PegaWorld 2025: Transforming Banking: A Modern Customer Experience from Start to Finish

PegaWorld 2025: Transforming Banking with a Modern Customer Experience from Start to Finish

So my name is Scott Andrick. I'm an Industry Principal with Pegasystems and I work in our go to market area around mostly consumer banking products as my area of coverage, but I've been doing this for many years. If you've been to PegaWorld before, I think this is probably my 15th or 16th PegaWorld.

I mean, I've been doing this for a very long time. You've probably seen me do this introduction before day two, right? Great keynotes the two days. Hopefully you saw some amazing breakouts. I see my friends from back in the row over here. They said hi on their way in. That was my first group yesterday.

They're stalking me now as we go through the the whole process. Uh, hope you enjoy the concert last night as well. We've got, uh, as the reminder in the Innovation Hub the chess tournament. If you've never been to the Innovation Hub in scene Alan, literally challenge 12 or 15 people at the same time playing chess.

It's quite interesting. He's inside of a horseshoe of people on the outside, and he just goes piece to piece and just walks around and plays, you know, 12 or 15 people simultaneously. It's amazing. So that's this afternoon. Really interesting. I suggest that you go take a look at that if you have the opportunity.

From a housekeeping perspective, there will be time for Q&A at the end. The key for this is there's a microphone in this aisle and there's a microphone over here in this aisle. So if you have a question walk on up to the microphone. We're not going to shout from the audience and try and redo the question upfront.

Please just go to the microphone. I'll manage the the long line of people that want to ask the questions, and we'll get through those. But they'll definitely be, you know, ten or so minutes at the end where you can ask some questions, which is good. The one of the things that I like about doing the introductions and working, I help get all of our speakers ready.

That's part of what I do, is my job is make them comfortable, um, not have them trip on the way up the stage, you know, as they're starting the presentation. That's not a good start, but it's great to actually see how banks will take Pega technology. And then they'll they'll go to the next area, and then they'll go to the next area and then go to the next area.

And that evolving story of where they use Pega in different places at the organization. I love to see that. And what's interesting, although this is Jessica's first time here, so be nice to her. Sanjoy Sarkar third time speaking three years in a row. So he's a pro at this and he's been talking on those different topics.

So if you would please give him a warm round of applause. Sanjoy and Jessica. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks, Scott. Um, good morning and welcome. Thanks for joining us and listening to our story. My name is Jessica Henry and I'm the director of Client Operations and part of the leadership team at in Community Association Banking at First Citizens Bank.

Last year I was actually a first timer to PegaWorld, and it was right before we went live with Pega, and I sat and listened to a panel that Sanjoy was on. And afterwards he said, Jessica, it's going to be me and you up there next year. And here we are. And those of you who know Sanjoy know he is definitely a man of his word.

So together, Sanjoy and I are both excited to invite you to join us on our journey of innovating and modernizing banking for our clients and our associates. We want to talk about the lessons learned and takeaways that we've created in our success and our journey so far, to help set the stage. I need to provide a little background on our 25 year history as Community Association banking.

We are a unique banking division at First Citizens Bank that services an industry you probably know more about than you think. If you own a home within a community that has a neighborhood sign in the front, or maybe you live in a condo building, a fancy high rise, maybe a large scale lifestyle community that has country club golf courses, something like that.

They all have something in common. All of these types of properties have communal property that must be funded and maintained by owners that live there. Each has an unpaid volunteer board of directors, and it's these folks who select property management companies that's our client to professionally manage the business of the association.

All of the payables, the receivables, the professional services required by that community. Many of you also might realize a couple years back you might have heard of the condo collapse in Surfside, Florida. And quickly, we all understand the vital role that these clients have in guiding and protecting both our most expensive asset, as well as guiding the financial well-being of our shared assets within each of these communities that people live.

Cab is dedicated to this unique space. In fact, we are one of the top banks that specialize in this unique business with over 1500 management companies and 42,000 associations scattered across every single state in our country. We have established ourselves as the expert bank in our space. We've built technology over the last 25 years and helped shape the industry.

We developed API integrations before it was cool to have integrations in banking. We did all of this to be able to make sure that our management companies had the ability to scale and improve their services. So things were going pretty great for Cab. And just like every success story, the path to success is not always linear.

