log on
the systems provided a single sign-on portal that allows them
to log on once. And then to access many of the
different commercial applications that they need.
We've introduced a digital but Butler Service, where they can
get curated answers to certain problems.
Very, very easily with we've updated.
Our voice response systems to make it very easy for our
customers to do business with us.
And as I said earlier, we're constantly, we measure, what's
going? All MPS, which is the score that
our customers. Give us both our commercial and
our consumer customers to make sure that we are, you know, on
the right track. It's funny as you were talking.
I was thinking, you know, we are a commercial customer Citizens
Bank and I haven't been into a branch in a long time, because
if I can do everything on my phone, of course, I prefer doing
that everything. It's much easier.
So, or on the website. So what are the Technologies?
You've kind of alluded to this. But what are the technologies
that go into creating that kind of seamless customer experience
that you're hoping for a couple of examples of cloud native
applications that we built from scratch that are actually where
the, the customer feedback has been just, just phenomenal.
So when he's for our Student Business, we developed a loan
origination and servicing. In platform from the ground up,
just over a year, 8.5 million lines of code.
API, microservices architecture, but fundamentally.
We really look to improve the customer experience.
How come we? We want to make sure that our
customers don't have to Providers paper documents.
So how can we get that information?
How can we leverage the data ecosystem, with the appropriate?
Of course, customer consent. Go get that information so we
make it very easy. For our customers to enroll to
enroll either either do a student refi or get a new
student loan, you know? And and the dispersment is very
easy for those loans because we've really looked at the end
to end process and made sure from a workflow perspective from
origination all the way through to disbursement of the loan.
It's very easy for our customers to do business with us.
Another example of that is one click.
Like he lock or fast, he long, you know, a real the average
processing time to process a home.
Equity loan, is something like 45 days.
We've been able to cut that down to seven days and in fact, the
application process now for existing customers and literally
be done in three minutes and the way that we've been able to do
that is we Leverage The Power of data.
The power of data that we already have these customers to
be able to Pre-fill a lot of this information, we're able to
do the underwriting automatically leveraging data.
We already have we don't have to go out and ask for this data
which clearly can take weeks to do.
So, you know, some of these systems have been really
phenomenal, they've grown their doubling the amount of Revenue
that we've been able to get from some of these products
year-over-year. And I think it's primarily
because we really Gaston on that customer experience and making
it frictionless for our customers to to do business with
us. So you see a connection between
the streamlining of those processes and the revenue and
the customer satisfaction that you're receiving from your
customers. We've seen in the first I think
hundred sixty days of launching lending as a service product.
We were already over 1 billion in An origination.
So, you know, we saw you know, forty percent Improvement in
loan turn around and it's really as well as been a satisfying to
the customer is also an enormous satisfier for our colleague
base. The used to have to do a lot of
these processes manually before literally, they would get a
calculator out and calculate some of these things it would
made it so much easier for our colleagues who are sometimes on
the phone providing advice. Ice by providing this end-to-end
workflow, they can see everything from the beginning to
the end and certainly the satisfaction of my colleague
base, as well as being has been really really positive.
There's a very strong link than between the the ease of use for
your internal Bank employees as well as ease of use from the
customer perspective and you need both sides in order to
create that ultimate customer. That's, that's correct.
Absolutely there's a very strong digital transformation theme
that's running through this. Can you can you link for us or
describe that that connection between the digital
transformation of these processes?
All the things you're talking about and customer experience.
How does how does customer experience fit into the digital
transformation? Landscape, digital
transformation, and customer experience.
Go hand in hand, you know? Oh, and you know, so I think and
the key to a lot of this is the data.
If you can provide, if you can make it a custom, you know, make
it frictionless for your customers to do business by
prefilling information, by making it very easy than to
complete applications. They're able to start an
application in a branch. If they don't have time to
finish it, we're able to continue that Journey at home.
Who is doing those type of things leveraging, the power
that we have in terms of the data that we have to make you
easy for our for our customers. Once again, if I look at the
client the client facing side as well on the, on the commercial
business, you know, we've launched a digitization
initiative to make it much easier to enhance client
onboarding and are lending processes.
