PegaWorld 2026: First Citizens Bank: Turning Data into Decisions, Collections into Connections

To tell you a little bit about First Citizens Bank. We're the largest family controlled bank in the United States. We've been around for 126 years. We have over 17,000 employees. We go coast to coast supporting business, commercial and wealth clients and help them build financing that lasts for Citizens Bank has been through a period of transformation. First, we acquired CIT Bank, which is where we started our journey with Pega, and we'll share more about that. And then we acquired Silicon Valley Bank, which has allowed us to grow our personalized lending, leasing and other financing solutions. And we have expanded our Pega platform to different segments. Last year, Jessica and Sanjoy told you about the success our cab bank had with rolling out their external external customer portal and putting that business on the Pega platform. They experienced excellent growth as a result of it. We also have Pega in our equipment finance division, which I'm going to tell you about, our enterprise fraud, Corporate complaints and accounts payable system.

I represent our equipment finance division. I'm the operations director and Sanjoy is the head of our automation, robotics and process flows. Let me tell you a little bit about equipment finance. We offer customized, customized financing solutions across different equipment markets to commercial customers. With that comes a level of complexity. We oftentimes say we have a tri party agreement. We have obviously our contracts with our end users, but we also support multiple different dealer structures across the United States. We have large enterprise dealers, smaller agriculture dealers. So we have to have a level of complexity when it comes to how we service our customers. Um, you know, whereas a lot of consumers will go to a car dealership to get leasing or financing structures, and maybe they just want, you know, three months of no payments. What our associates have to deal with is when a customer calls in, we don't know if it's our municipality, customers looking to finance laptops or if it's one of our agriculture customers that wanted to finance a harvester.

The agricultural customers have different needs than our municipality customers. So a day in the life of our associates prior to Pega is they would get the call. They'd have to open it up through our IVR technology. Then they would have to pivot to the contract repository, pull down SharePoint so they know which forms that they're dealing with, open up the general ledger system and so on and so forth. It was likely at least six applications they were touching to open up and just generate a payment letter and then send that out to the customers via outlook. Um, with that, the transformation we have made with Pega has been remarkable. What we needed was a scalable solution so we could continually service our customers. I want to tell you a little bit about our journey with Pega. Back in 2019, we introduced Pega 7.1, which established the foundation and automated workflows.

I remember sitting in the conference room when we made the Pega selection with Lilian and some of my other counterparts. We were wowed by the low code functionality that Pega offered, and we knew that would be scalable for us. We established the framework in 2018. You know, we had a lot of discovery during that time, and then we actively had to shift, as did all pretty much financial institutions when the pandemic hit. Luckily, at that time, we had installed all the email bot Listeners establish the document governance so that when we had to begin to stand up our PGP program in a matter of weeks, we were able to do that. We started under our SDLC. We were able to deploy code every couple of days. We established our DocuSign. We were able to route emails based on criticality during the PGP, as well as establish email campaigns to help our customers out during that period.

Sandra, is there anything you want to add during that time frame? You covered most? But what I would go ahead and say is even though everybody was there within a closed silo home during the Covid time, we delivered a lot, right? And each and everything that we had to deliver was very time sensitive. So I don't think, you know, any other tool would have would have done the same thing. What do you think, Justine? I agree, like at some, I will say like some points, you know, when it was right in front of us and we were trying to determine how we were going to reach out to our customers, we had people suggesting we'll just do mail merges and send it out via email. And luckily we were able to raise our hands and say, wait a second, we have a tool that can automate and track for you, which it's still great because with, you know, even now, this many years later, sometimes we have to reference back to those cases.

And through the case management, we have a full artifact, but we came out of the pandemic. And then in 2022, we were Citi Bank at the time, and we were proud to be acquired by First Citizens Bank. Well, then became the work of rebranding to the esteemed First Citizens Bank name. So luckily for the business, our tech partners were able to handle the rebranding through the low code technology. We had numerous emails that had to be rebranded as well as contract documents, but luckily you all handled most of the lift and it went very smooth. And for us, we just had to regression test. So as a business, we were very thankful to have Pega and our technology team support us during that time. We came out of that. Those two periods of 2020 and 2022 really establish Pega as a premier tool within First Citizens Bank.

