Driving Innovation and Digital Transformation

Michael Ruttledge is the Chief Information Officer and Head of Technology Services for Citizens Financial Group

Michael Ruttledge is the Chief Information Officer and Head of Technology Services for Citizens Financial Group

Michael Ruttledge oversees all aspects of the bank’s technology environment, from customer- and client-facing applications to the people, processes and infrastructure supporting Citizens’ day-to-day business operations. He spearheaded the Next Generation Technology strategy to modernize the bank and deliver personalized, digital solutions for customers. He also implemented a major up-skilling initiative and strong culture of learning through immersive Engineering and Architecture Academies, digital credentialing and building of critical skills for the future such as AI, Blockchain, Modern APIs and Cloud.

Before joining Citizens in 2019, he previously held the position of Group Chief Information Officer of American Express Co. He has more than 20 years of experience in infrastructure and engineering roles within the financial services industry including payments, merchant services, customer service, risk, fraud, banking, and finance. He has been recognized for developing the vision, strategy, and innovative culture to execute new digital capabilities, big data, payments, and next generation analytics platforms that advance business strategies. He received a graduate degree in Information Systems from the University of Brighton in the United Kingdom.

Following is the conversation that we had with Ruttledge.

As the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Head of Technology Services, what are some of your key roles and responsibilities that you have on a daily basis?

Since joining Citizens Financial Group in 2019 as the Head of Technology Services and CIO, I initiated and led our technology transformation journey through our Next Generation Technology (NGT) strategy. The NGT strategy focuses on driving innovation and accelerating speed to market delivery through a resilient and reliable environment with optimized overall spend.

“By empowering our colleagues across the bank to generate innovative ideas, we have been successful in driving new business opportunities.”

In my current role, I oversee all aspects of the bank’s technology environment, from customer- and client-facing applications to the people, processes, and infrastructure supporting Citizens’ day-to-day business operations. Since we are amid a digital transformation journey, the bank understands the importance of making investments in technology across its business lines to provide our customers with a great experience. We are making smart, targeted investments to compete and win against our larger banking competitors. Our transformation journey has allowed us to shift spending from infrastructure to engineering and focus on customer-oriented technology work. We have also been investing in colleague technology to provide an improved and more collaborative and efficient colleague experience.

A lot of banks try to copy the way fintech start-ups work. Yet this should not be the only focus of their innovation efforts. Your views on this.

Driving IT innovation should be a top priority for any financial institution’s technology strategy, and it is key to our NGT strategy. By empowering our colleagues across the bank to generate ideas, we have been successful in driving new business opportunities. We have several channels in place to help drive innovation—our innovation lab, innovation fund, and enterprise-wide hackathon.

• Innovation Lab: Allows Citizens colleagues to test and learn new emerging technologies and ideas in a secure environment

• Innovation Fund: Empowers colleagues to generate new ideas to improve the bank and our customers’ experiences

• Hackathon: The first enterprise-wide Hackathon was held in 2022 and produced 47 ideas with three winners moving forward to build out business capabilities

While banks are grappling with legacy systems and regulatory pressure, lean and agile fintech start-ups are honing in on their customers. How can banks introduce future proof technologies and processes to keep up with their competitors?

Banks can introduce future proof technologies and processes to keep up with customers by empowering their CIOs and IT teams to help build deeper relationships with customers and focus the shift from transactions to relationships through automation and automating tasks and transactions. This would allow branch colleagues and relationship managers to have the time to build relationships and serve in a more advisory manner.

It goes without saying that a digital transformation and the customer experience should be always at the forefront. At Citizens, we focus on using data to improve our customers’ experience and help them achieve their financial goals and reach their potential. Through our digital transformation, we have taken a Salesforce-based enterprise platform approach which has delivered value for the business and positions us for amplification of impact through future releases, rationalization, and convergence.

What would be your piece of advice for fellow peers and colleagues?

I would tell my fellow peers and colleagues to focus on talent and ensure you have the right talent at all levels, but especially at the leadership level, and to build your talent to meet the needs of the organization and your customers.

My leadership team and I have a strong focus on engineering skills, diversity, early career talent, and retention. This allows us to deepen our capabilities, drive productivity and efficiencies, and reduce our dependency on contractors. Since 2019, we have hired more than 650 full stack engineers, reduced contractors to 30 percent, and have increased our organizational diversity and internal mobility (28 percent).

To retain talent, we provide continued skilling opportunities for our technology colleagues through our engineering academies and badging program. Our engineering academy focuses on building internal engineering capabilities to support our NGT transformation and focuses on skills to quickly learn, experiment, and leverage new tools and technologies to build solutions. The Citizens badging program provides training for colleagues who aspire to build new skills and capabilities or refresh knowledge that they already have. To date, over 1,000 badges have been completed and more than 300 colleagues have participated in academies.

I would also add as a piece of advice is to have a strong partnership with the business and to consistently nurture that relationship. Our Next Generation Technology strategy is in year four of our execution plan, which drives us to generate new value for IT in the business. The NGT strategy focuses on driving innovation, accelerating speed to market, enabling a resilient and reliable environment, and optimizing with overall spend. We partner with the lines of business to support their missions and while delivering for the enterprise. Some of our top strategic objectives include:

• Modernization: We continue to modernize our technology platforms through APIs as a key enabler for channel convergence, back-office efficiencies, and cost optimization.

• Cloud Adoption: Our focus on moving to the cloud drives stability, resiliency, our sustainability agenda, and speed to market.

• Innovation: The changing business landscape highlights the need for innovation that capitalizes on new technology offerings.

• Security: We continue to focus on protecting our customers and the enterprise as an utmost priority

Financial

Big Data

Customer Experience

Blockchain

Agile

Fraud