Don’t Break the Bank: Run IT, Change IT

This is not so much of a best of episode as a taster for some of the topics we have covered and to tease / encourage you to go listen to the prior episodes.  

• We have had a diverse group of guests, customers, partners, industry thought leaders and colleagues.
• The deep dive has given us a rich conversation into the heart of some of the meatier topics of Financial Services, Technology and FinTech.
• You can find all of our episodes at dontbreakthebankpodcast.com

Featured Guests: 

• Leda Glyptis, Advisory Board Member for Incuto
  • Follow her on LinkedIn 
  • Episode Link
• Ray O'Brien, COO at Quantexa
  • Follow him on LinkedIn
  • Episode Link
• Spencer Kimball, CEO at Cockroach Labs
  • Follow him on LinkedIn
  • Episode Link
• Ian Ellis, Founder of the London Enterprise Tech Meetup
  • Follow him on LinkedIn
  • Episode Link
• Paolo Sironi, global research leader in banking and financial markets at IBM, the Institute for Business Value
  • Follow him on LinkedIn
  • Episode Link
• Spiros Margaris, VC, Advisor, and Board member at Margaris Ventures
  • Follow him on LinkedIn
  • Episode Link

One last thing.

Lenka Kanakova has been behind the scenes supporting and promoting us both in the podcast and in all the other Financial Services activities at VMware.  Lenka is leaving us and we want to thank her for her dedication, support, and good humour.  All of us wish you the best of luck for the future, thank you.

Matthew O'Neill is a husband, dad, geek, and Industry Managing Director, Advanced Technology Group in the Office of the CTO at VMware.

You can find Matthew on LinkedIn and Twitter. Listen to his episode on DORA here! 

Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveler and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.

You can find Brian on 

LinkedIn

.

In this captivating conversation, we have the pleasure of hosting Joy Macknight, the first female Editor of the prestigious publication - The Banker. Join us as we journey through Joy's illustrious career, starting from her double major in biology and environmental studies to leading a team of editors and reporters covering the international banking industry. She shares intriguing insights into the challenges and innovation within the banking sector and talks about her journey to becoming the first female Editor of the Banker.

We explore the ever-evolving landscape of sustainable banking and finance. We discuss how banks are redefining their reporting, the challenges of comparisons, and the need to include new criteria such as biodiversity and social aspects. We then venture into the realm of Open Banking and Open Finance, whose potential in the UK is yet to be fully tapped. We also discuss the revolutionary potential of open banking and digital identity, touching on the significant role banks could play as trusted sources of digital identity certification.

Our conversation then shifts to the importance of gender focus in designing financial services and products, highlighting the potential for products tailored specifically for women. We examine the need for diversity in banks, the sobering reality of gender parity as per the ANF Gender Balance Index, and the various dimensions of diversity. Finally, we delve into the potential impact of quantum computing on banks and how banks need to gear up for this technological advancement. Listen in as Joy shares her thoughts on all these topics and invites everyone to join the Banker Publication community.

• Importance of Gender-Inclusive Design: Joy highlighted the significance of designing financial services and products with women in mind. By considering the different needs and life journeys of women, banks can create more inclusive and tailored offerings. Designing with a gender focus can also empower women and drive financial inclusion.
• Long Road to DEI: While progress has been made, there is still a long way to go in terms of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the financial services industry. Achieving gender parity alone is estimated to take around 140 years, highlighting the need for continuous efforts to foster diversity and equality in all aspects of banking, including leadership positions. 3. Quantum Computing as a Game-Changer: Joy discussed the potential impact of quantum computing on the banking industry. While it poses risks to current cryptography systems, it also presents opportunities for improved market intelligence and algorithmic capabilities. Banks should invest in understanding quantum computing and build the necessary talent to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.
• Quantum Computing as a Game-Changer: Joy discussed the potential impact of quantum computing on the banking industry. While it poses risks to current cryptography systems, it also presents opportunities for improved market intelligence and algorithmic capabilities. Banks should invest in understanding quantum computing and build the necessary talent to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.

