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For Mohan Sankararaman, chief information officer at First Horizon, technology change is nothing new. In more than 30 years in banking tech, including 17 years at First Horizon, he has worked through the shift from mainframes to PCs and Oracle databases, the rise of the internet, and the digitization of banking.
Those waves have set the ground for his current mission, where the past two years have been dominated by upgrading how the bank uses data and AI tools.
"Are we wired for this type of change? Absolutely. But I'm not diminishing how hard change is," he said. "We're always on our toes trying to learn and adopt new things."
The bank is replacing a maze of siloed data repositories with a single platform it calls the "Enterprise Data Hub," which is designed to give a more complete view of its customers and operations. The hub has unified and standardized information tied to different business lines that could have been sitting in 10 or 15 different places.
That work is intended to be the foundation for "data-as-a-product." To complement the hub, First Horizon created an internal data marketplace that lets employees discover approved data products based on their access permissions. These are supposed to be easy to create and discover, purpose-built, and designed for specific business uses. The marketplace, which will act like the App Store, is in pilot mode with a handful of groups. Sankararaman said he wants to make at least 100 data products available within a year.
"Good customer service is only possible if you have data," he said. Access to better data will also mean banking analysts spend less time hunting for reliable information and more time helping executives and bankers serving customers, Sankararaman added.
Meanwhile, the use of AI in the bank has become routine. First Horizon's internal generative AI tool, ChatFHN, has been in production for about 15 months and is being used for drafting emails and documents, answering questions about company policies, and helping procurement teams compare RFPs. Human judgment still makes the final call, but Sankararaman sees it as a productivity booster.
While the last two years have involved a big shift, the challenge is less about the technology than the organizational change it requires, Sankararaman said. His approach is to show incremental wins instead of betting on a massive, multiyear overhaul. "Let's not try to boil the ocean," he said. He believes small, practical gains are what keep transformation moving.