So coming out of that, we were ready to reinvest in ourselves, and that's when we looked to Pega. We delivered 100 workflows and enhancements, over 100 workflows and enhancements in 2023, and really started building out those tasks and automations that we had to carry over from 2018. And then when we reflected at the success we had, we it came time to choose a collections platform. So we went, we had our success with Pega, but we also wanted to go out and interview in the market. And we came back to the same decision that Pega was the right choice. And that's when we began the work of launching our Pega equipment finance, servicing and collections platform. Is there anything you want to add or? No, I think as you told, we compared with a lot of lot of applications. But during my slide I'll talk about why we chose Pega on that, like from the technical side.

Um, but yeah, I think I still think, you know, if you ask me today, tomorrow, the answer is going to be same. Mhm. Um, so it's always fun. I mean, not many people get to work on a project for ten years. So two things remain the same. We love Pega and we believe in it. And also we still really love balloon arches, I can tell, but I will I will always remember that day. Back in 2018, I was so excited for the Pega launch. I drove ten hours straight to be here, fueled on excitement of Pega and caffeine, only stopping once from Washington DC down to Jacksonville. But it's great to continually build on this project. Now, I'm going to let Sanjoy tell you about how we combined all our multiple tech stacks into one unified, unified platform for our customer service and collections associates.

Sure. Thank you Justine. First of all, and thanks for a wonderful, wonderful partner, UN team. Throughout the years that has helped us a lot. Um, and explaining the business side of the use case to the audience. It was great. And at least at the last, passing the ball to the tech partner or the technology guy. Um, I would say that I'll try to keep the, the architecture discussions light. I'll try. Okay. Uh, the slide might not seem much, but I'll try to keep it light. Um, so let's think about this, right? And I'll try to make this slide visually appealing and kind of explain what I mean by this. First thing, the slide that is here was created in January February. And we worked through this. And this literally ties back to the two sessions that we had the keynote of yesterday and today. How it ties back to the same thought and again, revalidates, that whatever we were thinking, the way that we are going is the exact way the Platform is going on the same route, and also validating that the entire market is also following the same thread.

So I'm thankful that till now I don't see anything that I would have changed. Let's assume you have a collections agent, the collection agent, which knows each and everything, not each and everything in terms of the script, but the person who knows what are the clients, how they perform, what are the different things that happen throughout the journey, how to handle something which falls off the entire life cycle of it. Trust me, you will have that person or that set of persons within each and every team. But the problem is that if he retires, the brain doesn't scale. And that's why we have the CDH. We'll keep this aside. Let's move to the next use case. Everybody uses Netflix. When you log in for the first time in Netflix, you click some arbitrary or you know, something which is maybe not a not of your job comes up, you click on that, you click next day, couple of days, and after a week or so you get tailored recommendations for you personalized.

That's how it works. So first we spoke about the brain and scaling. The second thing we spoke about the personalization. Now let's connect this together to a scenario. And then I'm going to explain you what is experience layer, decisioning layer and automation layer. And you will see how this fits in very, very closely. So an example you go to the beach, right? I'll be going Hawaii next year, next month. So I'm trying to relate towards that. So you go to the beach and you will see some people are snorkeling, some people are playing volleyball. Some people might be, you know, having some drink over a bar. So that is the first thing. That is the sense first you see. That means you experience. Then you decide, okay, what you want to do, right? You want to walk through the beach, you want to go snorkeling, you want to play volleyball or x, y, z.