• Some of the really interesting and quite innovative and new instruments that they're bringing to the capital markets, I think is really fascinating. And again, I think, the pressure of the impending climate crisis is just what we're facing at the moment really necessitates the banks to act, and what I feel is that they are doing that right so they're taking it very seriously they're moving into actually into the whole supply chains of their of themselves, but also of their corporate clients, and this is what we need to actually make a huge change.
• ​​When you think of banking as a service, a lot of banks are already starting to think about that. They're thinking about embedding their services and other platforms or other apps.Then they're also thinking about creating their own super apps so that everyone can, you know, work through the banking app to access other lifestyle activities that you want to do, et cetera.
• Looking at gender data and actually unpicking that, and then finding out what makes sense, not just male customers, but also female customers, because a female's life journey can be very different, right?And if you're just designing products for men, with men in mind, then you're actually missing out.So why not design a pension for women specifically.
• It comes to financial inclusion, but also female empowerment, etc. And then getting funding to women entrepreneurs is also a big thing that they're working on, which I think is really important.
• When you look at it from a gendered lens you can really see that there has been some impact, but at the same time it hasn't been enough in terms of all the different levels within the banks.And I think that's really important when we talk about designing financial services products for women. What you really want is to have women as part of that designing culture, etc. But also, you know, working at all the different levels of the bank.
• What you want to have in any bank, is you want to have those diverse communities represented, so that you're actually serving those communities in the broader sense. And when you have a default design, you're designing for  just one aspect, whether it's, it's men or whatever. When in actual fact you want to be designing products and I think technology is there that you can do that personalization.

BIO:

Joy Macknight is the Editor at The Banker. 

She joined the publication in 2015 as Transaction Banking and Technology Editor. Previously, she was features editor at Profit & Loss, editorial director at Treasury Today and editor at gtnews. She also worked as staff writer on Banking Technology and IBM Computer Today, as well as a freelancer on Computer Weekly.

LinkedIn link to Joy

Twitter link to Joy

Link to The Banker

Here is the link to the Womens World Banking conference

Link to the 2018 article, Will the digital world solve the identity crisis?

Matthew O'Neill is a husband, dad, geek, and Industry Managing Director, Advanced Technology Group in the Office of the CTO at VMware.

You can find Matthew on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveler and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.

You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

In this episode, our podcast host, Matthew O’Neill takes us on a deep dive “Exploring DORA”, Europe’s new Digital Operational Resilience Act which is being suggested, will be as significant for Financial Services as GDPR has been to the rest of us.

Matthew discusses the key provisions of DORA and how it aims to ensure the robustness and resilience of the financial system in the digital age. We'll uncover Matthew’s take on the motivations behind the act, its implications for financial institutions, IT service provider partners, and even the regulators, all with the aim of providing protection for consumers. 

From cyber threats to operational disruptions, DORA's framework addresses a wide range of risks and sets new standards for digital operational resilience. Matthew makes it clear that regulators from other jurisdictions are watching with interest.

In addition, we learn of Matthew’s unprecedented journey in the financial sector; from an office junior at a local bank in the UK to becoming the Head of Infrastructure and Operations in Asia and then the Global Head of Data centres and IT Service Management at one of the world’s largest banks, and then on to his landing here at VMware. 

Matthew’s take on DORA gives you a true insider’s perspective. It’s a must-listen!

1. DORA emphasizes that operational resilience is not limited to financial services firms alone. The entire ecosystem supporting critical services must be considered. This means mapping out end-to-end processes, understanding who and what is involved, and ensuring full observability to keep things running optimally.
2. DORA introduces a significant shift in regulatory testing. Supervisors will now conduct tests on production systems especially where these are sharing cloud infrastructure with multiple firms. Stress testing operational resilience will become a priority, moving away from a mere tick-box exercise.
3. To comply with DORA's requirements, both financial service providers and their partner firms should invest in regulatory risk professionals and banking risk specialists. The act will challenge existing assumptions and practices. It might reveal whether claims of regulatory constraints are genuine or merely used as an excuse for avoiding technological advancements. This suggests that firms will need to navigate a potentially uncomfortable period of reevaluation and adaptation.

•  It's not just about the financial services firm.It's also about, the whole ecosystem that supports you in the provision of what are deemed as critical or important services. So, if you have one of those types of service, you've really got to map out end to end, how that operates, who operates through, who's touching what part of it and making sure that you're not just monitoring it, but you've got like full observability as to what's going on, who's doing what, where, when, and why, and if anything goes wrong, how quickly you can bring that back.
• The big differences now though, is that there will now be testing performed and you've got to perform tests, but it's also the supervisors are likely to be performing tests and they'll be performing tests on production systems that are potentially running on the same cloud infrastructures as many other [financial service] firms and many other firms. So, there's going to be much more stress testing of that operational resilience than it ever being a kind of a governance, tick box exercise. So I think that's one thing that's got folks concerned.
• What's going to happen here is there's going to be an increased level of transparency. I can kind of say maybe an implicit increase in levels of trust between FSI firms and their supplier partners, because the supplier partners are going to be held to account for what's running. And if they don't know what's running,that's a little bit of a hard position to be in. So, I think an unintended consequence of this is actually going to be a greater amount of visibility. for the firms that are uncomfortable with that, and there will be some, then their risk appetites might take them back to, ‘Oh, actually now we need to be doing more on prem or we now need to move some of that workload away from public clouds and into colo facilities or back into data centers.’ Or vice versa, ‘actually, we've got such a great relationship with this.Hyperscaler, we need to put more with them.’”
• The more critical service providers and partner firms that we work with need to seriously think about employing some banking risk managers and regulatory risk professionals to help them navigate the potential of where this could go. I think it's going to be a little bit uncomfortable for a little bit of the time. One of the objections that often comes up talking with a customer about implementation or the potential to, to consume more technology is, ‘Oh yeah, the regulator won't let me do that’.or, ‘that's against our regulatory stance’. Or ‘the regulator is used in that way.’ We and our supplier partners are about to experience, well, what does that, what does that really mean? Is that something you're literally hiding behind or is it something that there is, um, there's a lot of truth in?

