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When Fifth Third Bank named Jude Schramm chief information officer in 2018, the former GE Aviation executive brought with him an industrial engineer's mindset and nearly 17 years of experience building digital businesses.
Eight years later, and now grappling with the recently completed $10.9 billion
"The pace of change has exponentially sped up, especially as you look at what's happening from an AI standpoint," Schramm said.
Over the past year, Schramm has focused on what he calls enterprise-viable AI. This has involved equipping the bank's knowledge workers, including roughly 1,000 engineers, with AI tools; embedding AI into business processes such as lending and credit; and upgrading customer-facing experiences on Fifth Third's mobile app.
He has also been focused on breaking the bank's underlying technology away from monolithic legacy platforms and moving it to domain-based architectures. Modernizing the bank's technical ecosystem has meant its mobile teams went from two technology upgrades a year in 2021 to more than 500 in 2025.
"We can now deploy real-time and constantly be iterating on feature improvement," Schramm said.
Architectural changes in payments, meanwhile, are central to an initiative internally dubbed "2x the bank," aimed at doubling capacity across the bank's infrastructure. Real-time payments throughput has increased from 35 to 140 transactions per second, with the aim to also double wire and automated clearing house (ACH) capacity, Schramm added.
"Most of your traditional real-time payment rails aren't really built to scale that fast or that far," he said.
Technology upgrades have meant $200 million in annualized run-rate savings. Schramm's background in Six Sigma process design played a part in the strategy behind the changes, with savings stemming from simplifying existing tech stacks to reduced reliance on contract labor.
Rather than replace everything, Schramm has directed the bank towards outsourcing more standard banking capabilities, while investing in in-house intellectual property and "experiential" customer-facing tools.
Still, he is deliberately cautious about some aspects of AI hype, particularly involving agents. "When it hits at the core of deposit systems and loan systems, we've got to be really intentional," he said.
In the coming year, Schramm's priorities include completing the combination with Comerica's systems, expanding FedNow and other "move money" capabilities, and making "meaningful progress" on agentic customer experiences. Payments upgrades might involve partnerships with the likes of Stripe and Trustly, while new customer experiences are set to include a multilingual chatbot. A breakthrough year in 2026 would mean delivering all three, he said.
