Citizens’ CIO on the ethos that led the bank into the cloud and beyond
- Citizens CIO Michael Ruttledge explains how the bank modernized by moving entirely to the cloud.
- Ruttledge discusses cloud migration, AI deployment strategy, and building an innovation-driven organizational ethos.
Not all banks are stuck in the mainframe era.
Today, we look at Citizens, which has been on an impressive modernization and innovation journey, speaking with the bank’s Chief Information Officer and Head of Technology Services, Michael Ruttledge, to understand how one of America’s oldest institutions shed the weight of legacy technology, moved entirely to the cloud, and built the organizational ethos to carry its progress forward.
The start of the road
Citizens was once owned by the Royal Bank of Scotland, which divested its stake in 2015. Ruttledge, who joined the firm in 2019, was coming into an organization already in the process of modernizing. “When I joined it was a good time because people started to move more applications to the cloud and more were moving into agile development,” he said.
Since his joining, the firm has been focused on its “Next Gen Technology” initiative that focuses on 5 main pillars and serves as the spine for its modernization efforts:
- Empowering the development cycle: Move into an agile environment through developing DevSecOps tools and test automation.
- Enhancing communication within the infrastructure: Leverage APIs to modernize the technology stack.
- Improving internal capabilities and talent: Upskilling the current workforce because the bank had previously skewed towards outsourcing and developed considerable technical debt within the team.
- Transitioning away from mainframes: Moving the infrastructure to the cloud and remote servers.
- Fortifying the core: Protecting its core banking software by enhancing stability and security against cyber threats.
For a firm that was established in 1828, and (in Ruttledge’s words) the “last company on the planet to be using IBM Big Insights,” the Next Gen Technology initiative has been able to realize big results: “We’re the only super regional bank that is completely in the cloud. All of our business apps are either in the Azure or AWS public clouds and we are now in the process of decommitting our data centers in North Carolina,” he shared.
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