As Key Bankcontinues to move its platforms and systems into the cloud, it’s starting to report tangible results.
Last year, the Cleveland, Ohio-based bank fully transitioned its contact center technology and operations to the cloud through the Google Cloud-based contact-center-as-a-service, or CCaaS, platform UJET and retired multiple legacy on-premise technologies.
Over the course of the transition and with the launch of new AI capabilities in the contact center’s suite of services, KeyBank saw agent call volumes decrease by 15% while seeing a 50% increase in agent digital chat volumes. Additionally, the bank’s total cost to run the contact center decreased by approximately 10%, according to a bank representative.
“We’re rolling out new capabilities that our contact center teammates are loving, the fact that they can get new bells and whistles at their fingertips that make their job easier,” Jordan Olack, director of KeyBank’s intelligent automation and contact center team, told American Banker. “It’s going to simplify the role for our teammates, and when we do that we ultimately are going to deliver a better experience for our clients when they need help.”
In a 2024 American Banker research report, nearly all of the 181 banks and credit unions surveyed said cloud technology is at least a moderate priority, and 84% said it’s either a high priority or a strategic imperative.
A number of major banks have announced cloud migrations or upgrades as an alternative to on-premise data centers over the last several years. Back in 2019, TD Bank Group indicated it would take a gradual approach to moving its applications to Microsoft Azure. Capital One Financial has fully operated on Amazon Web Services since 2021, but experienced a data breach in the middle of its cloud transition that exposed the personal information of 106 million customers after a former AWS employee hacked Capital One’s servers through Amazon’s cloud.
In September 2021, JPMorganChase announced a partnership with the cloud-native banking core platform Thought Machine to transition its retail bank’s core to the cloud and Wells Fargo announced a dual-cloud migration plan with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. U.S. Bank started a cloud migration to Azure in 2022, and Citigroup announced in October 2024 it would be moving some of its software applications from its data centers to Google Cloud.
KeyBank started its transition to Google Cloud in 2019 with its online banking and data analytics platforms, despite news of the Capital One breach that had just been made public at the time. The bank then announced in 2022 that it would start the process of transitioning to Google Cloud infrastructure to operate all its primary platforms and applications.
KeyBank’s initial migration to UJET spanned a total of 17 months from May 2023 to October 2024, according to the bank. Olack said that KeyBank’s partnership is directly with UJET, even though the CCaaS provider’s product is built and hosted on Google Cloud.
“We’re actually going right to the source,” Olack said. “We are a strategic partner of UJET, and we’ve made equity investments as a bank into UJET as well.”
As a 200-year-old financial institution, KeyBank is often considered a legacy bank. UJET’s team, however, thinks otherwise.
“We’ve never thought of them as a ‘legacy bank,’ but rather as an established leader who was looking for a technology partner that could match their ambition,” said UJET CEO Vasili Triant. “From the beginning this required building a true partnership, not a typical vendor-client relationship. We spent a great deal of time understanding KeyBank’s business goals far beyond the contact center, while their teams learned the full capabilities of a modern, AI-powered CX platform.”
Triant also noted that collaborating with KeyBank’s IT and security teams was a significant element in transitioning the bank’s contact center technology to the cloud.
“Bridging the gap between on-premise procedures and a cloud-native mindset required a highly collaborative and conversational process,” Triant said. “This diligence, which went far beyond emails and tickets, reflects their commitment to ensuring every aspect of the new platform would meet their high standards for customer security and trust.”
Dylan Lerner, a digital banking senior analyst for Javelin Strategy, noted that cloud transformation for financial institutions is often a step-by-step process.
“Banks rarely go all-in on cloud technology or engage in full ‘cloud transformation,'” Lerner told American Banker. “Rather, they embark on a cloud transformation journey and gradually augment their legacy systems with cloud technology. A piecemeal approach is easier to manage and gives the financial institution time to adjust.”