That means at that point of time, you decide. And the next piece is you go and perform that. That is nothing but the automation, the third layer. So if how we have built this stack from day one is we have created multiple experience layers. We do have almost all the frameworks, if not all, most of them within our bank. Right? And we have tuned those frameworks with respect to FCB, FCB, and those are very reusable. So that that creates your main experience layer, right. What do you see and sense? Second thing, as I told, we took the CDH out. Of course, we have a long journey on the CDH piece. We have just got started. But the idea is to create the decisioning layer the same thing today. Alan and other tools in the call. Right. You know, you need to have the decisioning each and everything, you know, being V.tal being in the middle because each and everything, you don't want to hit the tokens and get the cost right.

No tokens, no prompts. And third thing is on top of decisioning. If you need an RPA or hitting AI or hitting any models within your bank, then basically you need the third layer. So this is how we have structured in case this thing is not needed. We skip that level, take that out from the application stack. And directly we have experienced layer and automation layer or experience layer and decisioning layer or just an vanilla experience layer, right. Beyond the experience layer, the fundamentals of course is the Pega rules. I think, you know, that's how we have done. And as I've told you this, this is the thought process. I think, you know, everybody is kind of following through. And this we have thought about this way, way early and how we have structured this. And that's why we are able to proceed or execute any project on very fast pace.

And also with, uh, quite, quite amount of accuracy. Do you want to talk about a couple of the screenshots that we have? Yes. We wanted to show you what we've put in production. And what's important to note is that we've created this scalable to all of our teams. So right now we're taking a look at the manager view. And when you look at the top of the frame, you see the flash cards. So we've customized this for each one of our teams. What is important for that management team to see what's going on with their teams. Then we prioritize call list complaints, upcoming payments and pending approvals. This is where we use the data analytics to present what is important to our team members. But some of the results we've seen as related to this through utilizing the out-of-the-box automated Dunning capabilities of Pega, we've seen a reduction of a minute and 37 seconds in our email campaigns out to the customer through collections.

We have a single pane of glass now for skip tracing and phone payments. Those were two additional applications that I didn't cover before that we would have to pivot to, and we've reduced our Henry Hale average handling time for collections by five minutes as a result of some of those changes. And then most impressively, I think one of the proudest things we did with this project was the workflow design and the case management for our repossession and recovery departments. You using the Pega data flows, we were able to eliminate 40 minutes of data entry per case. And the case flows from our collections team if we're unable to cure it. It follows the appropriate paths through repossession, built in full controls with the collateral management team, as well as going to the recovery departments. But what you see is a full case management. Within one of those cases, you can see the full journey that case took.

Before you move on. Justin, I want to add one thing because this is very good in terms of technical perspective. Sometimes we have a notion that I know Pega cannot be a reporting tool, reporting tool, so forth. But if you see this screen and this is live, there's a lot of data into it. It is not only the work basket and work listing. You see the numbers on the top, which basically pulls the data. This is real, real time data, right? And we do have a lot dashboard like this, which pulls the number, shows the number, shows the KPI so that you have the things right in front of you. Right. And to do that, it is not an easy job. It's I'm not saying that we have mastered it, but we have quite gone to the perfection where we can really display the real time KPIs by using Process Fabric.

Okay, so I just wanted to and data fabric as well. So, so in short, even though, as Justine told, it holds a lot of value to business, but getting is done was not easy. And we have made this as a reusable component throughout. So it is like a plug and play. It is. So this is the agent or this is the screen our customer service and other associates see when they log into Pega. And what we utilize on this is we have the Customer Decision Hub in the lower right hand corner, and we have our email panes on the left hand side as well as I pulled up an example of credit card payment. But this is all. All the information that the associate needs to see for whatever department they're working in is represented here. We talked about the different dealers we support. We support a lot of white label products as well.

So we have built in the automation where the associates don't need to think about what white label program they're supporting. We've built that all through automation. So that's one less click that they have to take. All the customer information is there in the mid lower part of the screen. You can't really see it here, but we have all the different 360 journeys. So if somebody from the collateral management team needs to take a look at this case, they can target in on the key information that they need. But what are the benefits that we've seen from this? We've seen next best action has helped reduce our average handling time by 20%. The credit card process is one component that has increased our average or I'm sorry, reduced our average speed of answer by 50% and not our knowledge management tool. Our new hire training has been reduced by 20%.