You know? We were as I said earlier, we
rolled out A single portal for them to log onto, which makes it
very easy for them and improves that, that customer experience.
We've improved our chat capability.
So if they do need to speak to a client service representative,
they can, and it really fits with really citizens is all
about white glove treatments, who are our clients and that
fits very well with that piece because we can do both.
You know, we really want to make sure that we're providing In the
South serve capabilities to our clients, they're able to do
things themselves but the same time if they need to reach out
and talk to somebody, they can we try and make that process
very easy for them. Please hit the Subscribe button
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Michael from a technology standpoint.
So what kind of transformation or change or Evolution?
Did you have to make internally within it in order to enable all
of this? We sets out by developing a
vision and a strategy, we called it.
The Next Generation technology strategy and he had five pillars
one, the first was moving to an agile environment, how can we
deliver much faster? New It's-- for our customers.
Second was, how could we build a library of reusable apis,
reusable microservices. So I can develop much more
quickly and share if abilities leverage open source.
Once again, with the view of being able to build so much more
quickly, the third pillar was around our talent and really
making sure we have the right engineering Talent at the bank.
The fourth one was about. About our journey to the cloud.
So, I will talk a little bit about that later.
But you know, the, you know, the journey to the cloud is
fundamental from two perspectives, one speed to
Market and secondly, to reduce our operating costs.
And then finally, the fifth pillar on this strategy was
stability cybersecurity. Making sure the bank is
protected. You know we are a regulated
entities is very important that as we're making all of these
Changes that were, you know, we're protecting our customers
data and that we're protecting the stability of the
environments and we're very focused on that.
Interesting question, that's come in from Twitter from our
Salon Khan who's a regular listener and our Salon thanks
for listening and for your great questions and he says given the
importance that is attached to improved customer experiences.
How do you decide Aside, the financial value of that, and who
gets involved, is it the CFO? Is it you as CIO?
How do you, how do you figure out the value of customer
experience to Warrant that investment, that you've been
making as we moved to an agile Journey would being very focused
on, okay, ours, and making sure that we understand the value of
the Investments and we're very focused on iterative
development. Element, developing MVPs testing
and learning. But, you know, we have these
quarterly investment meetings where we look at all of the
Investments and we measure whether we're hitting the
either, the revenue targets, the operating expense targets, the
customer experience targets. So we measure that we report
back on that on a quarterly basis and sometimes we make
adjustments to those some of those Investments.
So, yeah, we're very focused on looking at the value that, these
Investments are giving us. And frankly, moving to Agile, as
allowed us to react much more quickly, to that, as I said
earlier, before we were doing releases the way, 18 months, two
years, sometimes three years, what, you know, you spend an
awful lot of money on you know, two or three year program to
realize that hold on a minute. This isn't just wasn't hitting
the mark. So now, Much more focused on
smaller, releases incremental, releases and measuring.
The effectiveness of those releases on a regular basis that
must have required a real shift in the culture, the mindset, The
Thinking Inside it5 going from these very large monolithic
waterfall, projects to smaller incremental, Agile development,
not just a fundamental change for I It but a fundamental
change for the business because that, you know, the business now
has to develop the user stories in advanced of got to get that
backlog of user stories. So the engineers and be
developing at speed, you've got to think through, you know,
what, the business cases of these in advance once again
smaller increments. And so, you know, that product
owner role or experience owner role.
Is vital. And we recognize that as
Citizens as well. And we've been on a journey to
not only say upscale and re-skill our engineering talent,
but also our business talents to make sure they have that product
management skill set. You raise a really important
point which is very often when it comes to, these types of
cultural changes, we talked about what's necessary for it,
but it also must be matched on On the business side.
Because if I T does not have the right environment in which to
work, then the work is not going to get done.
One of the important shifts is part of our strategy was really
getting the confidence of the business that we were able to
deliver were able to deliver quickly at speed and we have the
right frankly engineering caliber that was able to deliver
results and we had some some really good successes.
