Citizens Bank Partners with MongoDB and AWS to Reduce Costs by $1.5M

Citizens Bank is one of the nation's oldest and largest financial institutions, and offers checking, savings, certificates of deposit (CDs), wealth management, and private banking services. All of these services relied on a 40-year-old on-premises legacy core platform that had rigid schemas that caused bottlenecks, and maintenance costs were growing exponentially. Citizens Bank aimed to modernize its banking capabilities and deliver world-class experiences for its customers. To achieve this, the bank sought a cloud-based solution that would enable secure and easy access to data, simplify operations, and scale to meet the demands of modern digital platforms.

Citizens Bank worked with MongoDB and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to create a modern technology stack for an agile, microservices-based architecture that reduced costs and simplified operations. A key element of the solution was the developer data platform, MongoDB Atlas, which served as the basis for the bank’s enterprise data cache (EDC). MongoDB Atlas caches the data of Citizens Bank’s 14 million customers from its legacy core system with a load time of less than 40 minutes. The EDC only replicates required data through change data capture, providing the bank with fast and uninterrupted access for real-time decision-making, dramatically improving performance for users.

The reduced load on back-end resources improved application performance, reduced latency, improved data availability, and helped drive operational costs down by $1.5 million year over year. The caching layer also reduces potential risks to data and performance when data is moved from the legacy platform to the modern tech stack. Notes Vinod Yadav, unit chief information officer of core banking, lending and operations technology at Citizens Bank, “MongoDB understood our needs and how to collaborate with us. They provided their best resources to get us up and running quickly, and to help us solve problems faster.”

The EDC enables and accelerates data-driven decisions that have a direct impact on the bank’s top and bottom line. Because the cache is always on and feeds data to Citizens Bank’s various channels in real time, downtime and load times were both reduced. Citizens Bank also utilized AWS Lambda to help securely scale compute capacity in the cloud, optimizing performance and contributing to high availability. This translated to 99.99 percent uptime with response times of 30 milliseconds for 95 percent of requests.

Once Citizens Bank began working from the unified, modern MongoDB Atlas data platform, it spent significantly less time managing its on-premises systems. Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) helped scale and deploy data processing workloads, which contributed to faster performance and expedited tasks. The new architecture also utilized Amazon Redshift to modernize data analytics workloads, resulting in insights that were delivered faster and more efficiently. Thanks to improved operational efficiency by using managed services, Citizens Bank was able to shift resources to drive innovation and develop new products.

A 360-degree view of customer data helped internal teams access insights to deliver relevant, personalized banking experiences to end users. “Now that the data is always on and delivered in real time, we can increase developer velocity and the speed at which we bring new features to market,” notes Yadav. “We can explore new use cases across each business unit to serve our customers in innovative ways, and provide the performance they expect from a modern bank.”

The flexibility of MongoDB Atlas allows Citizens Bank to deliver experiences to its customers that weren't previously possible. In the next few years, the bank aims to be completely off-premises and all in on AWS. Its objective is to continue scaling with its real-time data cache and to improve customer response times. Citizens Bank plans to drive real-time personalized offers to customers, utilizing real-time transaction data to inform push notifications. It envisions innovative instant reward experiences, such as sending an in-store notification for a free drink to a customer that regularly visits the same coffee shop. The bank also plans to leverage its high data availability to improve fraud prevention. With faster access to data and integration of generative artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, it’s accelerating proactive and predictive fraud detection to protect customers.