KeyBank harnesses data for evidence-based decision making

Inside banking 

Financial institutions, like KeyBank, are under continuous scrutiny from shareholders, regulatory bodies, and customers. They must manage continuous change, while striving to be cost-efficient. The increase of new data-driven technology, such as the cloud, AI, and machine learning means these institutions must be leaders in automation to function efficiently.

Traditionally, banks have complex, outdated technology that underpins numerous unconnected processes across departments. Manual process can create siloed teams, with service delivery reliant predominantly on human decision-making.

Now struggling with these legacy systems, which can often hinder innovation, the prospect of achieving optimal digitization in the ever-changing world of financial services for banks can feel overwhelming.

KeyBank, with almost 200 years of history and assets of approximately USD $198 billion, stands out amongst its competitors because of its commitment to helping its clients and communities thrive. It is automating at scale and simplifying operations to ensure it can continue to successfully provide banking, investment, and consulting services to individuals and businesses in 15 states through approximately 1,000 branches.

KeyBank sought a solution that would ensure better visibility of data to drive decision-making. It wanted to be able to redeploy resources to strategic areas and focus on more innovative projects, ultimately helping to enhance its customers’ financial journeys. To achieve these goals, KeyBank looked to consolidate and combine various applications into one platform.

Simplifying banking with automation

After acquiring First Niagara Financial Group, a longstanding ServiceNow customer, KeyBank implemented ServiceNow IT Asset Management (ITAM) to better control its software and hardware inventory as well as its cloud assets. At the same time, it invested in ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM), which allowed the company to consolidate on-premises legacy tools into a single cloud platform. The bank was now empowered to harness data and analytics with automated workflows on the ServiceNow platform.

“It was almost like a dream come true,” says David Klimas, ServiceNow Platform Architect at KeyBank. “When you think back to having asset management on one database, incident on another database, and taking months to upgrade anything, bringing this all together was fantastic. It really changes things when you have everything on one platform.”

“We can’t imagine life without it,” adds Adam Stockton, Enterprise Technology Manager at KeyBank. “From a development and infrastructure standpoint, when you have five different vendor relationships, sets of infrastructure, development teams, and support teams with different skills and technologies, that adds up to a lot of extra effort, money, and labor just to keep those platforms up and running.”

As the journey with ServiceNow evolved, KeyBank invested in the Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to gain improved visibility into its IT environment for better decision-making. And Service Catalog was adopted to ensure a user-friendly service experience, empowering employees and customers through self-service while delivering faster request solutions.

KeyBank eliminated various manual processes through automation and retired multiple applications. What’s more, ServiceNow enabled the redeployment of KeyBank’s resources to other areas, such as cloud acceleration, fostering a digital-first mindset, and other strategic areas. With ServiceNow a proven tool for success in multiple parts of the business, it was time for KeyBank to invest in ServiceNow Impact to realize even more value from the ServiceNow platform and take its innovation journey to the next level.

Strategy grown from IT to drive cost reduction

Prior to investing in Impact, the bank had a lot of experienced teammates using the ServiceNow platform but translating that back into value for the business posed quite the challenge. KeyBank wanted to increase visibility of real-time data via its ServiceNow solutions to highlight what could be achieved in terms of cost reduction, innovation, and risk mitigation. This would accelerate the legacy applications migration, thus creating an end-to-end, top-down view of everything within its technology stack.

The bank sought to make ServiceNow the “golden source of truth”. Thanks to Impact, there is now a comprehensive view of the business as well as the capability to see details clearly to inform evidence-based decision-making.

Making a difference with skilled resources

Impact pairs skilled resources and tools to deliver transparency, improve business KPIs, and enable a tailored product roadmap at KeyBank. One of the bank’s key projects includes improving platform stability, product adoption, and overall expansion of the ServiceNow platform holistically. Impact is now accelerating value at KeyBank by providing personalized AI recommendations, on-demand technical expertise, rich industry and competitive insights, and professional advice to help guide strategic decision-making.

“ServiceNow Impact gives you access to advisory sessions when new projects are starting,” says Adam. “It also gives you an avenue to get perspective from similar companies inside your vertical. It’s nice to be able to ask around to see how others in similar scenarios approach that same issue and get a different perspective.”

Seeing is believing

KeyBank can now see all its ServiceNow initiatives in a series of dashboards built in collaboration with ServiceNow Impact. With the increased visibility of real-time data, the bank can now align activities accordingly, and the dashboards also offer KeyBank the potential to measure success or progress, and then report on the value of ongoing and possible future projects.

Employee experience and processes have undoubtedly improved. Impact’s influence can be seen in a lot of metrics, including the automation of 33% of IT service requests and 55% of triage and incident assignments, as well as in an 80% reduction in software audit effort. Significantly, since adoption, Impact has enabled KeyBank to explore end-to-end security and risk management, from detection to compliance to resolution, and manage 400,000 vulnerabilities.

Through automating processes and simplification, the bank can better evaluate resources, and with a clear overview of all its platforms, it can focus on new projects, knowing exactly where resources are needed. 

“ServiceNow Impact often helps us learn what we have purchased and aren’t using yet,” says Adam. “For example, we were looking at potentially purchasing a visibility tool into our pipeline from another vendor and it turned out that there is a similar product that we already own from ServiceNow. We’re looking at implementing that next year.”

The company can now drive platform innovation while managing cost and risk. It can run efficient operations with highly skilled resources and preventive tools, improve platform health and governance, and ensure business KPIs and roadmap guidance to drive more value and innovation from the platform. All this ultimately enables KeyBank to deliver better services.