CSG Banking: How Banks Can Redefine Their Portfolios to Serve Both Enterprise and Retail at Scale | CSG | FF Virtual Arena #360

In the latest FF Virtual Arena, Richard Ullenius, VP of Banking and Financial Services at CSG, about what “banking without boundaries” really looks like for incumbent banks and financial institutions. The focus is how banks can redesign portfolios, tech and culture so they can serve both retail and enterprise customers at scale, without being trapped in product and organisational silos.

Ullenius starts by distinguishing between being customer-focused and truly customer-centric. Most banks claim to care about customers, but still organise around products, business units and internal targets but for CSG, real change happens when the customer, whether a consumer, SME, large corporate or public body – sits at the centre of how services, processes and technology are designed. Instead of thinking in terms of lending, cash management or liquidity silos, banks need to think in terms of end-to-end customer journeys and build capabilities and teams around those journeys.

Data is the next big theme and CSG positions high-quality, real-time, unified data as key to three major banking challenges: profitability, regulation and experience. On profitability, notes that margin pressure and changing interest rate dynamics mean banks can’t ignore cost-to-serve anymore. Unified data lets them manage pricing, revenue and cost more proactively across both retail and enterprise. On regulation and risk, CGS describes a move towards “regulation by design”; building products and capabilities with compliance and customer needs embedded from the start, instead of bolting regulation on later. And on experience, Ullenius highlights that both customer experience and employee experience improve when front-line teams get clean, real-time data, enabling faster, more proactive and more personalised service.

This leads into the idea of a “boundaryless portfolio” and neobanks are closer to this, CSG says, because they weren’t built around traditional product silos. But incumbents can catch up, and uses telecoms as a guide. Large telcos used to run many lines of business with separate product stacks – much like big banks today. Over the last decade, leading telcos have simplified to a small number of portfolios (for example, consumer and corporate) supported by specialists. Ullenius sees banks doing something similar: harmonising portfolios, creating “one bank, one portfolio” for corporate clients and redesigning the engagement layer so customers experience a single, coherent institution rather than several disconnected ones.

CSG acknowledges that many banks still run on COBOL-era systems, and that traditional “rip and replace” core transformations, multi-year, billion-dollar, open-heart projects, often fail and are hard to manage while running the business. Instead, he argues for a “keyhole surgery” approach: keep core systems where possible, selectively hollow them out, and layer lightweight, modern capabilities and APIs around them. Crucially, he says banks should start with a small set of high-impact, customer-visible use cases, rather than focusing first on back-office automation that customers never see.

Looking ahead, Ullenius sees a major opportunity for incumbents to combine their two structural advantages – trust and scale – with AI and real-time analytics. New entrants can move quickly, but they struggle to replicate deep, long-term trust and the breadth of data and relationships that large banks already hold. CSG imagines a model where the human workforce focuses on relationships, trust-building and complex judgement, while an “AI workforce” runs much of the operations, analytics and decisioning at real-time speed. If incumbents get that combination right, he believes they can go on the offensive against neobanks and fintechs, not just defend their position.

Finally, on culture and execution, CSG circles back to customer centricity. If he were leading transformation at a bank, he says he’d start by uniting all functions – sales, marketing, product, IT, finance, treasury – around a single, customer-led portfolio for the segments they serve. From there, each group would be pushed to rethink how they work: how products are built and operated, how systems are designed, how service is delivered in real time. That’s where culture genuinely shifts – when teams change the way they operate, not just their language.

Combined with modern tech layered on resilient cores and AI at scale, Ullenius argues that incumbents can become “banks of tomorrow”: faster and more relevant, while still grounded in the trust and stability that set them apart.