Fifth Third Bank

Workday Testimonial Video: Fifth Third Bank

Fifth Third Bank is a super regional bank that focuses on commercial and retail banking, and we're located in Cincinnati, Ohio. We are currently looking to utilizing a growth strategy to expanding outside of our footprint. My area led the technology initiative of the Workday implementations.

When Fifth Third decided to modernize their general ledger platform, we realized that this was going to be a huge shift to the bank, not just a technology upgrade. The major benefit that Workday provided that our old ledger system didn't was that we were at a much more granular level of data. It offered transparency that helped with analysis, that helped with reporting, that helped make decisions.

We needed to look for a system integrator that was proficient in working in those large-scale initiatives system that understood banking rules, banking policies, banking requirements. And KPMG helped shape our strategy, our direction based on their experience that they had. They've been very successful in these large-scale financial upgrades, and so we wanted to leverage their experience, leverage their creativity and innovation as we built the solutions for Fifth Third.

Leveraging their accelerators helped us to build a strong foundation. It helped us to then be more scalable, to be more resilient, to be more adaptable. So when the financial economics change drastically or regulatory requirements change, we can change with it, too, because we built that solid foundation. We built a lot of standards, a lot of controls, so that way when we needed to flex or to change, we would have the ability to do so quickly.

After we implemented Workday, we had all of this information at our fingertips like real time and so with that we could develop metrics to see how many manual journal entries are we doing, how many canceled entries or eliminated entries, what is our closed period looking like day by day? So with KPMG's help, we were able to focus on what are some of those KPIs that we should be looking at to make it a little more efficient. Now we have the data to support our analysis and our research to find out, did something really happen and now how do we correct it?

Fifth Third and KPMG were very collaborative; we became one team. We had one common goal, one common objective, and as part of that, KPMG would constantly challenge us to think outside the box. And because of that we're in a better place than we would have been.

I think Fifth Third is positioned well with the process flows that KPMG helped design, and then with obviously the constant innovation of Workday. I think we are positioned to be at the front of that curve as we're trying to expand into new areas and really expand our footprint. This platform helps us to be scalable, helps us to be resilient to those change and helps us to be adaptable to as the constant change is happening that we can keep up with that and stay ahead of that curve.