IDC AFS Congress 2017: Citi’s CIO shares Citi’s proudest moment

But instead of going on and on about the latest technologies and trends, what he really touched upon was mindset and culture ‘change’ within his organisation.

“We gathered our top engineers and asked them, ‘How can we get past the excuses?’”

This was especially significant because Citi had just completed ‘consolidating’ 17 markets into one homogenous platform of products and services, a very complicated and very difficult thing to do considering that each market was uniquely regulated with unique market practices and unique business practices.

A good place to start with was the things that got in the way, he said.

“What we found then was that the momentum started to build and the confidence started to build.”

Interestingly, he also said that buzzwords like fintech, digital and so on started to become less mysterious and less shrouded in mystique.

“We were seeing the power of teams running through (overcoming) barriers and roadblocks.”

So, doing things this way and using a method called the nudge concept, Weiland was able to get his IT organisation to run not ‘pilots’  but actual production environments and projects in addition to their day jobs.

“Engineers were able to refactor mainframe code to operate on cloud but also be backward-compatible to run on bare metal, and virtual platforms.”

Weiland shared that one of the proudest accomplishments out of nudges from the team, was enabling 80-percent of transactions with customers every day, through the web portal.