CIBC CIO Dave Revell on digital strategy
As digital transformation sweeps across companies and industries, 2019 will be a year of decision-making and profound change, according to a global survey by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) that was sponsored by DXC Technology and the Leading Edge Forum. Companies overwhelmingly recognize that digital transformation is now a requirement to succeed. Most are determined to take the next steps in their transformation journeys to drive growth and better business outcomes.
Below, CIO Dave Revell discusses CIBC's digital journey.
CIBC is Canada’s fifth largest bank by total assets (CA$565.3 billion) and a technology leader. CIBC was the first Canadian bank to offer a mobile-banking app for the iPhone, the first to offer a mobile brokerage app, and the first to offer a mobile-banking app for the Apple Watch. The full-service bank employs 45,000 people and has 11 million customers, running the gamut from individuals to the largest commercial outfits.
Dave Revell joined CIBC in 2011 as its senior vice president for strategic initiatives, then took the CIO role in 2017 to lead the bank’s multilayered, multipronged digital transformation efforts. We recently caught up with Revell to see where CIBC is on its digital journey and what has been learned along the way.
What are the main goals of CIBC’s digital strategy?
Client experience is first and foremost – making it easy and convenient for our clients to do business with us. Of course, having rock-solid security is an important part of that. Simplification is also important, in terms of making it easier for our team members to do their jobs on behalf of our clients. To that end, a lot of our efforts are focused around improving processes through automation and digitization.
“Our goal is to enable the innovation to transform to digital, while also recognizing that we need to do it at a large scale for millions of customers and across the bank.”
A good example of this is the work we’ve done around remote deposit capture. We were the first Canadian bank to digitize checks and give our clients the ability to deposit a check by taking a photo with their mobile phone. This made it much faster and easier for them, and also significantly reduced the amount of paper our processing teams deal with. We not only streamlined how we operate and reduced costs, but also created a much better experience for our clients.
How far along is CIBC on its digital journey?
Well, it isn’t a “once and done.” Once you start thinking about what digital means, you also start thinking about new technologies, such as AI [artificial intelligence], that can be layered onto your strategy. So, first we’re building the fundamentals of a digital platform and moving away from our old paper-based platform. Then we can continually enhance it with new technologies that make sense for our customers.
Internally, our progress varies by business area. For example, within the broad set of our retail customers, we’re quite deep in terms of re-architecting our core e-banking systems and building a modern mobile platform.
A lot of customers no longer think of us as a traditional bank with a grand foyer. They think about a phone, because that’s how they interact with us. About 5 years ago we used the term “The best bank in your pocket.” That was all about enabling the bank to display leadership through mobile.
Digital transformation isn’t cheap. How are you funding your various digital projects?
We think digital is the new cost of doing business, so for us, it’s actually a business imperative. Having said that, our programs related to simplification are helping us take costs out, which we can re-invest in other things for our customers. Also, we have a multi-year strategic program to modernize our technology, which will bring significant savings. But it’s not just about cost, as there are other important benefits. Things like moving to the cloud and adopting Agile development also enable us to get to market quicker delivering new products and services for our clients.
Is the traditional, cautious banking culture different from the modern digital mind-set, and does that represent a challenge?
It syncs perfectly with the business strategy of our CEO, Victor Dodig. When he came into the job about 4 years ago, Victor talked a lot about turning CIBC into a relationship-oriented bank for a modern world. Banking is still based on people and relationships, but modern banking is all digital.
As we began talking about enablers for the strategy, Victor would talk about innovation, simplification and customer-orientation. What’s being described is a cultural change from the top of the bank on down. We’re becoming more customer-focused and innovative, and we’re using technology tools to enhance the client experience.
You’ve said your team is like a FinTech inside a bank. Is that a part of this larger culture change?
Yes, we’re actually leveraging the best of both worlds, like the FinTech approach of being disruptive using new technology, and marrying that with the things that banks have always been good at. That includes scaling to millions of customers, having rock-solid security and building large-scale solutions.
Our goal is to enable the innovation to transform to digital, while also recognizing that we need to do it at a large scale for millions of customers and across the bank.
See the complete survey results and download 2019: The year of digital decisions.