But what's important to think about with our training is it's evolved. We have really been looking at how we hire different types of employees. Now, you know, before, you know, we needed somebody that could pivot to all these systems, you know, analyze the data. Now we are hiring more. Um, we're hiring based on empathetic skills. We want people that can connect with the customer through our training program. Now we focus more on role play and situational, um, opportunities versus click here or there or there. And then also we enforce our nice principles within our agents. So we want them to notice the customer interact, care, um, and execute with them. So we've been able to refocus our training as a result of the Pega tool. Also see. Most importantly, same day case resolution has increased by 44%. So that's fantastic. We're looking at refining our operations for the future.

Like Sanjay said, we worked on this slide in January. We're well within this journey, but we are in the process of beginning our work to extend our the Pega process Salesforce Lightning connector. So our originations platform is based on Salesforce. So we're going to create, we're going to take 26 existing Pega cases and expose them in the Salesforce platform. We want a full omnichannel experience for our front and back end offices. We're going to create work lifts, work lists, and work queues for them in Salesforce, but that utilize the Pega technology. We integrated five nine in May, just last month. And so now the team members are able to handle the call. Answer call, transfer and call wrap right within the Pega um frame. No more going to five nine. And we're excited to be expanding that in the future when we begin, uh, enabling the Pega.

AI. So we have a lot of plans for that. Lillian's very excited. And finally, ah, the last plan for late 2026 is creating an external portal just like what cab did. And we want to expose a marketing portal for our assets. And that will then follow an omnichannel experience to the back end office. So that's some of what we have plans for. Pega. Yeah. Um, one thing that I would definitely want to add here is right, there is a famous quote, and I think most of you know, there is an issue called swivel chair problem. And we are trying to solve it by Pega right down the line we have identified which are the applications which needs to stay, which needs to come in together. So we don't want to make the swivel chair problem at the back office so that the people is kind of moving towards multiple application.

And that's why, as Justin told right, connecting the Salesforce Knowledge Hub is there. CDH is there customers, you know, email is by default, even Knowledge Buddy and everything we are integrating, right? Remarketing portal. Also, you can go by multiple ways. It's an external portal. Like you can create a dotnet Java or you know, even you can just buy something from outside and go forward. But again, we are trying to make a closed ecosystem so that we can utilize the Pega better, the AI functionalities that is coming in, which I'll show next better. And we can use the full leverage of the entire ecosystem. That's what it matters. Before I move to the AI slide, and this is very important, let's take a step back. Okay. Any regulators for any financial industries, if first thing they come and see an action done by AI. If we cannot explain why and how your case gets dropped then and there, unless and until you are able to explain an AI action how and why with proper audits, there is a problem.

And that's why I think, you know, Pega plays a very important role in terms of the orchestrating that entire piece. So that is the first thing. Um, we have been bit cautious on the AI piece. Like, you know, we, we have submitted all the use case and provided we get all the approvals, everything is already stacked up in ranking to go ahead and execute. Um, so all, all of this AI initiative needs to go through a proper approval channel and why it is. I will try to explain. Assume that we have roads and we have cars. Everybody gets a car, but in the road there is no traffic lights. There is no traffic signs. There are no lanes. Everybody got a car. I would love, love it. Right. Office in five minutes. Back to home in five minutes. But F1 like F1, right? But the problem is everybody will have the same feeling, isn't it?

Like everybody, everybody will sing the same. But if there is no controls and standards, then it is wild wild West. Unfortunately, in today's era, AI runs faster than governance. It might be sounding too process heavy or governance heavy, but down the line, the governance and standards needs to match with the speed of AI. If not, you know more than that. Like you know it should be well ahead actually. So that's why we have been very cautious. We have a process, right? Once we have approved this, then we will go through this. But how I am thinking about the stack is, as we have shown you, like you know, the three layers that we have done. And the last one is the automation layer. We are thinking, right, to have most of the capabilities of Pega provided out of the box to be into the system.

