CHARLOTTE – Fifth Third Bank plans to reduce the footprint of its applications by 30% in the next three to five years as the $206 billion bank focuses on refactoring and rewriting apps for the cloud.

The Cincinnati-based bank’s cloud strategy does not entail “any lift and shift, we are doing a lot of either refactoring or complete rewrite,” Jude Schramm, chief information officer at Fifth Third, said Thursday at Bank Automation Summit U.S. 2023 in Charlotte, N.C.

For example, the bank relaunched its mobile app on the cloud in November 2022 to enhance customer experience, improve flexibility and offer scalability, he said. “We completely rewrote that entire application. We had to build the data integration first, so we’re not plugging back into legacy applications, and then we had to build the entire experience on top of a native to either iOS or to Android because we’re out in those stores.”

Prior to moving the mobile app to the cloud, the bank was releasing new versions of it roughly twice each year, however updates can happen weekly if needed, Schramm said. “We’ve done 50 to 60 updates to the backend [of the app] since we launched in November.”

The cloud “has allowed us to really take advantage from a business benefit of the speed and scalability that we want,” he added, noting that the mobile app is just one example of the benefits of the cloud.

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