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The Head of Sourcing & Procurement for Silicon Valley Bank, Steven Jo joins us. Being in finance, he’s not out front in a customer facing role, but he does feel that everything he does leads to some client benefit- such as improving the ability to support clients, ensuring services are consistently delivered in a timely fashion, keeping costs down to service clients at an attractive price point, etc. Adding intrigue to his day is that he’s sometimes a client for his client’s products and services which means that he does have a nice bird’s eye view of what’s next in technology trends. Which means that buzzwords for you are clients for him.

Martin Ax joins us from the RPA & AI BFSI Summit to urge his colleagues not to get too caught up in how many bots are working. He feels that the focus should be on how good you are at developing automation, how much benefit are you receiving and ensuring its part of an overall strategy. Automation can be a journey to the front of the customer experience. Once you’re overtly effective at automation development, no process should be too small for those lean and six sigma minded folks. Executing automation in a financial services environment forces you to be as precise as everyone should be based on the highly regulatory nature of the industry.

The Senior Vice President of Global Merchant Support at Visa, Jeff Allison joins us from CCW Fall and shares that he came to Visa through the acquisition of Cybersource. Visa, Jeff notes is a surprisingly small company which leads one to understand that it’s actually a technology company. The value Visa saw in Cybersource was he engagement and insight into the merchant realm. The disparate nature of the merchants Jeff and his team service is stark- everything from the largest companies on earth to the smallest mom and pop shops. That makes threading the needle on customer management difficult to say the least. The key is the data at the agent’s fingertips.

Joining us from OPEX Summit in San Diego, Cyndi Creamer shares what she’s doing in Business Transformation on the Robotics team for Swiss Re. She notes that there’s a fair amount of hype around robotics and we all need to remember that it is in fact a tool. She goes further in saying that it works for some whereas it doesn’t work for others. Cyndi dives in saying that there’s a whole tool box and robotics is just one of the tools in that box. So if you’ve been piece-mealing your system together for years and you realize that you’ve got a lot of gaps... is it wise to keep filling in those gaps with robotics now or do you need to look at your entire platform first.

The Vice President of Finance Systems for the CEO Office at Oracle, Loren Mahon joins us and shares that she’s chartered with internal business transformation internally at Oracle, particularly around things that impact financial systems and processes- which she points out- for any enterprise sized company- is almost anything. But particularly- the internal cloud strategy, looking at enterprise reporting strategy, data governance, M&A integration, etc and how that all links back to what’s being done from a systems, process and shared services perspective. Overall Loren and her team have four steps for business transformation- simplify, standardize, centralize and automate.

Vice President IT, for DVB Bank, Ingo Zymni joins us from the RPA & AI BFSI Summit where he shares that providing solutions is not the only thing that his group does. They design those solutions and design the processes behind the solutions. Ingo and the team like to challenge the way things are done. They try to streamline processes to set the base for more efficient work throughout the bank generally. As he and the team add more services as they get deeper into the bank they’re finding that automation and machine learning are tools that meet their demands as they’ve got a fair amount of unstructured data. When sourcing cognitive solutions, Ingo’s concern, which he admittedly needs to validate, is that the cost benefit of the solution is based on the scope and scale of the client in question

Senior Director of Global E-Commerce for Mondelez, Ganesh Kashyap joins us from Customer Experience Management Asia where he shares that in order to understand where consumers are going and be there in an appropriate way, you need to understand where they’ve come from. The companies categories and brands are typically sold offline in supermarkets and consumers go to supermarkets to make their grocery purchases. Biscuits and chocolate may or may not be on that list, but it means that when consumers make the decision over time to start to buy their groceries online, Ganesh and his team absolutely need to make sure that the categories that they play in are available in the online environment and ensure that consumers are reminded in that environment that these categories are available.

Patty Hatter joins us from OPEX Summit San Diego where she shares her experience as a CIO buying, as a GM building and as an executive leading transformation at sizable organizations. Patty says that it’s a lot of fun when you’re able to move through the transformation change, figuring out how to put the puzzle pieces together in a way that makes sense for your team, for the organization and moves the business forward. A key tool for Patty during any transformation is "radical transparency.” She coined the term to combat and debunk any distrust or misunderstanding between IT and everyone else in the organization.

Recently retired EVP & CFO of Revlon Inc, Juan Figuereo joins us and notes that upon reflection the shared services industry is in a very good place. There are many options and with RPA there’s a new world of opportunity to improve efficiencies, reduce cost and improve capabilities. Juan shares that typically, the Fortune 500 tend to be more progressive, they’re more focused on cost efficiency and looking forward- so they’re ready for automation. In his opinion processes do not need to be optimized in order to automate. But that comes hand in hand with outsourcing those processes for automation. Regarding his CFO role, it was aspects of the strategic agenda that kept him up at night. Back office only came into his mind if he was concerned with something…if something was going wrong.

Charles Mulinder joins us from the RPA & AI BFSI Summit in London where he shares that he’s originally South African, spent a good portion of his life in the UK and currently lives in Zurich, Switzerland. He’s worked within the financial services industry for 20 years and he notes that it turns out that while there are many people in the industry, counterintuitively, it’s a small circle and a relatively compact network. Charles brings the straightforward perspective that European banks all have significant cost targets. There are inefficiencies and legacy costs which need to be pared down. Unfortunately a lot of that cost is with people so the number of people engaged in banking services must go down. Of course, one of the levers that you use to achieve that is automation.