Cab started as First National Bank of Arizona sold to Mutual of Omaha Bank, where most of our growth and identity really came from. And then we sold to CIT Bank in 2019. And I think that's where our story gets interesting. With the pandemic and amid major uncertainty in the financial landscape, the fed lowered interest rates in 2020 and 2021 to the lowest point in history.

We hadn't seen interest rates that low since World War two. In fact, on a personal note, I was lucky enough to buy in 2021. And believe me, I'm not the girl you take downstairs to the casino for luck. I told my husband, like, seriously babe, we're going to die in this house. So here we are in 2023 banks in our short history.

Mortgage rates lower than we may have, may ever see them in our lifetime, and pent up demand for new home products. They couldn't build houses fast enough, and the delays in raw materials due to the pandemic just fueled that demand. And where is that growth concentrated? You're paying attention. You're right in associations, because more than 65% of new home growth happens in associations and condos.

So growth's crazy, demand is crazy, and cab almost doubles in size in that short amount of time. All with very little investment to match the scale required. We simply stopped keeping pace with our growth. And sorry y'all I'm cheating. So for the first time, Cab started to see attrition and declines in our business.

As fate would have it, in 2021, First Citizens Bank acquired CIT. And let me tell you, this singular act changed our course. But we had a lot of collateral damage to clean up after three banks in four short years. And we're here to share a story about technology and the customer journey. But I'll let you in on a little secret.

This story isn't about technology. It's a story about people. The best people in tech, the best tech in the world doesn't doesn't get built without the right people. You see, I'm not a long term banker. Prior to joining First Citizens, I ran two large management companies. And as a former client, I'm the one who selected the banking partners.

I was a former client of Mutual of Omaha and then sit and I was the one who picked them. I picked cab because they were simply the best until they weren't. And the truth is, I knew that they needed help. I just really didn't understand the details. After joining the bank, the problem statement was clear.

And I bet for some of you in the audience you'll understand these same problems. Here's what I learned. We had burnt out associates who didn't have the tools for success. We had complex systems. Three banks of hand-me-down legacy systems. Manual processes. Redundancies and workarounds. And frustrated clients that lack the service they actually deserved.

We had no ability to scale our operations. So we're in this perfect storm. And we had a bad customer experience and associate apathy. There wasn't much hope for either party. And if you know First Citizens Bank, you know their associates and culture is 100% laser focused on the client experience. In fact, there's no higher calling.

It was with that freedom, belief and investment that we began our journey to regain Cab's reputation as the rightful leader in our industry. That's our why. To find a solution that would help us achieve our goals. We knew we needed to simplify, provide transparency, connect our systems, and design and integration workflows to keep up with customer expectation.

We needed to connect associates to our clients because again, it's really just about the people. Meeting Sanjoy and his team and learning how he'd already driven success across our bank and seven other business units. Choosing Pega was the easiest part of our journey. So why did we choose Pega for community association banking?

Sanjoy Sarkar. Sure. Um, I'm pretty much sure that's a mouthful, right? There's a lot that Jessica has put through, but I would start by saying that was great. Uh, it's been great working with Jessica. Right? Uh, the business transformation that you bring to the table is fantastic. I really appreciate your team.

Right. Doing fantastic work. Right. Supporting fantastic partners. Right. No questions about that. I would like to definitely thank Pega and First Citizens Bank for sure to provide me the stage to talk about, um, right. And share the success that we had. Um, getting started as, as Jessica just continuing on on the same lines on the success rate and that's a statement.

But like a couple of statements that I'm going to make. But those are all true. First thing is First Citizens Bank, when we started, we were the first bank to start on Pega Cloud, right? We were the first client to go on Cloud. That was a risk. But again, if you see today's keynotes, you have to take risk but in a limited fashion.

And we took the risk and we are proud where we are. We are always on the latest version. Right. Adopting new things. Um, number one, same thing. Right. When this came through, um, I was looking I never knew what is community association? Bank is right. We stay in a lot of places. Right? We have homes.