Early on with that. I mean things like you know, the
small business administration's PPP program after covid.
Really helps us actually because it forced us to work with the
business very quickly, Implement new capabilities.
So we could help our small businesses and our commercial
customers get loans. We were able to develop some of
those applications in house with in-house Engineers, very, very
quickly. We also, as I said early we We
stabilize the environment very quickly as well, which gained
the confidence of the business. We've been able to reduce the
number of significant outages. We've been able to reduce the
number of risks in the environment considerably the
number of security vulnerabilities that were
outstanding. So that's given the business a
lot more confidence in the partnership that we have with
Technologies. And, you know, I would say, you
know, we started as a bit of an order taker, I would say and I'm
didn't have that, that relationship.
Nation ship. Now, if you had to ask the
business, what the relationship is and we have, they would say,
it's completely turned around 360 degrees and we have this
phenomenal relationship and certainly we can't do it without
them. That partnership is really,
really important. Can you assign any broad time
frame for the change in that relationship from as you said,
being an order taker? Historically to A much closer
partnership that you have. Right now.
We turn the corner year to, I would say, I think in terms of
at least by having that that seats at the at the table, but I
would eat some, it's an ongoing Journey.
You know, we're partnering with the business where we've been at
this agile Journey now about four or five years and, you
know, is, is we're still learning, you know, I think it's
and the business is learning. We're learning, you know, we
fundamentally changed Operating model, you know, we have we
moved to what we call the modern operating model which was done
in parallel to the Next Generation technology, which
fundamentally the business reorganized, how they worked
with Technologies to deliver new capabilities and we'll still
maturing that, you know, we're not the certainly not there yet,
but we've made significant strides in the right direction.
Again, it's a really interesting point that it's not Just a
technology transformation but you have changed your operating
model. I was scared.
I was going to say, can you assign?
Can you say that one is more important than the other and I
realized maybe that's kind of a silly question to even ask that
you need to do them in parallel and he can't be too far ahead
with one or the other either you have to do it in in constant.
And if I, you know, if I have an engineering team who is able to
deliver At speed and delivered capabilities to Market at speed.
And yet the business is not able to keep up with the backlog of
user stories. Then at the end, we're not going
to deliver that real true experience to our customers that
minimum viable product because it's not going to have
everything that the business need.
So it's important you really keep them in tandem going at the
at the same pace and you know yeah I don't think one is more
important. The other Think it's vital.
You know, you keep both moving along and we have another
question again from our Salon Khan who says digital
transformation is about business transformation and the and he
asks about the role of the CIO since the CIO has this very
unusual position of seeing across every part of the
organization, which is, which is very unusual.
You're not you're not siloed as a A CIO one of the things will
be moving towards is what we call a platform approach and
this is exactly to tackle this problem which is no, I don't
want to develop bespoke. Applications for every single
business process that I have. You know, why do I need one
application for student loan? Originations one application for
credit loan applications, one application for mortgage
applications one application or platform for home equity
applications loan. Originations if I can build a
set of common components that can be reused across all of Them
going to be much faster time to Market and frankly, much cheaper
to build out. So the lending as a service
example that I gave earlier, you know, the 8.5 million lines of
code that we developed Cloud native application.
We've built it so it can be reused.
Not only for our student lending business, for our personal
loans, for our credit card loans, and different different
platforms. So as the CIO, you're absolutely
right? I can step back And take that
platform approach and say, hold on, this is how we should
architect this system. And explain the benefits of that
for the business and sometimes you have to make, sometimes they
will agree and you'll you can wait and, you know, and
sometimes you might have to go ahead and because the business
is it's such a priority to the business, you have to build a
bespoke application of go out and buy a I spoke package.
So sometimes that happens, but making that conscious decision
is really, really, really important.
The second piece of that is, you know, which we've been on a
journey as well as to replace our all our core platform.