Matthew O'Neill is a husband, dad, geek, and Industry Managing Director, Advanced Technology Group in the Office of the CTO at VMware.

You can find Matthew on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveler and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.

You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

BIO:

Matthew is a Financial Services Industry thought leader, helping VMware customers and partners get the most from their technology investments. He is one of the senior leaders in VMware's GTM Strategic Ecosystem & Industry Solutions team. He works with customers, partners, the media and industry analysts to differentiate VMware's capabilities.  

Matthew works closely with the Strategic Ecosystem of partners, ISVs, Hyperscalers and Global Systems Integrators to develop industry-specific solutions to fulfil Financial Services customers' requirements.

Within the Industry Solutions team, Matthew is at the forefront of the new ways of working, driving delivery of industry solutions from ideation through GTM to adoption and improving VMware's industry relevance.

Matthew is a former Managing Director from HSBC, where he was the Global Head of Data Centres & IT Service Management. he spent five years in Hong Kong running IT Infrastructure & Operations across the Asia Pacific region and, before that, was responsible for HSBC's EUC & Telecoms globally.

Matthew brings this extensive Financial Services Executive expertise to share lessons, insights and opportunities with customers, partners and colleagues on their Cloud Journeys, Employee Experience and Digitisation/Digitalisation Transformations. He is called upon to provide opinion and actionable insight on the breadth of Financial Services, from the role of Artificial intelligence to Operational Resilience and even emerging regulations.

In this episode, we’re joined by Paolo Sironi, who shares his unique journey from banking to FinTech entrepreneurship and to his current role as  global research leader in banking and financial markets at IBM, the Institute for Business Value. In our discussion, he emphasizes the need to understand the human being when innovating in the world of FinTech and banking transformation. He recounts his career-defining moments where he had to choose between doing research and working in customer service, and how this experience shaped his understanding of the behavior of finance and customer interactions with services.We explore banking and Fintech in platform economies. Paolo discusses his experience of creating the risk management architecture methodology for a large Italian bank and how this knowledge influenced his approach to tech innovation.He talks about his proudest moment of writing books, the feedback he received from the community, and how these experiences have helped him make more grounded judgments in financial services. We also discuss platform strategies that can help banks generate more value for their clients, as highlighted in Paolo's latest book, Banks and Fintech on Platform Economies.

Discover how digitalizing value can positively impact society, why bankers are still needed, and the challenges of running a payment platform at scale. Paolo also highlights the role of AI in banking and how technology can empower customers to make informed decisions. In addition, we touch on the potential of quantum computing in revolutionizing financial services, the power of language, and the importance of mentorship. Paolo's unique perspective on these topics makes for a must-listen episode.

1. The importance of understanding human nature and behvaior when adapting AI platforms and services into services like banking
2. Emphasizing of transparency with technology and AI to embolden trust with the public
3. Banking and Bankers are very much alive despite the Bill Gates proclamation of 1994.  Banker / Customer relations are imperative for high value Investments and Insurance products.

• The economy is a platform. We should not forget that. Society is a platform where we operate, even politics is a platform. Financial services are a platform. So all of these platforms need to interact. But typically we don't think platforms, we think very narrow or very linear models. And it is that change in perspective that enables us to understand why the financial services platform is not working as it should, and the economy is not working as it should.
• If you think about money, money is there for the survival of the individual. If we didn't have money, I would be in Germany growing potatoes. You would be in the UK still growing your potatoes. Some of my Italian friends would be growing their tomatoes. It would be difficult for us to interact. But now that we have money, I can have work. I can move around easily. I can meet you. And we lost that understanding of the real reason for money to be there. But understanding that enables us to identify the value of money and financial intermediation. And if we identify the value correctly, we can digitalize that value.
• You need to identify what is the value for the consumer. And then once you identify that, you can define how technology enables you to generate that value. Because effectively, without technology, it's difficult to still work on good relationships because they become very expensive in terms of training, in terms of deployment, in terms of execution.
• Every time you need to make a decision in life, typically there's a financial transaction involved. Meaning paying or getting credit where I borrowed my money in order to make it happen. And sometimes that is a complex decision and you have to go back to the bank. You have to think about it, you have to supply a lot of information. If the bank can reduce the friction, that is part of a journey outside banking where banks participate in the journey just by enabling individuals to complete the process, they will unlock new value because the economy, the ecosystem around them will work more efficiently, right, and more seamlessly.Now the problem with this is that how do you get paid for the elimination of friction? In fact, the definition of the contextual banking platform strategy is that the opportunity to eliminate the friction makes banking contextualized, that means embedded, to unlock new value.
• The role of technologies like AI and data, again, is to unlock that value of the relationship that is dishomogeneous, is not even, because many people talk to [too] many clients. So you need to figure out how to help everyone.To get into better conversations where the value is positioned for the decision making process. And that will allow these people to see the value and pay the fee for accessing the advisory platform. So it's a transformation of banks towards trusted advisory institutions. So you will have embedded finance on one side, trusted advisory institutions on the other side.