Different sort of business, different altogether, new new things. Understanding how Spmc is like. I was like, okay, we need to sit down. We need to discuss. But again. Right. Um, I believe with the collaboration with business and tech, we can drive success. What we have been doing in for citizens. Um, as you see, the statement is 100% success throughout the bank.

Whatever we touch, um, we deliver on time before time plus week plus or one week here and there. But down the line, we are my team. I'm proud that we are gold standard in the bank. Right there is there is no failures. Um, that I have seen. It's not that we might not get it, but I'm quite confident because, um, the process that we have standardized, basically we have a proven formula how to go forward with that.

Um, on the same lines. Right. Um, as Jessica told. Right. We have created a seamless experience for anything that we do. We do have proven models. We do have adaptive, uh, components that we plug and play. Right. Let it be a different, uh, bank or something, right? Different parts of the bank. But we do have a framework that we can initially put it through very quickly.

Just put a vanilla layer or a flavor on top of it and we are ready to go. We are very transparent. Last year when I was speaking in PegaWorld, I committed a date of this being go live and I held to it, right? And it was something which we decided a date. Well, well before um, like one year before we really go live.

So we keep things transparent. We speak up when there is an issue, but we keep the commitments that we hold as we are on Cloud. Right. Driving the transformation. Know what we need to do. We have the components in place, right? We are 100% GenAI ready, right? We are ready. We do have CDH, but I don't want to call that as an Apes.

But you know, Bank is working on an AI strategy and model, so I cannot explain much around it. But once it is established, we can just bulk rollout, which I'm going to talk about in the next slide. Um, so that is one of the things, um, anything else that you want to add, Jessica, with respect to Why you chose Pega.

Yeah, I think it's really all about the customer journey and understanding each component of that. So from onboarding to servicing to exiting and making sure that we meet our clients where they are, um, providing them transparency, um, was extremely important to us. And so, um, all of these things, as you told us, were reasons that we selected Pega, but also because, uh, it provides us a long roadmap to get there.

Perfect. All right. Before I jump into this, let me take a step back. Let's understand. Consume. Okay. So, do we know what is the formula of success? I don't want to directly jump. What is SEC client connect. But let's talk it through. Let's understand where I'm coming from. What's the vision that we are going to.

Right. Do we have a formula for success like, you know, like Pythagoras theorem. Like a plus B equal to C to the power square. Something like that. We don't. Right? We stay in a market where the things are driven by the search engines. Right? We search something, we get it back. But one thing that is common clear is new, right?

Anything which we say is new, everybody is kind of excited and look forward to it. Right. So down the line we are living in a world of novelty, right. And unfortunately it's a cult of novelty. Okay. Even though we like new things, the truth is we hate novelty. So if you see that slide right, a modern experience.

What I wrote, I didn't write a new experience. I'll explain why you might say that I like new things, but I can prove you that, you know, we hate novelty, even though we like being there as new. Say an example, right? You go to a forest, you go to Amazon, right? You are moving around here. You see elephant which has which is white in color.

You will appreciate that, right? But think through an animal which you saw, which has legs of an elephant, body of a tiger, tail of a leopard, or something of that sort, you will run away from it, right? You're not going to like it because you are not familiar to it. Second piece is right. Let's take about normal anything day to day things like, you know, getting up and seeing yourself on a mirror.

Right? You you are what is the most thing that you are familiar with your face, right? Unless you are a celebrity. If you are a celebrity, then you are used to your photos. You love your photos and like you know you admire them. You see your posters and you are like awesome, right? But normal day to day life mango people, right?

We like something. It's our face. So you might have some friend which tells you. You know, I didn't look good on that photo. But if you see that person, that person admires him or herself in the mirror in front of me, because you are, you are consistently seeing the same thing again and again, and you feel like liking it, right?

So you like your face in mirror more than your photo. That's what usually people do, right? So this process is like something like a continuous stimulation of something again and again develops a liking of that particular thing. Right. So that means familiarity, right. Let me give you a good example of that.

Um, Spotify. Right. Spotify introduced a concept if you are using Spotify. Right. There is a concept called Weekly Mondays or Monday Madness, something like that. What they used to do is they thought we will do something really, really new. We will jumble up 30 songs every Monday and we'll put it into your profile, which is not relevant to your genre or anything of that sort.

