First Citizens Bank turns collections into connections

The Business Issue

First Citizens Bank is the largest family-controlled bank in the United States, maintaining a 126-year history and more than 17,000 employees and business, commercial, and wealth clients across the country. The bank has undergone a significant period of growth and transformation. Along the way, it acquired CIT Bank, where its journey with Pega began, followed by Silicon Valley Bank, further expanding its personalized lending, leasing, and financing offerings.

Within the bank, the equipment finance division supports some of the most complex financing needs from large enterprise organizations to small agricultural businesses. Every customer situation is different. One call could come from a municipality financing laptops, while the next might involve an agriculture customer financing a harvester. Associates need to quickly understand each customer's unique circumstances and provide the right support.

Before Pega, that was difficult. Associates were forced to navigate a patchwork of systems just to complete routine customer requests. For instance, generating and sending a payment letter required access to at least six different applications. The equipment finance division knew it needed a scalable platform that unified the experience, streamlined work, and supported growth.

The Solution

First Citizens Bank did not arrive at its equipment finance servicing and collections transformation in a single project. The foundation had been built over several years.

The journey began in 2018, when the team established a framework for automation. By 2019, Pega was supporting automated workflows across the business and the bank quickly saw the value of a low-code approach that could scale as needs evolved.

That flexibility proved critical during the pandemic. The team launched its Payment Protection Program (PPP) in weeks, deploying new capabilities every few days, automating and managing customer outreach at scale. The platform also helped streamline the integration of CIT Bank following its acquisition by First Citizens Bank in 2022, enabling the team to rapidly rebrand customer communications and contract documents with minimal business disruption.

By 2023, more than 100 workflows and enhancements had been delivered on the platform. So when the equipment finance division evaluated collections platforms through a formal RFP process, they chose to build on the foundation they already trusted.

Rather than introducing another system for associates to navigate, First Citizens Bank built a unified equipment finance servicing and collections platform on three layers: experience, decisioning, and automation.

The experience layer, – powered by Pega Customer Service™ and Pega Collections™, – provides associates with a single workspace and reusable business frameworks, supported by Pega rules. The decisioning layer, driven by Pega Customer Decision Hub™, helps scale the expertise of the bank's most experienced collections professionals. Pega Customer Decision Hub enables that expertise to be captured and applied consistently across the business, allowing real-time decisions to be made intelligently without requiring every interaction to reach a large language model.The automation layer executes those decisions through RPA, AI, and predictive models.

The result is a simpler experience for both managers and associates. Managers can focus on the priorities that matter most, while associates have everything they need in one place from customer information and next-best-action guidance to full case management.

Real-time dashboards powered by Pega Process Fabric® provide operational visibility through KPI reporting. The platform was designed to minimize data storage which supported cloud approval.

The Results

The impact of the transformation was felt almost immediately. By using Pega's out-of-the-box capabilities, First Citizens Bank automated customer communications, consolidated skip tracing and phone payments into a single workspace, and reduced time spent on manual processes across servicing and collections.

The results were significant. Average handle time in collections fell by five minutes, while next-best-action guidance delivered a further 20% reduction in average handle time. The bank also improved responsiveness in its credit card operations, cutting average speed of answer by 50%. Most importantly, same-day case resolution increased by 44%, helping customers get answers and outcomes faster.

In the repossession and recovery department, Pega workflow automation and case management eliminated 40 minutes of manual data entry per case while providing end-to-end visibility and controls throughout the process.

The transformation changed more than operational metrics. Knowledge management capabilities reduced new-hire training time by 20%. Instead of training employees to navigate six different systems, the bank can now focus on developing customer-facing skills. New associates are guided by the bank's NICE principles: notice the customer, interact, care, and execute.

What began as an effort to simplify collections has evolved into a scalable platform that helps First Citizens Bank resolve cases faster, empower associates, and deliver better customer experiences.

Want to dive deeper into First Citizens Bank’s journey? Watch their PegaWorld session here.