Citizens Financial Group has opened a new Global Capability Center (GCC) in Hyderabad, India, in collaboration with Cognizant, aiming to strengthen the bank’s digital resilience and testing capabilities while accelerating technology innovation.
The center marks Citizens’ first major technology investment outside the U.S. and is designed to play a central role in its enterprise-wide modernisation strategy.
The facility will focus on strengthening core systems, testing advanced technologies, and developing more secure, scalable digital infrastructure.
According to Michael Ruttledge, Chief Information Officer at Citizens, the initiative is about building sustained operational resilience and preparing the bank for the next phase of digital transformation.
“This center gives us the scale and expertise to stress-test emerging technologies, reduce time to market, and build safer, more agile systems,” said Ruttledge. “Hyderabad’s deep talent pool makes it a critical hub for banking innovation.”
The GCC will house up to 1,000 professionals specializing in IT, data, and analytics by March 2026. Their focus will include secure cloud migration, performance testing, and AI-driven operations. Citizens has also set a goal of becoming the first U.S. regional bank to complete full cloud migration this year—a move expected to improve system resilience and flexibility.
“Innovation must go hand-in-hand with resilience.”
– Michael Ruttledge
The Hyderabad center will play a key role in advancing this effort by rigorously validating digital platforms and ensuring business continuity across complex systems.
Cognizant, which is hosting the GCC at its new campus, says the collaboration will also serve as a model for how financial institutions can use secure environments to experiment with next-gen technologies.
“This is about building more reliable, transparent, and secure banking systems,” said Surya Gummadi, President – Americas at Cognizant. “We’re focused on enabling innovation, but we’re also making sure it’s tested and compliant from day one.”
The project aligns with a growing trend of financial institutions seeking to insulate themselves against operational disruptions by building redundancy, automating key processes, and conducting more rigorous testing of their technology stacks.
“It’s not just about speed anymore—it’s about trust and continuity,” Ruttledge added. “Innovation must go hand-in-hand with resilience.”
Citizens Financial Group is the parent company, while Citizens Bank, is its primary banking subsidiary operating under the Citizens brand.
Headquartered in Providence, Rhode Island, Citizens Financial Group is one of the largest and oldest financial institutions in the United States. It operates over 1,000 branches across multiple U.S. states, including Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.
The company was formerly a subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) from 1988 until its initial public offering in 2014, after which RBS fully divested its stake in 2015.
Citizens strategy
Despite being one of the older U.S. banks, founded in 1828, since the bank’s IPO in 2014, Citizens has made improving and continuously testing its digital infrastructure a major priority.
In fact, the bank disclosed it had hired an army of engineers – close to 750 – over the past four years alone to tackle the modern, online challenges that Citizens faces in a rapidly evolving banktech landscape.
The hiring has helped “us transform from being an organization [that] was heavily outsourced, to having a strong base of in-house engineers who have a problem-solving mindset,” explained Ruttledge recently.
Next year, the financial firm plans to swell this number to over a thousand, the former CIO of American Express recently announced.
Now the next big challenge for the bank, as for many financial services firms, is the use and implementation of artificial intelligence.
Ruttledge has no doubt Citizens Bank is “merely scratching the surface” when it comes to the use of GenAI.
“We’re not rushing into this,” he recently said in a BD analysis. “But I know by the pent-up demand … by the number of use cases that people want to go forward with, that the ideas are there, the demand is there.”
He disclosed that the bank ran a pilot earlier this year that used GenAI solutions to enable the company’s engineering team to develop its own code.
Responding to recent comments from Citizens CEO Bruce van Saun, that getting a proper AI strategy in place is a top priority, Ruttledge said Citizens is “putting a very deliberate, dominant structure around the use of genAI.”
He added that “we started with basically a hackathon: we generated over 90 different ideas across the bank, and we honed it down to half a dozen we were really going to pursue.”
One of those already in action is Microsoft Copilot, which Citizens engineers use to help develop code.
“We’ve just wrapped up a pilot with a group of engineers, which we saw a 20% productivity boost from,” Ruttledge continued.
“We’re going to be rolling out Copilot to about 1,000 of our engineers. People are using it to do core code conversions, taking SAS code and converting it to Python.”
He added: “They’re using it to do documentation, they’re using it to understand legacy code that maybe is not well documented. They’re using it to generate test use cases. It’s an extension of what we’ve been doing, because we’ve really been looking to enhance the productivity of engineers.”
‘Human in the loop’
Ruttledge said that Citizens has taken “a deliberate approach, probably over the last six, nine months, because we had to put the appropriate guardrails in place, the appropriate security and governance.”
He continued to explain that “so throughout these use cases, we have the human in the loop, so there’s someone validating the code as written before it’s launched in production.”
“There’s someone validating and checking the answers before we give it to our customers.”
Citizens overall next-generation technology strategy has moved the bank to a more agile operating model, Ruttledge stressed, and brought in a lot of the tools and processes “you need to do”, such as DevSecOps, pipelines, test automation, building APIs, moving to the cloud “and beefing up our engineering talent at the bank.”
In fact, he disclosed that the bank will be out of all its data centers by the end of 2025.
“We crossed a major milestone in mid-July [2024], in that we now have more than 50% of our applications in the cloud. We have a hybrid cloud strategy with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.”
“By the end of 2025, we’ll be at 100%,” he concluded.
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