While developing that, they introduced a bug based on your personalization. Something new. You know, something which you like. So it was was coming out of that 30 songs and people loved it. The point they found out the bug, they removed the bug. The likability went down right. Nobody started liking it.

And then they understood. Right. There is a very close intersection between new novelty and familiarity. Right? So that is very important. So it is very tough for a creative people like me to develop something new, which is familiar as well. Can we deliver a surprise? But can we deliver a familiar surprise at what it means right now?

Um, when? Now we'll talk about why I spoke about. This is about about all of this is just to ensure we understand the client connect, right? So we are delivering something new but familiar, not something just like that. This is totally a new business, which we went through. And the best beauty of the client connect is not just portal.

It is an end to end customer journey. That means this is not a portal, internal or external. We are starting this, you know, this is the place where the first thing happens and the last thing happens the entire journey. This is a snapshot of our external portal. It has evolved further. Right. But but you can see here, right.

It is an external portal which is being exposed to the external client. So the external clients can directly see entire 360 degree of their customer base, right directly on their profile, right on their laptop, mobile devices and so forth. Right. It's being responsive in nature. So any executive that has access to it can see their entire 360 degree externally.

Now it might look like very easy for internal users because you have like 800, 600, 1200, 2000 or users. But when I say external we are talking about 25,000 and above users. Pega. I would not say that, but there are very less projects or programs which are exposed over internet for Pega, and we are taking a head start on that.

It is not that we are the first one, but we are aiming for something great to achieve here. So we have streamlined back end with Pega already. The back office is there, right? The CRM pieces are there, right? The CDH pieces are there, the GenAI we are being ready so we can use all the components, right?

But again we want to go externally as well. So the front end, the onboarding piece, as well as the front end of an executive leader or making something to be done right, right up front is also Pega. So Pega throughout the journey is what we are envisioning it in this product, which is a new step towards this particular approach.

Here the executives doesn't see only the data, but they can act to it. Now the options can be anonymous, right? Once we enable AI onto this right in, sometimes down the line you it is like everything it is online, it is offline. You can see your data, you can view the details, you can do self-service.

You can run report. It will prompt you for next action. It will automatically do a couple of things and get your approval and get the things done and flow into back office. So the there is a seamless transaction, right? We'll talk about what we are going to build next. But basically, in short, we are creating the entire life cycle in Pega in a modern way, which is familiar to the client as well as, you know, it's not something which is drastically different, but we are trying to make it end to end.

Anything that you want to add, Jessica? Yeah. You know, the functions here are not anything wildly different than we do on a day to day basis to service our clients. Um, and most of our clients have a personal bank, and they go and they, you know, walk into the bank, or they go in and they look at their information online.

Um, this isn't something that is available in our industry in a comprehensive way like this, um, client connect. And it was intentional that we named it Client Connect again. It was about us being able to connect with our customer, um, and making sure that they had everything that they need us for at their fingertips.

So not just about self-serve. These folks don't don't have banker's hours. And so they need to be able to get information. Um, they're high volume. They're some of our clients have, you know, 4000 accounts, and they need to be able to take action, um, and, and do things on a day to day basis. This gives them the ability to do that and, and shifts some of what we do as a banker to be able to have those relationships and be more proactive rather than reactive.

And this is a tool for us to be able to do that. On the same lines, right? A very good point, Jessica, on that. Right. Um, so here, if you see what we are trying to do, is, you know, making a beautiful UI, putting it back to the client, giving them everything in one page. Now, most of the clients, you know, you might have bank accounts throughout multiple banks and whatnot, but I don't know any place where you see forex information, your stock information, your account details, your credit card, one in single page.

No, you have to log into multiple systems to get the data. Think about you have multiple accounts. Think about you manage multiple associations. They have multiple homes. They have multiple accounts. And it's a nested data right. You need to have a team to kind of build it for you. Right. But First Citizens is giving it free for an external client.

So like the likability is like huge over there. Jessica, you want to talk anything about, right? The vision to reality. Absolutely. So our journey, um, and this is kind of personal for me because, um, this journey started, um, coincidentally around the time that that I started with First Citizens. So it's transformative, um, for me, but also, um, echoes sort of my, my, my journey with it.