Paolo Sironi is the global research leader in banking and financial markets at IBM, the Institute for Business Value. He is a former start-up entrepreneur – focused on digitalisation of wealth and asset management. He started his career as a quant, leading risk management organisations in investment banking. Paolo is the author of business literature about finance, banking, and digital innovation. His latest bestseller “Banks and Fintech on Platform Economies” explores how platform theory, born outside of financial services, will make its way inside banking and financial markets to radically transform the way firms do business.  

For more information:

You can follow Paolo on his  LinkedIn

For more information, thePSironi.com

“Banks and Fintech on Platform Economies” http://relinks.me/1119756979

About the Hosts

Matthew O'Neill is a husband, dad, geek, and Industry Managing Director, Advanced Technology Group in the Office of the CTO at VMware.

You can find Matthew on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveler and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.

You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

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In this episode, we delve into a conversation with Dr. Leda Glyptis, an accomplished fintech leader and former banker. With over two decades of experience driving transformation and technology across diverse financial sectors, Leda explores the inherent ties between banking, fintech, and the current technological surge. Discover how these domains can seamlessly integrate into the tech revolution by aligning with the established systems of traditional banks and corporations. Tune in to gain insights from this seasoned fintech veteran, as she guides us through the pivotal juncture where digital innovation and banking converge.

Join us for a compelling discussion on the evolving landscape of finance in the digital age.

1. The lagging adaptation of digital tech in banking and Fintech
2. Doing the right thing over doing the thing right and embracing failure
3. Learning from a company’s legacy and the technical debt 

• “You need to make sure that you fail fast and fix it, but you also need to make sure that you fail small and fix it.”
• “So increasingly who gets it for me, the people who start talking about their end customer, their data strategy, and their overall cost to serve ahead of showing me wireframes of their UX. They're the people who get it.”
• “Leave aside the business model and how certain players in that space make money. What happens to all the systems that need to know what happened in real time for liquidity management? For everything that happens downstream, and we've been talking about, um, real time clearing and settlement for years.We know it's coming.”
• “There is no such thing as an organization that doesn't have technical debt. There just isn't. There will be corners that are cut because Bobby has a date and has to ship and go out and freshen up to meet his date.There's corners that will be cut 'cause money's short, or there's a deadline looming, or because you didn't think of something. And there will always, always, always, either because you didn't think something was important or because something else was more important, or 'cause you had a blind spot. So there is no such thing as no legacy and there is no such thing as no technical debt.”

Leda is a seasoned fintech executive and former banker, with a career spanning two decades working int transformation and technology functions across a variety of financial services verticals.Leda works as an advisor to boards and executive teams for companies of all sizes, from young startups to globally significant financial institutions, supporting leadership teams in transition: be it a process of transforming themselves, their business or their software infrastructure. Leda served as the Chief Client Officer of 10x Banking and the founding CEO of 11:FS Foundry (both in the cloud-native core banking space); she was the Chief Innovation Officer of Qatar National Bank and held a variety of innovation and transformation roles at BNY Mellon.Leda sits on the board of Flagstone IM. Over the years, she has held a number of NED positions in fintech firms in Europe and the UK including chairing the Board of Geophy (now a Walker and Dunlop company) through its successful exit. Leda is a frequent keynote speaker at flagship industry events globally including Sibos, M20/20, Finovate as well as specialist regional events; she is the author of the highly acclaimed #LedaWrites column on Fintech Futures and the book ‘Bankers Like Us: Dispatches from an Industry in Transition’ published by Taylor and Francis in 2023. Leda completed her undergraduate studies at King’s College Cambridge and holds an MSc and PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

You can connect with Leda on her LinkedIn

Follow her on Twitter  @LedaGlyptis

Order her book “Bankers Like Us” HERE

Matthew O'Neill is a husband, dad, geek and Industry Managing Director, Advanced Technology Group in the Office of the CTO at VMware.

You can find Matthew on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveler and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.