So you know, we have a legacy or and would be modernizing that
platform we, you know, we've actually moving to a cloud
native, modern banking platform and Again, that's based on these
reusable building blocks. And as a CIO sub to me to
articulate to our business, how that can be leveraged across the
broader business? Not just for one particular
business line, or I can, how can I use that?
Not just for our consumer business but also for our
Commercial Business for our small business business.
So it's very, you know, I do have that unique vantage point
and having taking this Platform approach, building reusable
building blocks that we can reuse across different business
lines helps with that. How do you go to the business
and say to the business folks? We need to architect well,
pretty much everything. How do you begin that
conversation? We did and we have.
And, you know, what we did was we set out creating a set of
blueprints and roadmaps and, you know, we laid that plan out We,
you know we said look rom-com, be built in a day, right?
You not going to be able to transform all of these platforms
overnight, but we've touched in the last four years, a great
many of them and we've made strides in improving them, but I
think the fundamentally, the most important thing, first was
setting out the architectural Blueprints and knowledge in
where you have platforms that are out of date that need
updating. Resizing which of the ones that
you need to upgrade first and and aligning that, you know,
with the business, it may be okay.
That you have a platform that's old if it's not a growing part
of the business. That is just working works every
day. Why touch it, right?
So you just park that and you say, okay, we will put that in a
maintain category, we will maintain it, but these other
systems that are a growth, they're going to help us grow
the bank. We will invest in and that's
Those blueprints do and These Blueprints fundamentally have to
be done in partnership with the business, where you lay out that
roadmap to say, over time over the next three to five years is
what we're focused on and get that alignment with the business
is really fundamental at that time.
How did you approach the business in terms of arguing, on
the one hand about the need from a technology standpoint versus
on? On the other hand, arguing the
need from a business standpoint. I think you've got to show both,
right? You've got to show one of the
one of the short-term medium-term long-term advantages
to the business sometimes. Sometimes they may be immediate
benefits to implements in these small scale changes that can
move the business forward. But sometimes you have to show
that longer that longer vision and show that over time, here's
How this is going to benefit you?
If you look at, for example, core magnetization, journey is a
five-year Journey. We are, you know, we started it.
But when we're not going to be, we're not going to move all of
our existing products to this new Cloud native platform until
about 20, 27. But we laid out that road map
for the business and show them what we've launched.
Now we've got all of our digital bank is now on this new
platform, eighty thousand customers in production, our
savings account is on that platform.
So I was able to launch that. Now, I'm building out checking
capabilities by the end of the year and then I can move our
checking customers onto that platform different products, one
by one, but, you know, next year.
So, yeah, I think it's showing that That journey and, but
you've got to create business value along the way.
It wouldn't have worked if I'd have gone to the business said,
well in 2027, you're going to get a brand-new shiny system
and, you know, we will be able to, you know, put things on it,
then you've got to do it incrementally.
You've got to show the value incrementally.
And that's, that's what we're doing.
We're I'd like to say were biting.
The elephant one bite at a time. We're not trying to read to all
at once. Talking about the impact on
customer experience. And so can you just again link
for us all of this technology transformation, business
transformation to that upper level theme of how does this
help customer experience? If you look at our digital
application? You know, we did 970 releases
last year, 1972 only Lisa's. So we were able to take that
customer feedback and really incorporate changes rapidly into
our mobile app. It has a 4.7 rating on the app
store which is, you know, is pretty high.
And so by building component, by building this component-based
architecture in the cloud, we're able to deliver new capabilities
so much faster. We're able to react to Industry
Trends as the banking industry. As tackled fees, you know, we
were able to reduce our fees and give customers who, you know, if
24-hour grace period for, you know, an overdraft we're able to
implement those capabilities. Very quickly were able to
implement capabilities, such as you can now, see your paycheck
on a Wednesday as opposed to a Friday.
And once again, we're able to deliver those capabilities very
quickly on the All platforms, we wouldn't have been able to do
that, you know? Before I talked earlier about
the branches, you can walk into a branch, the, the branch
Personnel have a Tabla and they can service you on that tablet.