So, we started in 2023 determining how we were going to solve our problem statement connected to our why of of being the best in our industry. Um, and we launched started hard work beginning in January of 24. Um, we launched internally in September of 24, and we essentially built the architecture for our internal back office.

So, um, approximately 65 complex workflows, um, that we built out. And, um, we continue to iterate three week sprints and add to it. It was absolutely disruptive. Um, and I think that our team grew with it, um, in 2025. This year in August, we'll launch our external portal, as Sanjoy showed. Um, and we'll do that in waves across our client base intentionally.

Um, and then there's so much more that we plan to stitch together on the back end to provide integrations for real time access for for our client base. Um, we're really excited because the results have been phenomenal when we started in September. I remember going to an industry conference not not long after that.

And, um, we kept talking about this thing happening, and, um, and it was tough for a couple of months for our associates and our clients. And in January, I went to a conference and people it was a 180. Um, our clients were talking about how much better things were, how much more responsive, how much more they were getting out.

And remember, this is internal only. Um, and then beyond that, our associates have the morale is 180 degrees as well, because they actually feel like they can make a difference, which is enormous. Yeah. I agree to it. And that's a great point. on the same lines, right? If you think it through, if you see the roadmap, it is not.

There is no assumptions there. Like and I don't like anything which has assumptions. Three steps. Step one. Step two. Step X full stop. No. To be continued. Right. That's how we don't operate. Because in that way we cannot grow and we want to grow in the bank. We have we had a roadmap of 2024. We have a roadmap of 2025. We have a roadmap of 2026, full stop enhancement and bio continues. But I don't want to drag the project for ten years down the line. Right. We do have a timeline we need to hit that. We do need to maintain it. We have a patience as a strategy at first citizens. But I'm going to tell you that our associates and our clients aren't that patient.

So, you know, we definitely have to deliver for sure. Yeah. Thank you. Jessica, just one thing. I will definitely mention that, you know, as we are talking about scale, there is a myth that Pega cannot be an external portal. I have seen very less as I've discussed. Right. Our assumption is like 25,000 users.

But you don't know if you grow like crazy, right? Which definitely is hitting a huge point at this point, right? Huge numbers in deposits. But definitely we can go to millions, right? But we are scaling and creating an application for millions of users and an external. So, you know, don't follow the myth, right.

It can be definitely used on external portal. The proof is here. So what is there more in Cap client connect Jessica. So next for Cap Client Connect our onboarding experience. We really want to make that something that is client facing. We want to make it easy. It's it's very difficult for our customers to switch banks.

It takes a lot of effort and a lot of pressure on them. And so it is a differentiator in our market for us to do that in a seamless way. So our onboarding piece is next. Um, obviously client client connect being external um, is next. It's really about driving transparency and connection. Um, there's a lot of other tech here stitching together a lot of the, the different, um, systems, uh, that we have in banking to be able to deliver frontline service to our customers.

Um, those integrations that we're working on right now are going to just shorten our response time and be able to provide things in real time for our clients. Thank you. Jessica. So I'm not going to mention everything, but most of the GenAI capabilities, as you can think it through, right? If you have a back end, front end, everything on Pega, the amount of automation that you can bring, right?

We already have the Blueprint. Uh, sorry. Uh Knowledge Buddy up and ready, like we intend to roll that out once with the AI strategy is being finalized and being published, and we are allowed to go, but the options are endless, right? Where I would see ourselves going in. Right. Because we are there already.

Like, you know, if you see the evolution of AI GenAI I. Agent Aika. What is the difference? I you ask a question, you get it back. GenAI a prompt, right? Everything is prompt. Prompt. Question. Answer. Prompt. Question. Answer. Feedback. Question. Answer. That's where we want to go. What do we want to do is say an example.

You know I'll just give an example not related to the bank. Right. As a generic one, you want to book a vacation in Hawaii, right? So basically you type in I want to book a vacation from this date to this date. Hit enter. It will not only get you the result, but it will find out the best optimal thing, right?

Run the automation goes to the workflows. Find the best available hotel. Find the best available flight. It's going to book everything for you in front of you and just come and say accept or reject. Or if you want to make any changes, right? No. Prompt. Right? Entire entire thread as a seamless. So that's where we want to go. Where the external clients. Right. As we are building the portal for them, anything they need they will just self-service Service, cutting down the, you know, giving best client experience, cutting down your back end office tech burden, cutting down my tech burden. Right. With respect to the technology prospect.

