How Truist is betting on 5G to help it experiment with cutting-edge tech and cut costs

Truist is using 5G to help modernize its brand, as well as to reach the bank's goal of saving $1.6 billion in net costs.

• Truist is piloting 5G tech across the bank, including implementing it at its innovation hub.
• Ken Meyer, a Truist tech exec, spoke with Insider about the superregional bank's plans. 
• This article is part of "How 5G Is Changing Everything," a series about transformational 5G tech across industries.

When BB&T and SunTrust merged in 2019 to create one of largest consumer banks in the country, at the top of its to-do list was setting up its new brand.

The bank, which renamed itself Truist, wanted something that was different from the heritage-filled brands its predecessors held. BB&T, headquartered near Charlotte in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, had been around since 1872, while SunTrust, which was headquartered in Atlanta, was established in 1891. 

Truist was to represent the banks coming together to service its clients as a "true financial partner," CEO William Rogers told CNN Business in 2019. So the bank set out to brand itself as having reliable, modern systems.

Part of that strategy is focused on using 5G, the fifth generation of the mobile network, across various aspects of the bank. 

At 5G's lowest frequency band, it still performs faster than 4G, going at a rate of 50 to 250 megabits a second compared with 4G's network bandwidth of 35 to 100 mbps. The next frequency tier, 5G's midband, reaches 100 to 900 mbps, while its high band reaches 3 gigabits a second.

Meanwhile, 5G's latency, the amount of time it takes to transfer a packet of information from one point to another, takes 1 millisecond, while 4G takes 50 milliseconds.

It's not just about speed. While the bank declined to comment on how much money the 5G initiative would cost, a Truist spokesperson told Insider the tech plans were part of the bank's goal to save $1.6 billion in net costs.

"It's an investment. We have great metrics around ROI to ensure that we're working on the right things," Ken Meyer, the chief information and experience officer at Truist, told Insider, referring to the return on investment.

Truist has plans for 5G at its ATMs and innovation center

The bank, which oversees $545 billion in client assets and employs over 50,000 people, is in the middle of running a pilot where a handful of bank branches run solely on 5G instead of the traditional T1 lines for internet connectivity, Meyer said.

A T1 line is a type of telephone line that carries voice and data at a greater capacity and faster rate than a regular telephone line, making them great for commercial buildings. It has been an industry standard for decades and is still widely used apart from other options like ethernet.

In June, Truist debuted a 100,000-square-foot building in Charlotte called the Innovation and Technology Center. It provides a 5G hot spot as its main source of internet. The center will be a technology hub where Truist and its business partnerships, which include local universities and fintech startups, test out various ways to provide solutions to its customers.

Meyers said the center was already testing augmented reality and virtual reality with the 5G network.

Next on its list is determining whether 5G can be used for its ATMs.

"Those pilots are actively moving forward, and we expect that we will start to expand that pilot work this year and then roll out a broader leveraging of 5G networking across our entire footprint," Meyer said.

Verizon, of which Truist has been a client for years, is working with the bank on the rollout of 5G. The telecommunications company is also sending its staff members to Truist offices to conduct a series of training sessions for the bank's employees. According to Meyer, the two businesses are sharing information and experiences with each other to optimize their company cultures and customer experience.

"Thinking about channel deflection and ways to get people into the right channel seamlessly, whether it's through their contact centers or their stores or their online chats, we're all doing a lot of the same thing," he said.

For both companies, this is the tip of the iceberg of what they're doing to prepare for the future of their industries.

Verizon has been working with other financial-services companies to explore use cases for 5G. Last year, it announced a partnership with Mastercard to allow payments for in-store and online purchases to be processed through 5G.

Meanwhile, Truist has been partnering with Amazon Web Services and Unqork, an enterprise-software company, as part of its overall initiative to modernize its consumer-facing technology. 

Meyers said the bank wanted to be a leader among financial services in the 5G space but it's not interested in taking it over. It's more interested in making the space better. 

"We think that we can do that through our clients and, and providing the very best experiences that we can possibly give to them," he said.