In an era where differentiation in banking is increasingly difficult, Ally Bank has emerged as a leader in creating exceptional digital banking experiences. Sathish Muthukrishnan, chief information and technology officer at Ally Financial said, “The intent behind launching our technology strategy was to ensure that technology will continue to be relevant in an all-digital bank, but more importantly, to create differentiation and drive significant business outcomes. We categorized our strategy into six different pillars. The first is security. Our second pillar was driving tremendous experiences. The third pillar is how I know my experience is working. That’s when data analytics came in. Measure what consumers do, but more importantly, measure what they don’t do. Our operational pillar involved migrating to cloud, driving automation and consistency in how we develop and deploy code. And then we needed to preserve our culture and take care of our talent. These pillars laid the foundation for our transformation. We now have about 75% of our applications running on the cloud and about 95% of the enterprise data in the cloud. This allows us to learn from consumer behaviors, understand what they’re expecting and create experiences in real time so consumers think they are our only customer. We had our cloud strategy and data in the cloud warehouse. At the beginning of 2022, we redefined our network. As we were thinking about AI, we launched our chat assistant, Ally Assist. We created Ally AI because we knew technology was fast-evolving, but there were concerns about sending data to external LLMs. To address this, we built an AI platform that could connect to external LLMs but with added security — it removes PII, tracks all transactions and rehydrates PII for context. Our platform can connect to multiple LLMs — from GPT to FLAN to Bedrock. We can pick the right LLM depending on the use case or combine answers from several LLMs. Our content creation LLM is different from what we use for code generation or risk assessment. We have different models for different use cases. My advantage is that the product team, UI/UX team and technology team are all part of the same technology organization. We rolled out savings buckets — your deposit account with multiple savings buckets that you can name yourself. If you start questioning why roadblocks exist and how to solve them, your brand becomes more relevant to consumers. You become their next best experience, deepening relationships.”