The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network

The reason we don’t think of insurance as an industry on the cutting edge of technological innovation is that, well, it’s *not.* Not today anyway. Nonetheless, insurance’s brightest thinkers know a change is overdue and are making the transformation to digital a reality. Doing so involves the incorporation of robust data and analytics programs, and that’s precisely what we’re talking about on this episode of *The Resonance Test.*

Lynn Rivenburgh, VP of Business Consulting at EPAM, joins Harini Wilkinson, SVP & Head of Data & Analytics for Protector Plans, a subsidiary of Brown & Brown Insurance, and Sirat Chhabra, our Director of Insurance Data & Analytics Consulting, for an appraisal of the role data and analytics currently (and ideally should play) in the insurance business.

Wilkinson says that more and more insurance companies are investing in “data analytics strategies, in the road map to really use this to move forward.” She adds that the industry as a whole has been talking about the topic for some time but that the pandemic really escalated the need to act.

“We're seeing that data analytics and becoming an insight-driven organization has been one of the top three priorities for our clients,” says Chhabra.

Chhabra details the saga of becoming a data analytics-driven organization in three stages: data collection, data preparation, and product creation for data analysis.

And, of course, clients are all at different stages of data maturity.

“In my current organization, where we're at the beginning, we've never really used data to drive our business forward,” says Wilkinson. They are at “the beginning stages of really understanding what data is there and how do we structure it in a way that we can use it.”

Our three insurance-minded speakers get into the issues of data governance (a little silo-busting, please!), legacy systems, and the nuances of measuring success.

If you’re thinking about insurance, this conversation will certainly carry your interest!

Host: Alison Kotin

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

If a bank releases a new digital product, but it’s not intuitive enough to resonate with customers, does it make a noise? When a bank undergoes a major digital transformation, what steps can they take to help ensure the experience they’ve painstakingly crafted resonates with customers and makes the right kind of noise in the marketplace? These are the sorts of questions Alex Jimenez, EPAM’s Managing Principal of Financial Services Consulting, is asking of John Findlay, CEO of LemonadeLXP, in this #TakeItToTheBank conversation.

For many years now, Findlay and LemonadeLXP have introduced gamification to the onboarding process to improve the adoption rates of new digital products as banks roll these experiences out to their customers. “Inherently, we all want to believe we build software that’s intuitive, that people will easily understand and get up to speed on quickly,” says Findlay. “I think that optimism is born out of seeing amazing products like the iPhone and the iPad, but what’s forgotten is Apple had trillions to invest in UX.”

So how can banks make customers feel comfortable with their new tech following a major digital transformation? Findlay says: “The best way to drive adoption is through your frontline. But what we’ve learned is that at about 70% of financial institutions, staff don’t bank with their employer. So, if they don’t bank with you, they don’t use your tech and if they don’t use your tech, there’s no way they can have customer conversations about it.”

Given the current state of the global economy, providing customers with a satisfying digital experience is more important than ever. “We want to keep [customers] happy,” Jimenez says, “And not just customers but employees…because at the end of the day… if you’re not supporting people, there’s no point in putting more technology out there.” Findlay agrees. After all, it’s people who are the drivers of ROI when it comes to tech investments. And when customers embrace a bank’s tech and transition away from branch use to these digital transactions, the banks stand to see a major reduction in the costs of processing those transactions.

But the responsibility for effective digital transformation shouldn’t fall solely on frontline employees. Leaders within the organization need to be the driving force behind adoption. And that’s where gamification can have a major impact on motivating leaders to embrace and model the use of new digital products. Jimenez says, “Gamification can take someone [in leadership] who’s not interested in the topic, who doesn’t see it as impactful to their job because they’re the head of mortgage, for instance, and then suddenly they’re a champion of the system and really understand how it works.” That kind of top-down embracing of a product, a piece of software or a particular user experience can greatly drive literacy throughout the organization.

And that literacy has a direct impact on the bottom line. Findlay explains this notion through the lens of an agent in the contact center. Improved literacy means that agent is better equipped to walk customers through transactions, shortening talk time, improving the customer experience, and ultimately making the agent experience much less stressful (which can limit employee attrition).

Right now, it’s time to familiarize yourself with the full Silo Busting conversation. Get clicking!

Host: Mo Banjoko

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Scott MacAllister

Executive Producer: Ken Gordon

On the latest #CybersecurityByDesign conversation, we’ve got our minds set on… hacking. Bruce Schneier, author of the recently published *A Hacker’s Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society’s Rules and How to Bend Them Back Again,* chats with Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, about the hacking mindset and what it means for security in the age of generative AI.

Schneier gets the conversation rolling by defining a hacker as “Someone who finds a bug or vulnerability, a loophole in a set of rules, and exploits it to their advantage.”