That is definitely we have in the plans, if not all, but also we intend to like we are on 25.1. So we have been always latest and you know, on Cloud. And that's the one thing that we always follow. And I was having a discussion yesterday, like we will be going with 26.1. Whatever is comes up ASAP whenever it gets released and whatnot. And if it needs to be better, then it's a better version as well. The reason being is there like we would like to do it in the right way. We would like to go ahead and stand up the MCP. Right? And then basically, you know, let the MCP two MCP talk and take the request and then, you know, hit to any LLM providers, which is being needed, Whatever is being approved by the bank so that you have the entire foundation of your Pega GenAI you have your MCP, your MCP talks to another MCP or any rest API that is coming through, and then your MCP basically, you know, translate and cause it to, to any of the LLM providers, whatever your choice or, you know, if you are going with the Pega provided LLM provider, that's fine too.

But in this way, what will happen is the entire stack is ready, right? You have the, you know, the core foundation of the framework. You have the CDH, you have the execution layer and you have the automation layer. Now in automation layer, also, you have two, two options. So there is no way you can go wrong, right? We might be a bit slow on that. I think I think everybody is everybody is being cautious to go ahead. But I think, you know, late 2026, early 2027 is going to be great. And, you know, as as each and everything will not hit the LLM LLM will have a lot of, uh, opportunities to really show the value. Okay. And again, the thing is that each and everything needs not to go through the LLM provider. Um, so, so that is something which you have already thought through and thanks got like, everybody is kind of thinking the same thing.

So again, which validates that whatever we thought, however we are planning to execute it is coming in the same way. Maybe it's having a bit of delay, but you know, the structure and the stack, we are going ahead with the same thing. Um, Justine, why don't you start and, you know, speak about, uh, some of the learnings that we can share? Yes. Like we said, we've been on this journey for a while and it's been a, it's been a discovery. And we've gotten, we've had some bumps along the way, but now we feel with the Pega surfacing collections first phase under our belt, and now we're actively almost ramping to the end of our second phase of this. Um, you know, we don't, we treat Pega as a platform, not just closing out one project and moving to the next. We're constantly evaluating where we're at with the journey, what our critical needs are, and developing and analyzing what's in our backlog and what the needs of the business are.

So it's an ongoing journey. You know, we're already ramping up, like I said, finishing up phase two, getting ready to launch phase three. Um, we have brought in encase in-house capability that's been crucial for us. So I'm pleased to have some of my equipment finance colleagues here, Lillian Starr and Amy Tate, who have been on the journey for a very long time with me. And then Melissa Peterson and Christian Soliano, they are new to the team. They've been on the project less than 12 months, and they have been critical. We've been able to utilize them, um, into different areas of operations. So while their background is collections and collateral management, they've gone and helped out our Insurance teams, our premier client group. So having them understand the scalability of Pega, the flash cards and what the 360 view has been about. They can go in and help those teams customize what they need.

Um, and then also, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention our wonderful partner Arvensis. They've been key to our journey and our success. They understand our data flows, what our structure is. And that's been amazingly helpful to us. Do you want to add? Yeah. Definitely. I cannot be again, right. As I will of course start with with the business. I don't know, I'm being very lucky to get wonderful business partners and that helps. I don't know, I'm lucky on that. But, um, that helps us a lot to execute the way that we, we want to, we have this, you know, trust on that fantastic business partners from Pega as well. They have been supporting a lot. Right. Chris and his team have been fantastic on that, right. In terms of Brendan and others, right. As you told, I totally, you know, wants us have been strategic in terms of the implementation as well.