Right. And which gives us enough bandwidth to sustain and grow as a bank. So that's what the vision is. Going to talk about strategic learnings. What what we have learned so far. So sure. So we we went from opening accounts, going through KYC and all the verifications that we needed in an average of 19 days, um, to now we're three days with our goal of being real time.

Um, and so we will deliver that. We're really excited about that. That's that's a huge differentiator in our market. Um, we also went, um, you know, just because of, of those workflows, like I mentioned, the 65 that we put together, um, we went from our, our associates, um, backlog of of work going down almost 80%.

Um, and so obviously that increased morale, um, we have done that with less FTE and more more consistent deliverable for our clients as well. Um, those are just a few. Um, but yeah. Yeah. So that's great. Um, right. And as you, Jessica, as you can see, the KPIs right from with respect to business, but let's come to the tech also.

Right. First thing is, as I told first learning as I've always followed, you need to have the correct team in place, right. First thing. And when I say team, let's start with first the tech team. Right. Just you need to ensure you have capabilities within your house to sustain, manage and with diverse knowledge of people which you can create as a part and deploy into various lines of business.

First thing, you need to have talent in house, right? Talent matters. Second thing, having fantastic business partner. Fortunately, I'm very lucky to have fantastic business partner, network, equipment, finance, cab and other places. You know, I'm lucky. I'm sorry, but. Right? So. Right. Fantastic business partners.

Who has the intention to grow? Intention to scale. Intention to expand. Right. And, you know, work hand in hand with tech. The third thing is, of course, a good provider, a solution or a platform. Unfortunate. Pega is the one, right? Brandon have been supportive on that front as well. So I love the product.

I've been with there for 17 plus years, so I know what it does from day one. The fourth thing is choosing the correct vendor partner. Arun Prasanna and team from nuances have been perfect, right? So we have been collaborating very well and kind of driving the things as we need to do as well as the other business partners and the vendors that we have.

Right. So along with that, the fifth thing is the collaboration between all of them. Right. So that is very important. As you can see, the KPIs we have automated most of. The things right. Let it be creating an incident. Right. So usually what you do if you have. Face any issues in any application you go ahead and call helpdesk.

Create a team. That's what you do right. But we don't do that right. We do it. But the system automatically does it. The applications that we create is integrated. You hit the button, you put your question, hit submit. In the back end, everything happens. Somebody reaches out to you immediately. Right. You need not to go. Ahead and go into a call because that process also we have automated like you get help right then and there. Um we don't run on bugs, right? Trust me, across the business we don't have we don't have bug prioritization meeting. I'm proud to have that. There is no bug prioritization meeting.

There are enhancements meeting. right? Which we are going, but I don't know if something called. Bug prioritization meeting also exists, which I'm not aware at least. From years now. Anything else that you want to add? No. I think that, you know, the experience has challenged our team, has pushed us to deliver the very best for our clients.

One other thing that I might mention, you know, we went from such manual processes as I know many of you have, we're just starting to scratch the surface with the data that we're getting, being able to measure each and every thing and then pivot towards that has has been huge and will continue to be as we evolve, um, our product.

So thank you. We're open for questions. We get a round of applause for our speaker. Okay. Okay. And I very gracefully made it on stage without tripping, which is always a great thing. We do have microphones again in the aisle, so if you want to ask some questions, we've got we got a little more than five minutes.

So come on up. Ask a question. I've got I've got the filler question though, while we wait for people to come. All right. Jessica. If you're going to do something different at the beginning of your journey, what would you do that would be different? So I think along the journey we we've evolved and, um, you know, I think we're pivoting this way, but I would I would urge you to think about where you want to be, not where you are.

Um, and really push yourselves to what good looks like, not where you are. I think we struggled at first to say, this is how we do things. This is how we want to go. Um, and the learning for us was no, um, really imagining the very best of yourselves as you go through the journey. That would be my advice.