He talks about hacking not just computers but tax systems, hockey, tax codes, and Formula 1 racing. Rehman mentions that he appreciated a couple of Schneider’s examples and Schneier replies: “There are a couple? There are dozens of examples! Examples are what makes the book fun!” (Reader: The book is fun indeed.)

Schneier notes that “hacking isn't necessarily good nor bad,” which might surprise some who live outside the perimeter of the cybersecurity world. “Hacking is how systems evolve. If I figure a clever way to use a system, to subvert a system that no one thought of before, there are benefits as well as costs.”

The guys then get into the inevitable topic of 2023: The costs and benefits of hacking in the context of AI.

“I think it's gonna be a big arms race in AI and security,” says Schneier, adding that in the near term, AI will benefit the defender. “The attacker is already attacking at computer speeds. Being able to defend at computer speeds will be an enormous benefit.”

While he’s generally optimistic that AI will be good for the good guys, Schneier says “The transition period will be very chaotic.”

This chaos will come from the idea of AI has a hacker. He points to the idea of accountants—human ones—poring through tax code looking for loopholes to exploit: “That feels like something that you can train an AI to do,” he says. “And what happens when AI finds vulnerabilities in tax codes or financial regulations or other sets of laws? How will that work? How fast will they be? How clever will they be? Will they find things that are just so complicated that humans would never have found them?”

Schneier says that AI will increase the speed, scale, sophistication, and scope of hacking and wonders if these differences in degree will make a difference in kind. Then he answers: “The advances in AI in the past six months have been enormous. The next six months will be even bigger. Conversations we have today aren't going to be true in six months.”

What won’t change, however, is the hacker’s essential mind, which Reman admits has always been part of him: “I have always looked at everything as: ‘What else can I do with this?’”

“That’s totally the hacker mindset,” replies Schneier. “I don't think you can train that. I think that is something you either are or are not.”

Host: Macy Donaway

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

When it comes to artificial intelligence, how responsible is the financial services industry? How responsible must it be? And how what steps should it take to get there? These are the sort of questions Alex Jimenez, EPAM’s Managing Principal of Financial Services Consulting, is asking of Kathryn “Kate” Hughes, our Director of LegalTech and ERM Business Consulting, in this #TakeItToTheBank conversation.

Hughes says that many financial firms have long invested in AI and they’re “starting to see a level of incremental benefit from AI.” She mentions a tool called ChatGPT—you might have heard about it—and says that people have been looking for a “sweet spot of a scenario or a use case” and that ChatGPT “hit it out of the park.”

Jimenez notes that while it’s good to invest in AI, it’s important to view it realistically. “ChatGPT is not built to be to be replacing a call center,” he says. “It's not built to replace the advice from your licensed advisor or from your banker or from your accountant.”

The pair have both tested ChatGPT, and quickly found some limits. Jimenez recently asked it about himself. “It invented a whole biography, he says. “It talked about my life and how I lived in San Francisco and how I did all these things, which are not real. And then when I asked for the sources, the sources were made-up as well.” Hughes recently asked the AI about her pension. “It gave me a really good overview of the United States pension system but did not in any way actually answer my question.”

Hughes wisely argues for a measured approach to AI. “I think we have to be *adults* when engaging this technology,” she says. “One of the finest ways to engage AI is to think about it as a co-collaborator… rather than think of it as some, you know, alien other, and to sort of bring it into the mix.”

Risk is, obviously, a big issue here. “Banks need to start thinking about how they manage the risks around AI,” says Jimenez, and he warns against the danger of “digital redlining,” which is when “the data that we're using is biased and now the decisions that the AI is doing are biased as well.”

Hughes speaks about the guidelines proposed by the Wolfsberg Group and the proposed legislation for the EU harmonization of AI regulation, which call for things like ensuring that there is a legitimate purpose, making sure that there is accountability and oversight, openness and transparency built in.

Guidelines are great but the big question remains: How to move FS toward AI responsibility?

Hughes says there are two paths. The first involves insuring “that the organization has its own governance and policy, brand reputation and ethic.”

The second path involves education. Hughes recommends reading about the proposal for harmonized rules for AI across the EU, the Algorithmic Accountability Act, and the AI Bill of Rights and notes organizations should start familiarizing themselves “with the actual content of these proposed legislative items.”

Right now, it’s time to familiarize yourself with the full *Silo Busting* conversation. Get clicking!

Host: Alison Kotin

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Not *soccer* teams: SOC teams. When we say SOC, we’re talking, of course, about the Security Operation Center, a group charged with monitoring, detecting, preventing, and responding to cybert threats. In this #CybersecurityByDesign conversation Michael Mumcuoglu, CEO and Founder of CardinalOps, Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, and Aviv Srour, our Head of Cyber Innovation, illustrate the term with vivid examples and relevant, up-to-the-minute details.