You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

In this episode, we talk with Tony Boobier, a consultant, mentor, author and advisor with a specialisation with AI and financial services. Tony delves into hype surrounding AI's role in everyday life. He discusses the fear-driven perceptions of data-driven decisions, pondering the motives behind the hype, and its influence on society's view of AI. 

The episode also explores the practical applications of Generative AI in understanding vast amounts of data. From Customer Satisfaction to Risk Management, we talk through AI's current efficiency and areas that still need improvement and emphasise the need for organisations to integrate AI sustainably, with focus on Stakeholder Management. 

Join us and gain valuable insights from this thought leader who provides an objective perspective on the evolving AI landscape.

1. The overhype of AI’s role in everyday life
2. Making sense of all the data through generative AI for human understanding 
3. What AI can do for us today efficiently and where it still needs improvement 

• “You have to ask yourself,  why all the hype? You know, who is driving all this hype? Of course, there's a lot of fear around the whole topic. People kind of envisage a world of data driven decisions as being very dystopian really. They're frightened by what they've seen in 1984 and what they learned from Hollywood, and there is an element of that, of course. But a lot of the hype particularly has been driven, I think, by people with a vested interest. Particularly large organisations who are trying to drive stockholder value. Small organisations that are trying to establish a niche in the market. And maybe also, you know, dare I say it, the media who are keen to identify what is the buzzword of the moment. And AI seems to be one of those buzz words. And therefore, you know, put the expression AI into a title and it almost becomes clickbait, really.
• “I've found sometimes that smaller organisations particularly  have a technical capability and they throw it to the wall and say, ‘you know, how can I make this work in a FSI industry or, or any other industry?’ And that for me is looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Organisations need to focus on what's important to them. Customer retention, customer satisfaction, risk management,  reduction of operational cost, and if AI and advanced technologies is the way that they do that, then all well and good, but, you know, don't view AI as being the panacea to all of that.”
• “Any data transition, any AI transition or whatever you wish to call it, needs to be part of an integrated sustainable program rather than something which is on the wish wishlist of an individual. So stakeholder management becomes absolutely critical. “
• “One of the joys, one of the pleasures of being an independent consultant, as I am now, is that you, you do have the ability to, to step back and be a little more objective perhaps than towing the corporate line and that I find very helpful.”

Consultant, Mentor, Author and Advisor on AI and Financial Services

Tony Boobier is a UK-based technology executive with over 40 years of international experience. With a global viewpoint focussing on data, analytics and AI for the Financial Sector, he currently operates as an independent consultant, executive mentor and advisory board member.  

He is author of 4 books: ‘Analytics for Insurance’ (2016), ‘Advanced Analytics and AI: Impact, Implementation and the Future of Work’ (2018), ‘AI and the Future of Banking’ (2020), and his lockdown project ‘AI and the Future of the Public Sector’ (2022). He is also editor / contributor to multiple other publications.

www.tonyboobier.co.uk

Connect with Tony on Linkedin

You can find more from Tony here… https://www.tonyboobier.co.uk/

And, you can also find Tony’s books here…  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Tony-Boobier/e/B085QMF7DY

https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B085QMF7DY

Matthew O'Neill is a husband, dad, geek and Industry Managing Director, Advanced Technology Group in the Office of the CTO at VMware.

You can find Matthew on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveler and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.

You can find Brian on 

LinkedIn

.

In this episode, we talk with Ian Ellis, Technology Strategist, Angel Investor, Venture Partner and Founder of the London Enterprise Tech Meetup. Ian Ellis is an experienced Technology Strategist who has driven C-level stakeholder engagement across some of world's leading organisations, including Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Prudential Financial, Microsoft and Bank of Ireland. His work involves aligning the high-level objectives for an organisation with its technology and business strategies, particularly related to how it drives practical innovation and also engagement with the external ecosystem of emerging technologies, investors and incumbent tech players.

Ian covers a lot of topics including generative AI and its potential applications, reporting requirements around ESG, and the need for thoughtful regulation, responsible innovation, and sustainable practices in the financial services industry.

• Well placed regulations can help drive innovation
• Virtual advancements are having physical, global impacts
• FinOps is on the rise

• “One of the things that people never think about is the importance of regulation. I think if you look at financial services and regulation in Europe, I think the European Union has been a very enabling force within the financial services ecosystem, with things like SEPA, PSD2, and all these types of regulations that drive, [or] actually force innovation a little bit. I think about regulation as a breathing thing, or a human thing is the wrong thing to way to describe it. But if you look across regions and how they regulate that has an impact on the innovation ecosystems in those regions.”
• “Actually, what the FinTech lab helped people realize is that the financial services industry and the ecosystem is, it's not a zero-sum game. There are winners and losers on all sides. So, if you disrupt a retail bank in say, you know, foreign currency, you're probably actually making money for an investment bank or a broker dealer on the other side. So, banks win somewhere else if they don't win on the front line in retail, they're winning in the backend and syndicating something.”
• “Because the thing with financial products [is] often [that] they're reasonably similar with nuances and differences on the edge, and sometimes those differences are important, sometimes they're not. So, working out how to think about that type of stuff in a way that makes sense. I think some of the challenges around AI and loading large volumes of data in is the time to market stuff. So that you need to think about the data being current. Nobody made money in a market looking at yesterday's data or the day before that.”
• “So, it's like everything ties back to physical somewhere. And the costs of some of these technologies are things that people don't think about enough in terms of sustainability.”

