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Michael Ruttledge began his tech career programming in COBOL on a mainframe. Forty years later, as CIO of
"We are the first super-regional bank to move its entire mainframe and every business application into the cloud," he said. "No one has done that. Not even banks like Capital One. Nobody. That is truly an industry first."
Ruttledge said his team has migrated 700 applications over the last four years and eliminated another 600.
"Right now I'm literally in my data centers disconnecting storage, network, and the remnants of legacy servers," he said. "We'll be fully out within the next couple of months."
The result: Technology incidents have declined by a remarkable 78%. The efficiency gains have also been extraordinary, he said: "The cloud allowed us to go from taking several months to get an application up, to now being able to do it in 36 minutes with the push of a button."
Altogether, the bank estimates the migration process has delivered about $45 million in annualized cost savings in the last 12 months alone.
"It's easy to underestimate the spaghetti — the band-aids that have been put on legacy applications over the years," he said. "As you start to unpack that, you find, 'wait, why is that using this technology?'"
A more nimble, cloud-based system has allowed
The bank's AI-powered assistant, dubbed CiZi, has reduced its mobile-banking-related call volume by 44%. Coding output from its engineering team is up 10%, but the gains jump to 55% for a subset of engineers using more advanced AI agents.
To achieve all of this, Ruttledge has prioritized upskilling
"We've got badging programs, academies, as well as both a business-oriented AI Academy and an engineering AI upskilling track," he said. He added that none of these increased efficiencies have led to job reductions.
"My point of view right now, and it could change, is that we aren't going to eliminate all of these jobs," he said. "The jobs will change, but you're still going to need software engineers, or whatever you want to call them."
Industry peers are seeking out his guidance as they embark on their own transformations. "We do share — we're a tight-knit group, especially on the regulatory and fraud side," Ruttledge said. "At least two banks that haven't started this journey have called me."
For Ruttledge, the mainframe exit was just the beginning. In January, he launched an initiative called Reimagining the Bank, with 47 projects already underway across consumer, commercial, and private banking.
"We're looking at how we can take advantage of advances in AI, agentic AI, and digital over the next two or three years," he said. "To really propel the bank forward."