The big challenge is the ever-increasing complexity of our digital systems. “The rate of tech adoption in the business and the evolving threat landscape are basically outpacing the SOC,” says Mumcuoglu. He says that SOC teams are involved in “a constant chase trying to catch up with all that change.”

Education is a constant for the SOC team. “With every new tool and with every new technology, that team needs to have now subject matter experts in really have a huge range of technologies,” Mumcuoglu says.

Part of the issue involves rules. “I have seen many incidents which could have been easily prevented with the proper rules,” says Srour.

The three cyber experts talk about collecting logs, blind spots, staying up-to-date and handling the burden of false positives.

Rehman says that for most CISOs, “the abundance of white noise” would not just cause a capacity problem, but would “numb the system down, meaning your teams would now no longer have the right awareness of what is really an anomaly, what is really odd, what is really something that requires investigation. That abundance of white noise actually would kill your system.”

In other words: SOC today is anything but a game. It’s serious business. Learn what it takes to train your team from some veteran players.

Host: Alison Kotin

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

There's value—business value—lodged in the cloud! But to begin releasing this value, a shift in mindset is required. Organizations need to understand that cloud isn't just for IT people but for business leaders seeking to create an adaptive organization and apply the idea of composable business.

Cloud is essential for creating composable business, and all it promises. In this *Silo Busting* conversation, Eli Feldman, EPAM's CTO of Advanced Technology, says: "Cloud service providers are API providers and this is fundamental in understanding... new ways of working." He talks about how cloud can help business "evolve its capabilities very rapidly, repackage them constantly to meet customer demand and IT technology."

Feldman says the cloud can enable a wide variety of services and endpoints through APIs that can integrate within an overall business platform capability.

His conversational partner Miha Kralj, EPAM’s VP of Cloud Strategy, notes that cloud can give the "illusion of global omnipresence," in which business "can reach to every corner of the world, not just because cloud is everywhere, but also reach of the internet and also digital savviness of all of the modern consumers that are out there."

Listen as these two experts talk about how the new cloudiness is changing the craft of modern engineering and introducing change management challenges to leadership everywhere (say Kralj: "The cheese is moving again, right?").

You don't want to just move to the cloud; you want, as Feldman says, to *become* the cloud. The episode will provide instructions on beginning to do so.

Host: Glen Gruber

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Everybody's talking about generative AI and ChatGPT… but few are doing so with the clear-eyed intelligence and honesty of Sandra Loughlin, EPAM's Chief Learning Scientist, and Alexandra Diening, our Head of Research & Insights for EMEA. In this episode of *Silo Busting,* our conversationalists think about how to optimize this new tech and the unique environment it is creating.

Loughlin says that, regarding ChatGPT, there are "people out there who wish they could turn back the clock and just bury their heads in the sand and pretend that doesn't exist. But generative AI is here, and we need to find ways to live with it and… benefit from it."

She approaches the subject, she says, from three perspectives—from that of her clients, from her practice as a consultant, and as a learning scientist thinking broadly about education.

Diening addresses the hype, and compares it to the speculation surrounding, say, crypto and NFTs, saying of the former: ChatGPT is already delivering tangible value.

Loughlin says she was recently asked to write an article for publication, entered a query into ChatGPT, "and within, you know, 30 seconds it had come out with a full article." She found the draft wanting, of course, and then dove into editing.

Diening notes that the software's output "lacks the nuance of critical and ethical thinking," which means that people are still very much necessary, no matter how hot the hype.

She adds that this might lead to a labor market shift. "I always talk about the death of generalists when it comes to generative AI." ChatGPT could take care of the dull and repetitive work that any general practitioner can do and allow specialists to shine. Could this be a force in the return to craft? Perhaps.

Of course, they both worry about generative AI feeding on polluted data sets. Loughlin says that ChatGPT might, like social media, creating echo chambers “for things that are not true but are very attractive for a lot of people.”

But that’s not the only issue. Diening notes that becoming a specialist requires one to experience the "tedious task of aggregating data" and that, traditionally, one must "go through a certain amount of dull work"—like drafting and redrafting one's words, unassisted—to "sharpen yourself as a specialist." She reminds us that ChatGPT is a tool, comparing it to a calculator, saying that it "doesn't take the job away from mathematicians" but helps them crunch their complex numbers. The smart way is to look to partner with this technology rather than rival it.

And that tool, Loughlin says, will ultimately be beneficial for consultants because it will optimize their work. "It's a tool… to help us shape our offerings, get more precise, and create, frankly, more value for our customers."

Curious how it might help *your* customers? Tune in!

