PNC Bank CIO Ganesh Krishnan at BA Ignite: Strategic automation is key to tech success

PNC Bank Enterprise Chief Information Officer Ganesh Krishnan said IT acronyms like AI, ML and RPA are just so much jargon if they are not linked to a strategic plan. Krishnan spoke at today’s fireside chat at the BA Ignite virtual conference. The terms refer to artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotic process engineering, respectively.

Krishnan pointed to PNC’s announcement Tuesday of “Low Cash Mode,” a new bank product designed to help customers avoid overdraft fees. The $433 billion bank will not charge insufficient funds fees to Low Cash Mode accounts, and will automatically alert customers as to how long they have to resolve an overdraft fee.

The Pittsburgh, Pa.-based bank is the first to offer such a program, Krishnan said, noting that the capability for it didn’t occur overnight, but with a strategic approach to automation that PNC began in 2013.

“It didn’t happen one fine Monday morning,” Krishnan said. “There has been a lot of work that has happened behind the scenes … four years, five years back, one of the things we saw was the culmination of data and automation coming together.”

Rather than jump on the technology bandwagon, PNC took an engineering mindset, and formed a centralized plan for how to approach emerging technologies, such as RPA, AI and ML, Krishnan said. That meant pulling the technologies under a centralized program that PNC called “intelligent automation,” a term that has just recently come to mean the application of AI to automation. The outcome for PNC, he said, was that its program drives operational efficiencies; accelerates cycle time; increases productivity; creates “straight through” processing; and enhances customer experience.

The bank’s intelligent automation program provides a framework and discipline to work with the approved technologies. Without putting the program in place, the bank would have spent “tons of money and wasted calories on trying to do things in a very narrow fashion,” Krishnan said.

In response to a question about the trend to democratize automation, Krishnan said that, with a strategic plan in place, the actual automations are performed within the lines of business. This also has meant automating processes holistically, with the involvement of parties from across the bank, from risk and security to the those performing the manual task, he added.

Too often, organizations of all types will put a “shiny layer” in front of customers and call it digitalization, Krishnan said, adding that banks need to strive to automate those “internal monolithic processes,” behind the scenes, end-to-end.

As an example, he pointed to the home mortgage process. Many fintechs provide front-end digitalization to automate the application process, “but there are thousands of steps behind that application,” Krishnan said. “You’ve ultimately not achieved your end goals and outcomes of reducing the end-to-end time for that application to be done. Plus, you’ve not achieved your internal goals of savings, cost savings or revenue generations.”

This is why digitalization coupled with automation is extremely important for the future, Krishnan added; to achieve this, organizations must think strategically about automation.

“Until organizations make it a strategic priority, put focus on it, invest in it, you’re not going to be able to make that huge dent into that monolithic manual process,” Krishnan said.

Bank Automation Risk Summit, on June 15-16, is an all-new event that will explore automation in regulatory compliance and risk management for financial institutions. At the virtual event, attendees will gain valuable intelligence on new practices, methods, processes, tools, and data for improved risk management planning and performance to drive better results and fewer risk failures.