Citizens is six months into its Reimagine the Bank initiative, and the pace of change in the artificial intelligence realm is “overwhelming,” said Brendan Coughlin, the bank’s president.

“We're building tools for engineers to be more productive on code development, and every three weeks, it's like, well, Copilot’s in the lead. No, no, Claude’s in the lead … and your head wants to explode,” he said, referring to Microsoft and Anthropic AI products.

Banks must shake the old mindset of set it and revisit in five years, he said, as large language models and other firms “continue to leapfrog each other.”

“These things are becoming obsolete in matters of months, not years,” Coughlin said during a recent interview. “It's a really tricky dynamic that I think most organizations haven't had to deal with, ever.” 

Executives at the Providence, Rhode Island-based bank “intellectually knew that, but seeing that real-time, that you're revving the organization up, it’s pretty complicated, you’ve got everybody going in the right direction, and then you're like, ‘Whoa, wait a second – now this new thing just came out, and are we on the right path?’” he said. 

“The nimbleness around it has been pretty intense,” Coughlin said.

Citizens’ Reimagine plan involves taking “a giant step back,” Coughlin said. That means simplifying the $226 billion-asset lender’s business model through vendor consolidation and a smaller office footprint, and applying AI to reshape bank operations.

Through nearly 50 initiatives, the bank is targeting about $450 million in benefits by the end of 2028, with about two-thirds tied to expense efficiencies. Citizens has projected about $50 million of one-time costs to be offset by $45 million of benefits this year.

In January, CEO Bruce Van Saun said the bank has “a lot of wood to chop to actually execute this program.”

Achieving AI return on investment requires disciplined focus on areas that present tangible outcomes, and “intense, cross-functional enterprise energy,” Coughlin said.

Coughlin sees particular promise with changes to the bank’s call center and engineering operations, to bolster customer experience and help the bank compete with larger lenders spending far more on technology. 

As other banks tap AI for similar uses, “at the end of the day, this will be about execution,” Coughlin said. 

Call center changes are being tested, and Citizens aims to have 25% of calls answered by non-humans by the end of this year, in pursuit of a longer term goal of 50%. Coughlin said that’s a customer experience play as much as it is a cost-cutting effort, with the agent acting “almost like a personal concierge.” 

The bank is moving toward having engineers manage code-writing AI agents, versus writing code themselves. AI tools that have been deployed are making engineers 30% more productive, he said.

That boost “should get us down the field faster, competing with the mega-banks,” he said.

How it’s affecting the team

Those developments have already prompted changes for the bank’s roughly 17,400 employees, including upskilling and retraining through the Reimagine program. Coughlin said Citizens’ “willingness to ready our team … for the future of work” can be a differentiator for the bank.

Where AI agents can field requests for new debit cards, for example, a call center inquiry handled by a human may relate to retirement consultation or securing a mortgage, turning that role into one that’s “more strategic, important; it’s probably higher-pay,” Coughlin said. 

Currently, about 70% of the bank’s customer calls are answered overseas by a vendor. In the short term, “we’re going to shed our outsourced agreements before it touches folks that are directly employed by Citizens,” he said. Similarly, the bank plans to drop some third parties it works with on the engineering side. 

In the long term, “the more clerical, administrative roles that we have – some of them are outsourced, some of them are not – will likely not be needed at the same level of scale,” Coughlin said.

He likened it to retail banking changes over the past decade, with branch interactions becoming less transactional and more advice-driven.

Citizens doesn’t have a projection on how its overall headcount may be affected, but role transformation will happen broadly, he said.

Vendor and branch changes

As the bank streamlines its vendor roster, Coughlin said executives are mulling where they can consolidate business with one vendor rather than two or more, and which companies are the right ones to link with over the long term. 

When it comes to core providers, “the FISes and Fiservs don't have the here-and-now modern platform and they're telling you that they're going to build it for the future. And then you have these startups and challengers that are thinking about it in a more modern way, but they don't really have a platform that works today.” 

“Do we have confidence the incumbents will get modern at the pace we need?” Coughlin said. “Or do we want to wait it out a little bit and see if these challengers emerge with the right mindset, but a platform that actually works here and now?” 

Other simplification moves are easier, such as picking one customer chat solution to use across the bank instead of using different platforms in various divisions, he said.  

On the physical side, Citizens is exiting 19 small buildings so far and is weighing, over the next year or two, where to have its biggest office hubs, Coughlin said. Its largest office is in Johnston, Rhode Island. 

The regional bank is also plotting branch network changes and rolling out a new mobile app. About 15% of customers have access to the new app, and Coughlin expects that to hit 100% in the next 30 to 45 days. 

Changes include a more modern user interface; improvements to the login experience; faster functionality; enhanced customer data, including credit scores and logos of the companies they’re spending money with; better search and account opening capabilities; and more functionality for AI assistant CiZi. Coughlin said the bank plans to add more to the app over the next year or two. 

As for branches, Coughlin indicated the bank doesn’t share the aspirations of some peers who’ve de novoed in the Southeast, preferring to refine its existing network in the states it’s already in. Citizens counts about 1,000 branches across 14 states and Washington, D.C. 

The lender has a 2.1% branch share in New York, where 3% to 5% share is needed to achieve operating leverage, he said. “If we want to be a real player, we’re going to have to densify,” he said. 

And in New England, “we're going to do a lot of surgery around some of our legacy markets,” to position the bank for mass-affluent customers and above, he said. That means branches that are “more impressive, [on] the right corner, the right staffing.”