Technology Strategist, Angel Investor and Founder of the London Enterprise Tech Meetup

Ian Ellis is an experienced technology strategist who has driven C-level stakeholder engagement across some of world's leading organisations, including Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Prudential Financial, Microsoft and Bank of Ireland. He has also been involved in Venture Capital, working for a period as a Venture Partner at an enterprise tech VC firm called Next47.

Typically his work involves aligning the high level objectives for an organisation with its technology and business strategies, particularly related to how it drives innovation and also engagement with the external ecosystem of emerging technologies, investors and incumbent tech players.

Ian co-founded the OperAngels syndicate of industry experts, focused predominantly on making angel investments in the enterprise tech and cyber security spaces. He is also the Founder of Enterprise Tech London (formerly the London Enterprise Tech Meetup) and was an entrepreneurial driving force behind the launch of Accenture’s FinTech Innovation Lab in London.

He holds a BA in Economics & Information Studies from University College Dublin and an MSc in Analysis, Design & Management of Information Systems (with distinction) from the London School of Economics.

Ian is based in London, but works globally, and has previously worked in London, New York and Dublin.

—

Connect with Ian on Linkedin

Check out the London Enterprise Technology Meetup at enterprisetech.london

Matthew O'Neill is a husband, dad, geek and Industry Managing Director, Advanced Technology Group in the Office of the CTO at VMware.

You can find Matthew on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveler and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.

You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

In this episode, we flip the script on our show and put Brian Hayes, Senior Director, Financial Services Industry Vertical at VMWare in the guest seat. We discuss the digital transformation of the financial services industry. Brian highlights the need for financial institutions to embrace digital transformation, adopt agile methodologies, and cultivate a culture of innovation to stay competitive in the rapidly changing industry.

Hayes emphasizes the importance of understanding customers' needs and preferences, using emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain to create personalized, relevant experiences. Brian also acknowledges the challenges of balancing innovation with regulatory compliance and risk management. Ultimately, successful digital transformation requires a collaborative approach, a focus on the customer, and a commitment to experimentation and continuous learning.

3 Takeaways:

• The financial services industry is undergoing a rapid and significant transformation driven by technology and changing customer expectations. Digital disruption is changing the way financial services are delivered and experienced, and financial institutions must adapt quickly to remain competitive. This transformation requires a deep understanding of customers' needs and preferences, as well as the ability to leverage emerging technologies to create new, innovative products and services.
• To stay competitive, financial services organizations must embrace digital transformation, adopt agile methodologies, and cultivate a culture of innovation. This requires a willingness to experiment and take risks, and the ability to quickly iterate and adapt in response to changing market conditions. Successful digital transformation also requires a collaborative approach, with cross-functional teams working together to develop and implement new solutions.
• Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and blockchain are revolutionizing the way financial services are delivered and creating new opportunities for innovation and growth. These technologies have the potential to transform everything from payments and lending to risk management and regulatory compliance. Financial institutions that can effectively leverage these technologies will be better positioned to create new revenue streams, improve customer experiences, and drive operational efficiencies. However, it's important to remember that technology alone is not enough – a successful digital transformation also requires a deep understanding of the business, the ability to navigate regulatory and compliance requirements, and a commitment to developing a culture of innovation.

Key Quotes: 

• "Digital transformation is not just about technology, it's about culture and mindset. Financial institutions must be willing to challenge the status quo, experiment with new ideas, and embrace a culture of innovation. This requires a willingness to take risks and try new things, even if they don't always work out. Success in digital transformation also requires a focus on the customer – understanding their needs and preferences, and delivering personalized, relevant experiences that meet and exceed their expectations."
• "Innovation requires experimentation, and experimentation requires a culture of tolerance for failure. Financial institutions must be willing to take risks and try new things, even if they don't always work out. This requires a culture that values experimentation and learning, and is willing to accept failure as an inevitable part of the innovation process. By fostering a culture of experimentation, financial institutions can create an environment where new ideas can flourish, and where teams are empowered to take risks and try new things."
• "The future of financial services is all about customer experience and delivering personalized, relevant services at scale. Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning can play a key role in delivering these experiences, but they must be deployed in a thoughtful and strategic way. Financial institutions must focus on understanding their customers' needs and preferences, and using technology to deliver solutions that meet those needs. By doing so, they can create differentiated experiences that drive customer loyalty and ultimately, business growth."