Host: Kenji Ross

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Now is an odd time to be a Chief Digital Officer at a financial services organization. The Fed is fighting inflation while watching unemployment numbers. Consumer spending is in flux. Banks are still—still!—trying to figure out their budgets.

With all this going on, how’s a CDO going to proceed with a big digital transformation project? That’s exactly the topic Alex Jimenez, Managing Principal, Financial Services Consulting at EPAM, is covering with our guest, Tom Novak, VP/CDO of Visions Federal Credit Union, on *Silo Busting.* On the latest #TakeItToTheBank dialogue, Novak is all about adhering to his central principles.

“If we stick to our digital transformation objectives, this whole play of humanizing digital as we look to scale our business, there will be short-, medium- and long-term benefits to doing that, and [they] will help us navigate some of these headwinds that are happening from a macroeconomic perspective.”

Jimenez notes the irony that some firms are suddenly shifting away from their digital transformation efforts to focus on creating efficiencies. “It's funny to hear some organizations that say, 'We're gonna stop doing digital transformation because we gotta be more efficient.'” The two ideas should have been part of the conversation together all along.

Novak says his org will “continue to invest in digital transformation efforts and leveraging the data and insights that we get from those” because that's how “we can really propel ourselves out of the doldrums of this, let's call it a mild recession.”

The conversion is centrally about cost optimization in the present and preparing for growth going forward. The insights gained from the digital transformation work, Novak says, will provide “a lot of our insights to move the business forward in the future.”

Novak and Jimenez also tackle Visions' venture into crypto wallets, the importance of getting business intelligence in order, of digital account openings, and of AI and ML and personalization.

Yes, people are opening more digital accounts but, says Novak: “We’re still missing out on how we can form a real relationship with that member as opposed to more of a transactional relationship.”

Episode 53 is what it sounds like when two financial services pros who have, in fact, a real relationship, speak honestly and well about our current moment.

Host: Alison Kotin

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

It’s time for your authentication journey! Mandeep Khera, the Chief Marketing Officer at SecureAuth, is our guide in this #SecurityByDesign episode of *Silo Busting.* And Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, is of course on hand to pepper Khera with questions about the fascinating concept of passwordless.

Khera begins with a little history—we move from plain text passwords to hashing to one-time passwords to multi-factor authentication, biometrics, and behavioral—and then concludes: “But guess what, passwords are still around and it doesn't make any sense.”

The role of passwordless, Khera says, is to “clear all the friction for users and provide a lot more security.”

It isn’t, of course, that simple. “A lot of people are claiming [that they are using] passwordless, but it's not quite there yet,” says Khera.

The reason—the real reason—we need to evolve to a real passwordless system, Khera says, is that roughly 80% of today’s cyberattacks happen because of credentials.

Together Khera and Rehman talk about identifying ourselves via our phones and physicality and the annoying friction created by passwords (“Let's just get rid of all the passwords. Let's get rid of all the friction. We just have everything we need”).

The pair zero in on the idea that behavioral monitoring and analytics might provide an answer. “I kind of know what you like to talk about,” says Rehman. “If all the sudden you start talking to me about, you know, Amber Heard… I’d be like: Is this Mandeep?”

It’s a fantastic conversation about how our computing future might operate. To hear it, you need only intone the famed cinematic shibboleth *Klaatu barada nikto.*

Just kidding. You need only click Play. Happy listening!

Host: Alison Kotin

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

May we borrow your attention for a few minutes? If you have a vested interest in commercial, residential, business, and/or personal lending, pull up a chair to hear what Chris Karageuzian, CEO & Co-Founder at Help With My Loan, and Alex Jimenez, Managing Principal, Financial Services Consulting at EPAM, are saying on our latest #TakeItToTheBank conversation.

The economy is getting softer but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad time for loans. According to Jimenez, some players are saying “This is actually a good time if you have the discipline” and “if you have the right team.”

Karageuzian and Jimenez talk about how automation is changing the way front-end underwriting works today and will work tomorrow. In a time when rates and guidelines are in rapid flux, and some banks that have been in business for 30-40 years are shutting down, automation can be an important strategic advantage.

“Our production is going up because a lot of people need to automate,” says Karageuzian. “They wanna move faster, they need to be able to handle the remote work.”

It’s a complicated moment for banks. Karageuzian says that there's an “overflow of deals at certain banks that are staying in the market, but they need technology because they don't have the staff.”

Listen as these two loan-minded interlocutors talk about FinTechs and VCs, the pandemic’s effect on commercial lending, and how salespeople can be, as Karageuzian puts it, “augmenting their talent with technology.”

So lend your ear to this episode to get a better—a much better—understanding of the tech-enabled lending game.

Host: Alison Kotin

Engineer: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon