Citizens: Innovating Corporate Banking Experiences

Joseph Drambarean:
Welcome to Fintech Corner. We’re here at AFP. Once again, I’m Joseph Drambarean, your host, one of many hosts actually this year. And I’m joined by Matt Richardson from Citizens. Thank you so much for joining us. 

Matt Richardson:
Happy to be here Joseph.

Joseph Drambarean:
I don’t want to say I picked you up off the floor, but I guess maybe you just did stumble into our booth, and we thought, hey, what if we talk a little bit about next-gen user experience in banking and what that world looks like? So I appreciate you coming on.

Matt Richardson:
Thank you guys for having me. 

Joseph Drambarean:
What I was hoping we could start with is maybe you give a little bit of background of maybe your role at Citizens and how that kind of overlaps with this topic of how you have been thinking about the next generation of user experience. We’re surrounded by so many, if you want to call them, thesis players in this space. And how do you think about that specifically?

Matt Richardson:
So I am the head of the product management group within the treasury management group at Citizens. So we’re on the corporate bank side, working with corporate banking clients, and I look after not only the payables and receivables products, but also how our customers connect with us and how they get information about all of their transactions, how they can access and leverage that data. And it’s been a huge point of interest and innovation for us because in my view, that landscape is changing dramatically.

Joseph Drambarean:
Absolutely. We are surrounded by so many different solutions that are all vying for the attention, but also the practice, if you will, in the treasury space. How do you see kind of… the software that is available in the market versus the software that is brought to bear in the Citizens portal? Is there adjacency? Is there overlap? How do you see that kind of progressing?

Matt Richardson:
Well, I think the traditional approach that banks have, banks and their corporate customers, our corporate customers have used and been comfortable with for a long time is the corporates go to the bank’s portal. And then there’s always been the traditional sort of software-based TMS providers as well. But the primary goal of the banks over the years has been to drive customers to our portal.

So I think what’s changing a bit is, first of all, commercial banks tend to be a little bit siloed. We all sort of know that, right? There’s lots of different parts of a commercial bank, and many times they have their own fit-for-purpose application. This one might do foreign exchange. This one might do international trade. This one might do commercial cards, and this one might do general cash management. Right. So that’s four different things already.

So we’re seeing a couple of things start to change. First off, customers don’t want to deal with those four different things. They want to deal with one thing and request politely that the bank kind of deal with their silos behind the scenes. So that’s one thing. But the other thing, and I think this is a very important shift, is customers might say, “Look, I don’t really want to work in your portals at all. I want to work in our portal. I want to work in our ERP or our TMS system, and I want you to be able to accommodate that as a bank.” So that whole move more to open banking and being sort of portal agnostic is… we have to be ready to meet our customers there.

Joseph Drambarean:
Right. And it’s part of the portability of their data that is also kind of playing into all of this. Coinciding with a lot of these developments is the actual data transformations of a lot of these organizations where they are starting to bring on more cloud-based offerings. They’re bringing more things in-house in terms of application development, maybe customizing their experience. And I think it’s always been interesting to see how do the banks react to that, right? Especially when it comes to the surfaces that you’re talking about, whether it’s product-specific surfaces, digital experience that’s involved there, and how do you create consistency across all these different areas? From a customer perspective, it kind of just sounds like, “I just want it all to work.” and, “I don’t want to have to, you know, spend a year or two implementing all these things, only then to redo it again, because something changed or because there’s a compatibility issue.”

Matt Richardson:
And you and I have chatted about it. It’s important to us at the core of a treasury management offering. Is fairly… is well defined. Right? In every bank, you know, we’re here at the AFP conference, and every bank here does a lot of the same things we do from a core perspective or a standard product set perspective. But what we think is really important is how can we go out a little bit on the value chain and continue to find value-added services that our customers want and they would buy from us as their trusted banking partner if we offered them.

So I kind of refer to it as our marketplace concept, but that’s what really interests me. I’m on the lookout for partners that are best in class in their space, are creative, are innovative, and are flexible, and could meet a need for our clients without requiring me to build it from scratch when someone is out there in the market who’s already done a really good job of that. And I think the way you guys look at the market in a more modern way is interesting. You guys are cloud-based, you’re API-driven, and you want to take some of the load off of your users by making some connections. And I think that approach is important.

Joseph Drambarean:
Yeah, the modernity approach is not just for the sake of using the word, it’s… we see so many of our customers, especially on the consumer side of the …equation, being able to enjoy services that are plug-and-play. When it comes to setting up an integration or a service that is important to their life, even in their consumer banking world, everything is so easy. Everything is really self-serve from an end-user experience perspective.

The first thing that a lot of these customers think about when they go through that data transformation strategy is, “Why can’t my personal experiences with consumer products be the same in enterprise?” And the answer is, there isn’t a really good reason. It’s mostly a bunch of bad reasons.

Matt Richardson:
And a lot of legacy reasons.

Joseph Drambarean:
Exactly. The exciting part of modernity when you bring it to the customer experience is that it’s so mind-blowing in the context of enterprise when it does all just work, right? From an API perspective, one of the easiest things to accomplish with APIs is that because they’re prebuilt and because they have a pathway to connecting quickly, customers can get up and running instead of within months or worst-case scenario, in a year—in days, maybe even an hour, right? In the best cases. 

Matt Richardson:
Much lighter tech integration, much less tech effort on the client. Versus sort of legacy software-based applications. And for us, the API availability cuts both ways, because we can use data or information or experiences that our partners can provide the API in our experience. So we absolutely would still like our customers to use our experience when that works for them. And the APIs that we can port in information are incredibly important. And then on the flip side, if the customer would choose to bring the information into a different experience, those APIs are incredibly important, to your point, to be able to set up quickly, easily without making it a massive project.