Yeah. Yeah. I love the KPIs that you had on the. It was like two slides ago. Some of the things that you were able to do here, the automation work that you're able to accomplish. So you've done three what's going to be the fourth. And we're going to see great numbers like that in your speech next year.

We'll do the crystal ball here and we're going to project what are you going. What are you going to bring us next year, Sanjoy. Um, as you see. Right. Uh, the standards that we have put across, we are bound for success, right? Doing the first step towards the cloud taking initiative. Right. Ensuring we do have kind of a COE model.

We know what basically we are building how we are utilizing it. Right. I'm exploring some other, um, additional softwares and people that are explored, you know, spoke about in the PegaWorld. But, you know, we are bound to be success because we are 100% AI ready and other things we already have in place.

right? There is nothing else that we need to have. But once we have the strategic roadmap being published and we are approved. Go go go. We will just go. So definitely I think next year is going to be huge. We are bringing actually rolling out a huge application for another line of business on 11th of July. Right. And again a date specific date. And we are going to be proud of that. And I think a lot of things coming next year. Yeah. And as again, I work with all the speakers to get ready for this. And I know that they've got a big, um, kind of a strategic decision that's going to be coming through this summer.

And I can't really, you know, point out enough the fact that because they're on Cloud, once the bank makes the decision on what their AI strategy is going to be going forward, their ability to take advantage of all the cool stuff that you saw in the keynotes and in Innovation Hub, is going to be lightning fast because they're already going to be there.

And I really want to encourage people to continue to look at how do I move to the cloud and how do I be in this ever green state of being on the latest so that I can take advantage of the things again, within the construct of what your organizations will allow? Everybody's got a slightly different opinion.

AI is not just one thing. AI is a lot of things. There's the machine learning statistical side. We heard from Rob Walker earlier. Everybody gets that. That's, you know, ten, ten, 15 year old technology. You can take advantage of that. You can do that today. It's not all large language models. Please do not run away screaming just because the word AI is there.

So I want to encourage that. Okay. We got like two more minutes right here in the make sure the mics on. Can you hear me. Yep. You're good by the way. Great presentation and a great story. Congratulations on your success When you started the journey in 2023, what kind of legacy application or legacy data was there?

Or was this a greenfield implementation? Maybe a little of both. We definitely had a bit of a greenfield, but we we had a lot of homegrown applications, um, and that just weren't servicing that were disconnected, um, and weren't part of the enterprise strategy. So. And was that a challenge from a technology implementation standpoint, the legacy that you inherited, uh, prior to 2023?

Um, I would say I'll answer that in a different way. Right. When we first so this was part of a modernization project for CAF. Um, Pega and other softwares are being evaluated. Right. So we when my team went in, we evaluated out what needs to be done what, and we proposed suggestions. And then just, you know, just like that, we found out that a lot of application, as you know it is under attack to take those out.

So we took a bold step to taking something out immediately and some of them taking out on phases. Right. Say an example integrations. Right. As we are all 100% on SaaS and we had all the connectors built in, like any integration, I'll just take some name LexisNexis Iris. If you just go through DocuSign direct to direct connections SaaS to SaaS connections make it work further, we were able to take those out immediately, right?

Any homegrown systems like mainframes kind of stuff, right? You know, Excel sheets and all. We just took it out, right. But, you know, homegrown system. We took out some of them and we intend to retire some of them throughout our journey. And I'll just add that it's been iterative. We have we didn't rip the Band-Aid in every single place.

And that might have, um, been challenging, but it was the right decision in in order to get us ready for each next step. Um, and so I think, again, just the patience of being like, okay, I know where I'm going, but I'm here now. And, uh, layering it in a strategic way. One thing that definitely I'll add there, like, you know, the the technical partners that we partner with, various other systems, I don't own, say, mainframe system in First Citizens Bank, but the technical partners are very supportive.

They understand the growth of the bank. So we work as a cohesive unit for a common cause. It's not more like, you know, can we replace this with this? It's not about that. It's about like what is good for the bank. Where do we see ourselves? Right. We are top 13, Bank of the US and soon will be in top five, right?

It's my personal assumption, you know, that there's nothing from my employer. Okay. No M&A that you're hinting at. Yeah. Well, thank you so much. All right. If we could get one more big round of applause to thank our speakers. Thank you.