Um, one thing that I will share on that is, strategy and implementation, right? Sometimes it is like, you know, very easy to paint a strategy, right? And, you know, there is another team which does the implementation and you paint a strategy and then you basically pass it off and the implementation is not done correctly, then it's the wrong thing. If you think the other way, the strategy is wrong. Execution is fine, right? That also doesn't work in the way. But both needs to. Strategy and execution needs to have a proper handoff. So we have found a operating model that actually we are moving ahead and you know, kind of working fine where the strategy people will execute something before passing it to the implementation. It's not just the the facts go ahead and execute in this way. This is the document. Just follow. It doesn't work in that way.

Right? Because the thought process needs to match. And, you know, the person who is creating the strategy needs to be having an accountability as well. And the strategy is so important because our goal is to unify and no longer be fragmented. A little bit more about our journey is we're in the process of modernizing Multiple applications, a general ledger. We're going from three different originations platforms down to one. And we want front end and back end to speak through the Pega Salesforce connector. So it's critical that we have the team members that understand the long term journey, and we're writing requirements that will take us from the originations platform, hit our general ledger, which is our ultimate book of records through Pega and have that constant communication loop. So whatever group you're in, you know where a contract stands within First Citizens Bank. Absolutely. The only thing that we are missing, and as I think you know, is just the AI piece.

Once we get the approvals and get that added, I don't think anything else that we need across across the entire ecosystem of the platform. Right. And I would definitely want to thank my technical team. They are fundamentally strong. Everybody is so focused. And again, I don't want to just take one names, but they have been so supportive. And you know, everybody is putting their hard work. Everybody has that knowledge. But without my technical team, I would not. They would not have even able to deliver that as well. So yeah, and I thank you for all the support you have provided for the business. I mean, Andrew and I started working back right around the pandemic time very closely and to see where we've come over the last eight years, it has been quite remarkable and we are so excited for the future. I mean, it keeps me happily coming to work every day, getting help build this platform with the other users in our organization.

And we're proud to keep delivering Pega equipment finance platform. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And again, right. I'm thankful for the partnership. One thing that I would say from the technical standpoint of view in today's era, you need to be a bit faster and aggressive to be very honest, to keep up with the AI and everything, right? Because there is there is always a question around where does workflow RPA and AI stands, right? That that you know, where it is going in the next five years. So that's what I'm saying, right? You know, you need to execute a bit faster. Bit aggressive whereas realistic also. But again, if you are stuck with the process process process, I don't think it's happening then. Right. You need to be aggressive to, to deliver something. And you know, we are partnered with business to get the things done, whatever they need.

Yeah, I think we are good and we have some time back. So definitely want to take questions. Um, and pass the ball to Scott. Thank you. Can we give Justine and Sanjoy a round of applause. So I'm going to take credit for the fact that Pega makes her happy coming to work every day. That's I love hearing that from our clients. Oh, I love I'm happy to come to work today. It's because of the technology. Yeah. No. Not exactly. Okay. Great partnership. We love that. Q and A, I think you've probably seen this. If you've been to some breakout sessions, we want you to ask questions. That's part of what makes PegaWorld interesting and different. So we have microphones in the aisle. I'm not going to take hands. You walk up to the microphone, you ask your question. I'll kind of like space you out so people aren't talking if I can see.

Um, so that people aren't talking over each other. So I'm going to let the gentleman over here who got my eyesight fastest. Go ahead. Hello? Was this on? You're on. You're good. Okay. So thanks for sharing the story. Uh, I'm. My name is Shiraz. I work in the Toyota as a product manager on Pega site as well. But I want to understand, considering, uh, you're using Pega with AWS some some kind of cloud provider, not on, on premises. So in that scenario, what was the enterprise guardrails for the data security moving from your in-house to going to the cloud? And I want to understand that from the technical perspective. And the second question that I have is when we have, um, when we talk about AI and even today in the keynotes as well, it was mentioned that we need to, when we talk about using AI, we need to identify some specific resource who can work on it and deliver some outcome.