Joseph Drambarean:
I love this marketplace concept. It actually reminds me of Amazon Web Services. Amazon, when they rolled out AWS, the initial strategy was “Conquer.” Right? It was, “We have databases, we have cloud containers, we have networking. Use us, and we’ll just solve all the problems for you.” Eventually, though, they started to realize that there were great vendors out there that, they specialize in security. They specialize in maybe visualization and analytics. They specialize in plug and play databases that make it lot easier to stand up for IT teams that maybe they don’t have the engineering experience to do all of the things that you need to do in AWS.

And so they rolled out a marketplace, right? Where you stay within their ecosystem, you purchase software really through your AWS account, but it’s all kind of vetted by Amazon and it’s integrated in a way that makes it as close to plug and play as you could imagine, right? Within an environment like that. To shift that to your concept, do you see citizens becoming a platform?

Matt Richardson:
Yes, in a way with flexibility. What we really want is to be able to offer our clients these ideas. Maybe they’re already thinking about them or maybe they’re not. And if the case is that they’re not, we can explain what the benefit is and try to move them along the decision making path. Or if they already are, we can kind of say to your point, look, we agree with you, know, solution X is an important solution for corporates like you. We’ve gone through a very rigorous process to vet who we think are the best in class players for a variety of different solutions and we’d like you to take a look at this. And it does, so it can really help a client in terms of all of us struggle with having too many vendors, right? So if they can leverage the bank as the entry point into that type of relationship, it might make their lives a little bit easier. 

Plus all of our corporates, certainly the larger corporates, have to think about share of wallet. It’s just a reality, and the more broad we can open our aperture and things in terms of what we can offer them, it gives our clients more of an opportunity to not only solve a problem with a value added solution that helps with efficiency, automation, visibility, et cetera. But it can solve a share a wallet problem too. 

You know what was interesting just to keep on this analogy for a second. I just thought of the fact that Amazon entering into the conversation and really putting their credibility on the line by, you know, vouching for all of these different vendors. It created an environment where the procurement process is more efficient for the end client.

Joseph Drambarean:
You know what was interesting, just to keep on this analogy for a second? I just thought of the fact that Amazon entering into the conversation and really putting their credibility on the line by vouching for all of these different vendors, it created an environment where the procurement process is more efficient for the end client. Do you see the same thing happening?

Matt Richardson:
Absolutely. So it is easier and more efficient for our clients to add on a net-new service with us than it would be to go through a procurement process for a net-new fintech. Their counterparty—our client’s counterparty—is us. We’re already a known counterparty to them, so it’s just much simpler. So it gives us a lot of flexibility in talking to our clients about solutions, in bringing them new ideas. If they like those ideas, it makes it easier for them to execute with us.

Joseph Drambarean:
In addition to the marketplace idea, where do you see the future of experience going in corporate banking? I know the portal is so important, but what about the portal is kind of the experience that you hope to accomplish evolution in, in the next few years?

Matt Richardson:
So what we would like to do, it is very important for us. And we know it isn’t the only way that our customers will consume the bank, but it remains an important way. So what we want to do, it goes right back to the silos that I talked about, and we want to eliminate those silos, work within our infrastructure. We work with a lot of great partners providing specific applications that solve specific problems, but we would also like to begin extracting or pulling those experiences up into a higher level, sort of a higher layer where we can control some of that experience. So it feels more holistic and unified and tied together to a client.

And from there, we have an opportunity to not only leverage content that is in our applications, but we can bring in value-added content into our portal and try to make ourselves a one-stop shop for our clients. Now, we’re always going to have the clients who, and we want to be able to encourage the clients, who use their ERP or a TMS and prefer to go in that direction, oftentimes because they have multiple bank relationships. We know we’re not always the only bank. And we want to be able to encourage that too. And that’s where the APIs, the open banking connectivity, our ability to push information to our customers and their ability to push transactions and transaction-related information to us is very important, and we need the flexibility, regardless of how the customer wants to operate.

Joseph Drambarean:
The consistency of the experience, I think, is a topic that is so important. That design…

Matt Richardson:
In commercial banking—it’s ripe for improvement.

Joseph Drambarean:
And it comes on the heels of a lot of the work that’s already been done on the consumer side of the house, where that was a priority. And it’s one of the main attractors to the banking experience.

Matt Richardson:
Absolutely. And to your earlier point, all of our opinions are formed by the things we use as consumers. And so it’s a very valid question for our customers to sort of say, “In my own personal experience, things are a little easier, a little simpler, a little more straightforward. Why can’t it be like that at work?”

Joseph Drambarean:
Absolutely.

Matt Richardson:
And we try to keep that as a guiding principle.

Joseph Drambarean:
So this is day three of AFP. I’m sure you’ve had a chance to walk around. What are the most exciting takeaways for you just coming out of the conference?

Matt Richardson:
I think the energy around innovation, the energy around automation, efficiency—there are so many great ideas that we know can help our clients. A lot of things we’re very interested in, in learning more about, exploring more. We can’t do it all, but we need to pick and choose what we think can be most impactful to our clients and take a look at some really interesting companies that are doing some really cool things. This is a great forum for that.

Joseph Drambarean:
Well, Matt, thank you so much for joining us.

Matt Richardson:
Thank you for having me.

Joseph Drambarean:
This has been Fintech Corner, and we’ll see you on the next one.