Citizens Bank Taps Employees and Fintechs in Its Drive for Innovation

Citizens Bank, a $165.7-billion-in-assets financial institution headquartered in Providence, RI, is a practical innovator. It invites employees to propose innovations and compete for dollars to fund their development. 

The bank also works closely with several fintechs to help develop ideas into commercially viable solutions suitable for the highly regulated banking industry. 

As Executive Vice President and Head of Digital and Experience Design, Lamont Young plays a key role in the bank’s innovation initiatives. 

Where do innovation suggestions come from within the bank?

We have been pleasantly surprised at the diversity of ideas that have come in. We see a good cross-section — back office and front office ideas, concepts related to automation, cyber security. And the ideation has come from all levels of the organization, not just senior leaders but some more junior and newer colleagues.

Citizens works with a variety of fintechs, including as a founding partner of MassChallenge FinTech. Are there any cultural differences that are apparent when the bank works with the fintech world?

Speed. Any of us who work with accelerators like MassChallenge, where we do hackathons and conceptualize ideas, see some start-ups go from concept to real-code prototypes in 24 hours. When you get the right people in the right place, the pace of change is like nothing I have seen in my banking career.

How has the bank changed in the face of this?

We don’t want to stifle development from internal teams or the fintechs we work with. We want to move as quickly as possible to meet the pace of the fintechs. So we have made a change in procurement teams to onboard fintech proofs of concept (POCs) faster. They don’t have to go through the very long process that some traditional procurement onboarding required. We have been streamlining that process, especially in POCs and small-scale pilots, so we aren’t overly burdensome to start-ups, while maintaining good risk and compliance controls.

What are some areas where you have innovated?

Security, cyber, automation, and full digitalization are top of mind, as well as straight-through processing (STP) and streamlined processes in the back office, securely digitizing documents to take some pressure off the back office, and better ways to look at consumer finance and make credit decisions.

Are there technologies with unrealized potential? 

I do think when you look at blockchain, which has been this big buzzword for the industry, lots of banks are still trying to organize around real use cases for it. I think it is on the horizon, but we are still probably a few years away from practical applications for U.S. banks that don’t do a massive amount of overseas business.

“I AM SO BULLISH ON VOICE. I BELIEVE THE ADVENT OF VOICE BIOMETRICS WILL BE A GAME CHANGER IN THE NEXT COUPLE OF YEARS-NOT JUST THE ABILITY OF VOICE TO AUTHENTICATE OR TELL SIRI OR ALEXA TO DO X,Y, OR Z, BUT VOICE WILL BE HOW CONSUMERS ENGAGE WITH THE INTERNET OF THINGS.”

What areas of fintech do you think will look markedly different in three years?

I am so bullish on voice. I believe the advent of voice biometrics will be a game changer in the next couple of years — not just the ability of voice to authenticate or tell Siri or Alexa to do X,Y, or Z, but voice will be how consumers engage with the Internet of things. Interfaces are going to change where the voice becomes the primary mechanism for how clients engage with their favorite brands.

Isn’t voice competence pretty uneven, with some quite sophisticated and others still very primitive?

I totally agree, which is why a lot of start-ups and others are investing in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Firms that offer it are talking to us at Citizens about standards for Interpretive Voice Response, mobile, or online banking. What the industry needs for voice to grow is for it to mature enough so that whatever interface you are talking to recognizes your conversational tone, colloquialisms, and slang — or even what I am saying when I am talking with food in my mouth.

We hear a lot about technology’s role in financial inclusion. Is this something Citizens is thinking about?

Technology can be a great equalizer, and mobile can be a way to reach the underserved. Mobile is ubiquitous in life, a standard part of how you live.

I do think we have an opportunity with mobile, not just in terms of financial management — using a mobile device to manage accounts — but using mobile for financial literacy. 

More and more financial institutions are embedding tips and tools, personal financial management (PFM), and financial literacy content into mobile or digital apps, encouraging  everyday savings strategies, especially in the first quarter.

What kind of opportunities does working with MassChallenge help Citizens address?

We have been pretty pleased with the latest cohort. We continue to be interested in authentication. Some start-ups are looking at different forms of biometric accreditation to make it simpler for clients to access their data, while continuing to make it harder for bad actors.

A lot of what we have seen from MassChallenge, Plug and Play, and another accelerator is start-ups that want to automate certain back office processes or undertake digitization of paper. In commercial banking, the amount of paper required for recordkeeping, where you are getting quarterly statements from businesses with lines of credit, is a real pain point. Some start-ups are interested in being able to digitize, do STP, and create a more efficient back office.

Can you see a world without paper in banking?

Our head of consumer banking has made a declaration of war against paper. Clearly top of mind for Citizens, and probably every other financial institution, is not just the cost, and the environmental impact of paper, but the client experience. Consumers are very comfortable having documents delivered digitally. If I have lost a document, I don’t want to wait five days for the bank to put it in the mail to me. Clients know they can have access to all these documents digitally.

What can the bank offer a fintech start-up?

We can work with them to make a good concept commercially viable. Their thinking is pushing us to think differently about a problem internal to the bank. Start-ups can really help us think about how we will meet challenges, and we can help them become commercially viable.

Do you have an example?

Our wealth team is working with another platform, now in POC, that will optimize interaction models with clients, providing greater visibility into the clients’ financial needs so advisors can provide better service.

How do you provide advisors with client information without being creepy?

We have a chief conduct officer who sits in our risk group and looks at how we as an organization ensure we have good compliance and are not overstepping boundaries. We want to do the right thing for customers, and we have a process around consumer privacy — how we utilize technology and data not to be creepy, but to make the lives of our customers easier. 

If I know you log in to pay your bills every third Friday, to us it is not a creep factor if when you log in on that third Friday we automatically display Bill Pay. That is a case where the way we use technology is about convenience for our clients.