And listening to you, you are more optimistic into just go and figure it out. And then we will see what what happens next. I want to understand your perspective, why you think that, um, just going and taking the first step and then figuring out, okay, what will happen. I want to understand both sides. Thank you. Um great question. I'll break this into two because there was like, no easy for me to answer. Uh, first we'll talk about the cloud and the data piece. So first thing is when we were starting in 2027, we had everybody off. I think most of us from technically have worked on on prem. And that was the time when SaaS was becoming more right, intuitive and lucrative and whatnot. We had an option, fortunately, because we were starting fresh, fresh from the scratch. What we choose. Um, I don't think we had enough expertise.

If we have to flip back to on prem would have done that because we implemented this like in multiple other areas. But fortunately that time, you know, our mindset was more around cost savings, support light, that kind of thought process. So we went ahead with the cloud in terms of the data in Pega, the beautiful thing that we did from the day one is we don't store data. So we have created that Process Fabric, if you will, right? In the data fabric, which basically pulls the data, processes the data, and we don't maintain anything, right? Hardly. There is some data that is kind of stored in Pega and even attachments. We wipe it out and move it to some other platform emails. We wipe it out and move it on the other platform. When you click on it, it pulls back and kind of downloads.

So from the data perspective, we got a green. Go go go. Right. We got all the approvals in place. Because if you are not doing anything on the Pega, then there was no concern. Much, much. We did the implementation of the processing payments and everything whatnot, but we used SDK. We didn't create any custom connectors and whatnot. Right. So as you go ahead and use the SDK directly, your PII and all those things falls on the SDK. We don't customize that screen that is again, hosted by a vendor and they take accountability of that. So everything is kind of thought through as of now, right? The short answer is on the database. We don't store anything on that. Coming to your question about being optimistic and being first, I think we need to be optimistic for sure. Right. Being first and taking some aggressive approach towards any new model in a limited capacity is fine.

So when we say we will go ahead and upgrade it, that doesn't mean we will go ahead and start upgrading in the dev, right? Pega is very, very supportive in this. You know, we can ask for a clone environment immediately, this copy or dev or StG to clone environment and they give you right. You update to the latest version. And then basically you see whether you really need it or not. Um, so we follow that approach and, you know, unfortunately, we have created a model, uh, where any upgrades, we don't have a upgrade project, trust me on this one. Like we don't have any project where we say, you know, we need funding for this to do an upgrade. So like, we just do it because we know the art to do it. Um, and I think, uh, again, limited risk is fine. Getting too far behind the version is also not good.

Then basically you don't reap the benefits out of it. Okay. But again, I think it's case by case. I would definitely want, uh, you know, people to judge it based on their use cases. But definitely I'm being optimistic on, on these pieces. Thank you. Okay. I saw two people run to the mic over there. You guys have to arm wrestle. Who goes next? Congratulations on your seven year journey. Come to eight years with Pega. Um, a little closer to the mic so everybody can hear you. Can you hear. Me? Yeah. You're good. Yeah. Thank you. Um, curious to know, uh, what was the journey in terms of internal approval and what was the point when you thought that the results of the tool spoke for themselves? Um, in these seven years, I assume that, like the beginning, you need to gain some internal buy in.

And, um, maybe at the beginning the results weren't as expected. Like financial results take time to mature. So how long do you think it took to get to that point where, like everyone was on board and the results speak for themselves? Um, I'll be honest, 2018, when we first released, we were establishing the framework in all the email listeners, and we had just a couple of cases built for automation. So that was our discovery period. It really wasn't until we Got through again. I mean, the the pandemic was very eye opening for us with Pega as a tool because, you know, we needed to make the changes we could, you know, immediately to support the programs. Um, and then once we got through the rebranding and it came time to have the discussion with collections, I will be honest, it wasn't immediate, like we're going to go straight to Pega, but we had to prove the work and the benefits we, we'd seen from those 100 enhancements and automations that we had delivered just to get the ask to go through the RFP process and establish Pega as the right choice.