Best Career Advice:

• The most important thing you can do for your career is to be a lifelong learner. Keep an open mind, be curious, and never stop learning. Seek out new experiences, challenge yourself, and be willing to take risks. And always remember to stay humble and never stop asking questions.

Bio:

Brian Hayes, Senior Director, Financial Services Industry Solutions
 

Brian is accountable for the ecosystem, solution, and go-to-market strategy, of VMware’s offerings to Financial Services customers globally, working with the broader VMware ecosystem and partners including key global product, applications, and consulting organisations.

Formerly a Managing Director within the FS Industry, he brings considerable technology and business experience having held Global IT functional and leadership roles in Retail Banking, Capital Markets and Market Exchanges for such companies as HSBC, Barclays Bank, Morgan Stanley, and NYSE. He has also held General Manager and senior executive positions within the consulting services and systems integrator industry, leading global business lines and global programme delivery teams.

Operating globally throughout his career, he has lived overseas in the USA and Japan and for extensive periods lead initiatives and teams in locations as diverse as Brazil, Russia, Holland, France and India.

With this knowledge, skillset, and experience, he brings to life to client conversations and connection around not just the technology but also the specific business demands and themes, with relevancy to the broader industry challenges. He also sees the future based around open innovation and the co-creation of effective eco-systems, bringing all parties to the table to drive customer solutions and value creation.

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For more information:

Follow Brian on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-hayes-global-transformation-infrastructure-leadership-innovation-cyber-cloud-digital-delivery/

About the Hosts

Matthew O'Neill is a husband, dad, geek and Industry Managing Director, Advanced Technology Group in the Office of the CTO at VMware.

You can find Matthew on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveler and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.

You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

Welcome to Season 3, Episode 1 of Don't Break the Bank. In this episode, we speak with Joe Baguley, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, EMEA, at VMware. In his own words, Joe is the connection between R&D and the field, our customers, and our partners.  He drives all things around that, in terms of where we're going, what we're doing, what's next, and leading the technical community within VMware in EMEA.

Joe shares his insights on what the customers he meets with are telling him, the future of IT, and the role of VMware transformation in the cloud era. He discusses the challenges and opportunities of digital transformation, the importance of security and compliance, and how organizations can leverage technology to stay ahead of the competition. He digs into the use of the cloud and its future adoption and whether it has gone too far.  He also talks about how sustainability is becoming an economic requirement, as well as the rise and expanded use of automation in business. 

3 Takeaways:

• Digital transformation is not just about technology, but also about people and processes. Companies need to develop a clear strategy, invest in the right skills, and build a culture of innovation to succeed in this rapidly evolving landscape.
• Security and compliance are critical components of digital transformation. Organizations must integrate these requirements into their plans from the outset to avoid costly and damaging security breaches in the future.
• The role of the CTO is evolving from a purely technical role to a more strategic one. As technology becomes more central to business strategy, the CTO is becoming a more strategic partner to the CEO and other business leaders. This requires a different skillset and mindset than traditional IT, including a deep understanding of business strategy and the ability to communicate effectively with non-technical stakeholders.

Key Quotes: 

• "We're moving from a world where infrastructure was defined by hardware to a world where infrastructure is defined by software. The rise of cloud computing and software-defined infrastructure has enabled us to abstract the underlying hardware and treat it as a pool of resources that can be dynamically allocated to meet the needs of applications and workloads. This has made IT more agile, flexible, and scalable, and has enabled organizations to move faster and innovate more rapidly than ever before."
• "We need to think about security as an enabler of innovation, not a barrier to it. In today's world, security is not just a technical issue, it's a business issue. Customers and partners are increasingly asking about security and privacy as part of their due diligence process, and they want to work with companies that can demonstrate a strong security posture. By building security into our products and processes from the start, we can differentiate ourselves in the market and create new opportunities for growth."
• "One of the biggest challenges facing IT leaders today is how to balance the need for innovation with the need for operational excellence. It's not enough to just have a great idea, you also need to be able to execute on it reliably and at scale. This requires a different set of skills and processes than traditional IT, and it requires a culture that values both innovation and operational excellence. By balancing these two priorities, we can create sustainable value for our organizations and our customers."

Best Career Advice:

• Focus on building relationships and collaborating with others. Success is not just about what you know, but who you know and how well you can work with them. This is especially important in the technology industry, where innovation often happens at the intersection of different disciplines and perspectives. You need to be able to communicate effectively, build trust, and work together to achieve common goals.

