Citizens Bank aims to complete cloud migration by the third quarter as part of its effort to accelerate digitalization and product development.

The $217.5 billion Citizens began cloud migration in 2019, Ajay Punia, head of fraud risk and transmissions engineering, told Bank Automation News, adding that “more than 80% [of the bank’s apps] are already on the cloud, and we have a target to close the remaining 20% by Q3 of this year.”

Like ING Bank and JPMorgan, Citizens opted for a multicloud strategy to help it scale capabilities, Punia said.

“We have a huge presence on Amazon Web Services,” he said, adding that new products are being tested on the AWS cloud.

The bank also uses Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, he said.

Citizens initially planned to have 90% of its applications on AWS and 10% on Equinix by yearend, Chief Information Officer Michael Ruttledge said in 2023.

Cloud-based fraud management

Modernizing its fraud management system has been a focus in Citizens’ digital transformation strategy, Punia said.

Citizens’ legacy fraud detection platforms were fragmented, working in silos determined by their function or type of transaction, he said.

“The first step of this transformation was to consolidate the domains themselves,” he said.

Citizens began modernizing its fraud management system in 2023, developing a cloud-based fraud management platform on MongoDB Atlas on AWS, a fully-managed cloud database by software firm MongoDB, Punia said

The platform includes three applications:

• Detection and monitoring;
• Alert management; and
• Disputes and claims.

The first two applications are for the bank to use to detect fraud, but in case fraud is not detected by the bank, the third platform allows the customer to report suspected fraud and file a claim and dispute, Punia said.

The three applications also talk to one another, he said.

“If there is a claim created, for example, the first platform will get feedback that this is something which we missed so that it provides a feedback loop, and that’s how the strategy can be implemented to make this a better control system,” Punia said.

The platform has handled around 80% of claims volume since 2023, Punia said.

Citizens’ updated anti-fraud system includes more than just a technology transformation, Punia said. The bank revisited its overall business strategy and operations processes and added new detection models.

“Our predictability rates are higher than what we had in the past,” he said. “We are detecting fraud more than the industry standard [of 10% to 11%] now, and that’s because of the new models and the new strategies that we are implementing on the business side.”

Punia declined to say what Citizens’ predictability rate was.

The platforms use a lot of automation, which has significantly reduced manual work for employees, allowing them to process more alerts and claims, Punia said.

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