Why Fifth Third's CIO mostly buys rather than builds tech in the race to compete against banking giants

Jude Schramm (Credit: Courtesy of Fifth Third Bancorp)

Fifth Third Bancorp ranks No. 17 among the top 20 U.S. banks, with operations stretching from the upper Midwest to the lower Southeast. But even with that reach, the company must carefully consider its technology spending to better compete with much larger rivals.

“Fifth Third isn’t a trillion-dollar bank—I don’t have the IT capital that they have at JPMorganChase, where my counterpart there, Lori [Beer, global CIO of JPMorganChase], has a budget that’s 20x mine,” says Jude Schramm, chief information officer at Fifth Third. “And so for us to be nimble, we had to strategically lean into partnerships and do a little bit more buy than build.”