Bio:

Joe Baguley

Company: Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, EMEA, VMware

Joe Baguley is VMware’s Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for EMEA, joining VMware in July 2011. He helps develop and communicate VMware’s strategy and vision with customers and partners, using his wealth of experience to help organisations reduce costs and better support users and business needs. As part of VMware’s Office of the CTO and its representative in EMEA, Joe assists VMware’s customers in understanding how to use today’s advances in technology to deliver real business impact as well as working with them to inform VMware’s R&D processes.

Joe is a recognised leader within the European technical community and considered one of the top 50 most influential leaders in UK IT. He won an award for data leadership in ‘Infrastructure & Protection’ in the 2016 Data 50 Awards and appeared in the Computer Weekly UKtech50, the Information Age Top 50 Data Leaders and the Cloud World Series’ Cloud 100 community board. He has played a key role in CloudCamp and other events, communicating how cloud technology fits into the broader IT landscape. Joe previously spent ten years at Quest Software where he was CTO of EMEA, shaping its direction and strategy.

In addition, Joe is also on several advisory boards at the European Commission and ETSI and is a founding committee member of the Data Centre Specialist Group at the British Computer Society which helped shape the European Code of Conduct for Data Centres.

Joe is based in the UK but his remit is across Europe, Middle East and Africa.

For more information:

Follow Joe on Twitter - @JoeBaguley

and on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/joebaguley

Joe’s most recent blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/be/2023/02/2023-top-it-observations-by-joe-baguley-cto-emea-vmware/

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About the Hosts

Matthew O'Neill is a husband, dad, geek and Industry Managing Director, Advanced Technology Group in the Office of the CTO at VMware.

You can find Matthew on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveler and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.

You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

Spencer talks with us about building a next generation database with Cockroach Labs. He discusses the importance of distributed databases to use effectively and efficiently the commodity hardware found in the cloud, that can’t be specialized and can scale rapidly. Spencer explains about the new realities of doing business across multiple regions with diverse databases, and what is being done to protect information and maintain continuity. He also sheds light on how CockroachDB on what they can do to help them push the envelope.

3 Takeaways:

• In the modern era, certainly since the advent of the web, the scale that many applications have to grapple with rapidly exceeds what used to be considered enterprise scale. 
• The use cases that demand distributed database capabilities are the norm today, as opposed to a newly ascendant luxury kind of capability.
• Consistent replication is something that you really need, and the ultimate differentiator comes in if you care about multi-region operation.

Key Quotes: 

• “What really defines the sort of flavor of distributed database, which Cockroach is, is a need to really use effectively and efficiently the sort of commodity hardware that you find in the cloud. That's the critical thing, so it can't be specialized hardware. The distributed database is just sort of the natural evolution of any of these architectures when you realize that you can only scale vertically so far. And, as you scale vertically, you're really limited to a single location where that hardware sits, and it might be a big, supercomputer, very expensive, but it's still only one location.” 
• “Ultimately you do have to distribute, if you want to have the kind of business continuity that's required in most mission critical applications, because a data center can go down. So, that means you have to be re replicating your data to another location. So, you immediately have redundancy if you've got a failover or a distributed, you know, just a de facto distributed database.”
• “When you're talking about just scale, and data intensivity scale, and how much data is under management, and how quickly is it growing? It's big tech. I mean, some of these use cases are mind blowing with the total amount of data that they're starting to write every day. And, it's accelerating in many cases.”
• “What we've seen is that you can pretty much do anything, but you're going have to make some trade off. And, those trade-offs often are quite reasonable. So, that's sort of the art really, of composing these systems.”

Best Career Advice:

Start off at a company where there's a lot for you to learn at the best company that you can find.

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Bio:

Spencer Kimball

Co-Founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs

Spencer Kimball is the co-founder and CEO of Cockroach Labs, where he maintains a delicate balance between a love for programming, distributed systems, and the excitement of helping the company grow smoothly. While attending the University of California at Berkeley, he was one of the original authors of the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP). He worked on databases during the heyday of the dot com era, and worked for Google during much of their biggest growth and impact.

After college he co-founded WeGo, a company providing tools for building web communities and served as the company's co-CTO. In 2000, he created a web-based version of GIMP, OnlinePhotoLab.com, with the technology subsequently folded into Ofoto's online image manipulation tools. Kimball started work with Google in 2002 where he helped spearhead Colossus, a new version of the Google File System. He also worked on the Google Servlet Engine. In January 2012, Kimball launched the company Viewfinder which developed an app that allowed social media users to share photos, chat privately, and search photo history without leaving the app. The company was acquired by Square, Inc. in December 2013. He then formed CockroachDB, an open source project he started on GitHub in February 2014.

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For more information:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/spencerwkimball/

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About the Hosts

Matthew O'Neill describes himself as husband, dad, geek and IT Exec.  He an Industry Managing Director within VMware’s Strategic Ecosystem & Industry Solutions (SEIS) team.

You can find Matthew on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveler and Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.

You can find Brian on LinkedIn.