But, you know, we have a good recipe for how we develop. I mean, we're constantly looking at data to know which cases we're going to target next for automation. Um, so we're, we're seeing benefits with every iterative agile release now. Thank you. Hi. Interesting conversation, Justine and Sanjay. Thank you very much myself. Rashid. I'm here from Emirates NBD, National Bank of Dubai, from the UAE. We lead the Pega CDH practice there, the decisioning practice. Uh, unfortunately, that is the only Pega thing which we lead over there. There is no other Pega system which is there inside our organization. And this whole Pega CDH also was brought in maybe like two years back or something. So it's like a startup inside an MNC in adjusting our architecture, our Pega thing to the way the enterprise wants. So I have two questions, mainly for Sanjay. Basically the three layered architecture which you showed us.

Unfortunately, only the decisioning layer is there with us. The other two layers are not there with us, and it comes from the legacy system. So as a decisioning mature bank, or is there any kind of a platform maturity score or something like sum. These many percentage of campaigns should go via the decisioning route on 3040 percentage of campaigns can go through the spray and pray route, or any filtered route or rule based route. The remaining 60 percentage should go on for decision. If you ask me, how many percentage of campaigns hardly 95% still go through the legacy system? 5%. We try to control it through the decisioning practice. How much would it be in your, uh, in percentage terms, and how much would be the ideal percentage terms to say it as a Platform mature thing? So that would be my first question. The second question, as I said, like, again, unfortunately, we are the only Pega system practice on the decisioning side.

So we don't have that liberty or freedom of using the Pega customer experience or the Pega KYC or any other kind of Pega system. So are we missing out on anything on the data flows or something? Obviously you will say yes, but I don't have the freedom to make our MNCs to go back to the Pega system. So what are the exact things which we are missing out if we don't use those Pegasystems? And how can we tackle that in a simple way? Because if you say that me to me that you have to do it based on that system, I cannot do that. I don't have the liberty to take those systems. So what am I missing? These two options. I'll take, I'll try to take a quick shot and definitely we can discuss further. So first, to answer your question, you can if you are not routing all the campaigns and everything with CDH and just doing five and 10%, then I don't think there is.

You are getting the value out of it unless you pass the data, get the KPIs, get the reports right. There is no value. So if you are just using for 10 or 15%, to be very honest, right? I don't know, right. In this scenario, right. I would not prefer, right. I would definitely push to push that more than 50% or so, because down the line, CDH is not only about, you know, unless you push the data, push the process, put number of, unless you grow that and scale it to a higher number, you do not really see any value. Okay. You are just showcasing CDH. But there is very less, right? Output of that right. You can get money out of that. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So that that is the question. Right. That is my take on that. And the second piece is in my previous companies, right?

Like, you know, past to past company, I have used Pega. We created the front end was entire Java and Angular, and there are use cases where the front end is angular Pega and the front end works by the APIs, and it just works as a case. Option one. Option two the front end is just Pega, but the back end is not at all Pega right? That also I have seen. And now the third option comes into the picture, which is in terms of AI, you make Pega as a MCP like, you know, let it be cortex or uh, Amazon bedrock doesn't matter, right? So that can also be possible. So I don't think you are losing it out. Right. We we did the angular component with react and, you know, AngularJS, NodeJS and all those things in the front end because we wanted a very, very sleek UI.

And that time Pega was not so good, unfortunately, on the UI UI piece until they launched Constellation. And now you have JNI functionality is coming to improvise the UI. So I think we are getting better. But if something is like you need to have like a gaming thing, something of that sort, like, which needs to be flashy, something needs to flower up and whatnot, then I think the front end can change, but both the options are fine. Pega is very strong on the back end. Right front end can be replaced, but if you are not using Pega back end, I don't think it is. There is no point. Awesome. I appreciate the questions, I really do. We are at time and actually the last session is coming in, so if we could give one more round of applause to Justine and Sanjoy.