Three regional banks, three different layers of the financial stack
- Super-regional banks are moving away from the one-size-fits-all playbook, focusing on distinct tech layers rather than competing on the same digital features.
- Across Citizens, Truist, and KeyBank, modernization is shifting from a technology agenda to a positioning strategy.
The most important change in regional banking today is structural. These banks are moving away from a uniform modern banking model and toward specialized roles within the financial stack.
Across Citizens, Truist, and KeyBank, modernization is increasingly becoming a means to a larger end: repositioning the bank’s role in the financial ecosystem.
Citizens: The operating system bank
At Citizens, modernization is increasingly treated as part of the operating fabric rather than a discrete program.
Michael Ruttledge, the bank’s CIO, described a shift that is less about adopting new technologies than about removing legacy constraints. The bank has migrated its business applications to AWS and Azure and is in the process of decommissioning its remaining data centers.
“We’re the only super regional bank that is completely in the cloud,” Ruttledge said.
But the cloud transition is only one layer of a broader restructuring effort. Citizens’ “Next Gen Technology” initiative brings together DevSecOps practices, API-based architecture, workforce reskilling, mainframe retirement, and efforts to strengthen core system resilience.
Within that framework, the bank now has more than 70 AI use cases in progress across areas such as underwriting, software development, and internal operations.
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