You don't have to go to the teller machine, we have
e-signature capability. So there's many ways that we're
making it easier for our customers do business with us.
When you look at our the new new account origination, For new
customers, that sign up. We really made it far fewer
clicks to be able to do a lot of that information far.
You were far fewer details, that they have to enter, that's
making it easier for our customers to do business with
dramatically reduced. The time, it takes to apply for
a new checking account, you know, or a new deposit account,
or a new credit card, by leveraging, the power that we
have Have in the data here at solisten.
So I think there are some examples might Chris Peterson
asks when you were talking earlier about building blocks
Blueprints and roadmaps and this is a, this is a pretty geeky
question. So see how see how are you?
How you'll respond to this? Did that come from adopting or
maturity? Maturing it Frameworks like
togaf or ITIL when you Think about the standard set of apis
that we're building, you know, we leverage vein, right?
Which is the, you know, Institute that publishes
standard apis for the banking, you know the banking industry
certainly from an architecture perspective, we follow togaf
toga principles so we definitely look at them.
When you look from a cyber perspective we've built all the
controls that the knee Mist Foundation recommends, in terms
of cyber best practices and and building protection into the
code. So you know yes we definitely
look at all these types of outside standards and and where
possible we we you know we adopt them absolutely.
This is from Elizabeth Shaw. Who says, how do you know which
aspects of the customer Variants from the customers point of
view, needs Improvement. And then how do you map that
onto how it can help? I'll give you one example.
ATMs. No, couple of years ago we had a lot of feedback on the
about a customer's dissatisfaction with ATMs. Now
we've jumped up this year to fourth in the ranking in JD
Powers on our ATMs and year. We've introduced things like
Multi determination. So you when you go to an ATM you
can ask for. Do you want 20s, you want
hundreds, how do you want your money?
You can also enter personal preferences so that.
Next next time you go, we automatically know that you
always get $500 out and you always want to in hundreds.
So, you know, there's those personal preferences.
We've also made it easier if you don't want to carry any card and
you can tap and go with your mobile device and get cash out
from Ivar ATMs now with your mobile device.
So you know, direct feedback from our customers and we
prioritize that set of activity and really we've significantly
improved you know the quality I would say for our customers of
our of our network of 3,000 plus ATMs, just one example.
But you know, we always listen to our customers and you know,
we prioritize a lot of those Those customer experiences that
are raised another question from Twitter.
Our Salon cam comes Khan comes back again.
And he says, how is digital transformation different than
any other IT project. And can you explain this from
the perspective that for, and that an on it person would
understand. I'll give you one example that
we've been doing as part of our digital transformation, is what
we call war on paper. All right?
So You know, if you think about it in the, you know, the olden
days, you know, if you need to prove your income, you have two
axes or walk into a branch and give us your payroll stub.
Or if you're a company you have to give us your tax information.
Now, a lot of that information now is available through apis.
That I can go get right with appropriate customer consent.
So You know, that's where the digital transformation really
comes. In of those business processes
is, you know, how can I digitize that same in our Commercial
Business? We really digitized a lot of the
documents that are clients after providers in terms of wanting to
request loans, Etc. So we've been very focused on
making that very easy for our clients to do everything to sign
through DocuSign rather than Sign in, you know, manually and
having to supposed to or fax or send that type of material in.
So those are just a couple of examples.
But you know, that that war on paper in, not only is a big
customer experience, satisfying fundamentally as well.
Was uses our operating expenses. You think we don't have to keep
all this paper. We don't have to post it and the
postage fees that go with that. You're also able to reduce your
costs by I reducing the amount of paper that you have.
So just one example of where digital transformation
fundamentally replaces some you know, business processes.
What about Cloud? You've mentioned Cloud several
times. So we're does cloud fit into
this. And why is the cloud so
important to this cloud is fundamental to our overall
architecture, you know, we we started, we have a multi Cloud
strategy. So we're on both.
Aw, OS and Microsoft Azure. We started on AWS.
So a lot of the mobile applications that I talked about
of all been built on on AWS add data platforms.
You know we had several Appliance Solutions, we were on
the teaser on terror. Dates are on IBM, biginsights on
hortonworks. We've eliminated a lot of those
Appliance aleutians. Now everything is in a data Lake
on AWS. We're able to build, you know,
customer 360, which is a view of all of our customers
relationships with us. We're able to our product
master. So we really understand
fundamentally, what are our customers and what products they
use. So, when we built all of that on
the cloud, you know, we're moving to more real-time using
data data, streaming tools. Enable us to make decisions
real-time, that's what our customers want.
They want instant gratification, If ocation, right, so all of
that is enabled on the on the cloud.
So and it's just fundamentally improve that time to Market.
So, you know, before you would have to order a server and then
you would have to order the operating system, then the
database, then you would have to lay the application down on
that. You know, we've automated a lot
of that. We've automated a lot of the
security controls so you know, as I build out Code.
And I put it on this pipeline. No, now I can do releases in
under 15 minutes. It would used to take four hours
because it's all fully automated in the cloud and I've built in
the controls. I don't need someone in security
to check the code, check out the code, look at the code and say
is it free of vulnerabilities? I already I scan for that, I
automatically scan for it and produce, you know I say yeah
that code can move forward into production.
It's free. Vulnerabilities, free of
defects. So you know the clown has helped
us enable that we've built what we call a platform as a service,
which is a sort of development toolkit for our Engineers on the
cloud, able to develop so much faster.
Once again, reusable utilities. They don't have to do error
handling. We already pre-built that and
they can reuse that. You don't need to build logging
so already reuse and they can reuse that on the platform.
So many, Of these capabilities, allow our developers to really
move at speed in the cloud. It's also enabling us to really
improve resiliency because we have multiple availability zones
within the cloud. We have multiple regions.
So we're able to fail over from one region to another region.
And so it's really improve the availability of our most
important here, one applications.
And then finally you know cost You know, ultimately our plan is
to exit our data sensors by 2025, by the end of 2025, that
unlocks massive amount of operating expenses that we can
feed back in to other things at the bank, either more
development, more, new capabilities or other priorities
for the bank. But unlocking that and, and, you
know, we see the cloud as a much cheaper alternative to having
our own a brick-and-mortar in our own data senses.
So again, there is this technology architecture that
enables the agility and the responsiveness to customer needs
customer requests, which therefore, improves customer
experience and proves revenue, and all the good things
associated with that. Absolutely, you brought it full
circle Michael. As we finish up Any closing
thoughts on this alignment of it with customer experience?
One piece of advice, I'd give is make sure you have the right
talents. We we swung the pendulum a
little too far over to Outsourcing.
I would say, you know, four or five years ago and we've now
swing that pendulum will be back with hired. 550 software
Engineers, the bank, we've trained and Reese killed over
400 stuff. For engineers by developing, an
internal academies, badging certification programs and and
our colleagues love it. They love the fact that we're
investing in them, they're able to use new technologies.
These academies that they've learnt 30 different, new
technologies, whether that's mongodb or snowflake, or
postgres sequel. Whether it's the new Dev, say
cops tooling that we've been able to bring in and, you know,
new apis microservices. So you know, they have this
engineer. Muscle.
They did people in Technologies, they were computer science
grads. They just lost that muscle.
They were they were managing and not doing and so, you know,
we've now enabled them by re-skilling them, retraining
them to do again. And so I would say, invest in
your people invest in your talent, train them would be, you
know, one piece of advice. And then, you know, also look at
the external Market Place, bring the right talent in so they can
coach and mentor. Your existing Talent base as
well, but that's that's fundamental, I would say, get
the, get the talent rides and other things will fall, will
fall in place. Great advice, get the talent
rate and other things will fall in place and with that, we're
out of time. And so I just want to say
Michael, thank you so much for taking your time to be with us
today. Thank you, Michael everybody.
Thank you for watching. Especially those folks who asks
such excellent. It and insightful questions.
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