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.  3 Takeaways: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.comFeatured Guests: Leda Glyptis, Advisory Board Member for IncutoFollow her on LinkedIn Episode LinkRay O'Brien, COO at QuantexaFollow him on LinkedInEpisode LinkSpencer Kimball, CEO at Cockroach LabsFollow him on LinkedInEpisode LinkIan Ellis, Founder of the London Enterprise Tech MeetupFollow him on LinkedInEpisode LinkPaolo Sironi, global research leader in banking and financial markets at IBM, the Institute for Business ValueFollow him on LinkedInEpisode LinkSpiros Margaris, VC, Advisor, and Board member at Margaris VenturesFollow him on LinkedInEpisode LinkOne 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.About the HostsMatthew 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.3 Takeaways: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.Key Quotes: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 JoyTwitter link to JoyLink to The BankerHere is the link to the Womens World Banking conferenceLink to the 2018 article, Will the digital world solve the identity crisis?About the HostsMatthew 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!3 Takeaways: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.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.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.Key Quotes: 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?About the HostsMatthew 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.

Episode Description: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.3 Takeaways:The importance of understanding human nature and behvaior when adapting AI platforms and services into services like bankingEmphasizing of transparency with technology and AI to embolden trust with the publicBanking 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.Key Quotes: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: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  LinkedInFor more information, thePSironi.com“Banks and Fintech on Platform Economies” http://relinks.me/1119756979About the HostsMatthew 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..

Episode Description: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.3 Takeaways:The lagging adaptation of digital tech in banking and FintechDoing the right thing over doing the thing right and embracing failureLearning from a company's legacy and the technical debt Key Quotes: “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 Glyptis:  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.For more information:You can connect with Leda on her LinkedInFollow her on Twitter  @LedaGlyptisOrder her book “Bankers Like Us” HEREAbout the HostsMatthew 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.3 Takeaways:The overhype of AI's role in everyday lifeMaking sense of all the data through generative AI for human understanding What AI can do for us today efficiently and where it still needs improvement Key Quotes: “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.”Tony BoobierConsultant, Mentor, Author and Advisor on AI and Financial ServicesTony 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.ukFor more information:Connect with Tony on LinkedinYou 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/B085QMF7DYhttps://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B085QMF7DYAbout the HostsMatthew 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.3 Takeaways:Well placed regulations can help drive innovationVirtual advancements are having physical, global impactsFinOps is on the riseKey Quotes: “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.”Ian EllisTechnology Strategist, Angel Investor and Founder of the London Enterprise Tech MeetupBio: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.—For more information:Connect with Ian on LinkedinCheck out the London Enterprise Technology Meetup at enterprisetech.londonAbout the HostsMatthew 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.—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 HostsMatthew 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 BaguleyCompany: Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, EMEA, VMwareJoe 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 - @JoeBaguleyand on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/joebaguleyJoe's most recent blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/be/2023/02/2023-top-it-observations-by-joe-baguley-cto-emea-vmware/------------About the HostsMatthew 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.-------Bio:Spencer KimballCo-Founder and CEO of Cockroach LabsSpencer 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.-------For more information:https://www.linkedin.com/in/spencerwkimball/-------About the HostsMatthew 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.

Claire-Louise is a managing Director within the Technology Sector at Russell Reynolds Associates. She is a diversity and inclusion advocate, with a passion for hiring diverse Board and executive leadership teams and building succession pipelines of female and underrepresented minority leaders. Claire-Louise chatted with us about what she calls the great reflection, assessing the current work environment landscape and how recruitment and retention has changed in recent years. She explains how technology, workplace perspectives, corporate culture, sustainability, and social impact have affected those changes.-------3 Takeaways:The job market has been extremely dynamic. There's a huge demand for technology skills all around the world, in many leadership and advisory roles. There has been a shift behaviorally and culturally in workplaces. There is a greater focus on how to retain great people, and more of an emphasis on things like the use of technology and who is filling different roles, to the makeup and dynamic of where people are working and when they do their jobs.Technology is the differentiator today for many corporations. There is a much bigger focus on having tech savvy leaders than ever before. There is also a much greater expectation that most major corporations have cyber security experience on their board.The complexity and the intellectual challenge of trying to resolve the legacy operations with the new, and driving that transformation at that scale with that degree of complexity, is very much in focus. Leaders are being required to straddle both, understanding how to mix the old with the new, creating great products or platforms, while maintaining a good customer experience and getting the most from their IT budgets.-------Key Quotes: “The markets have changed significantly since the pandemic. There's this digital acceleration with a razor focus on customer centricity and hyper personalization. We are all used to consuming product services platforms more easily than we have done before. That's driven quite a lot of change in the industry. And, as a consequence of that, we've seen quite a lot of CEO board movement, then CIO and COO movement.”“Great talent will always be hired, no matter the economic situation. We need to be thinking about succession planning and retention of great talent so that we are not losing great technology leaders and technologists to competitors or even to different industries. This is actually something that we're seeing quite a lot of at the minute.”“I think people are continuing to be motivated by how do I develop as an individual? What is an organization doing for me in terms of my career prospects? But, equally, I think there's an acknowledgement that you want to work for an organization that has meaning and is having an impact on society. I think that has changed.”-------Best Career Advice:Make sure that you build relationships and that you network. Sometimes those relationships are not inside your own organization or even actually inside your own industry. Keep an open mind and make sure that you network to create opportunities to meet others and put yourself out there in a deliberate fashion.-------Bio:Claire-Louise McSherryManaging Director - Technology Sector at Russell Reynolds AssociatesClaire-Louise McSherry specializes in helping financial services companies find technology leaders. She is passionate about building succession pipelines of diverse leaders in CIO, CTO, CDO and CISO roles.  Based in London, Claire-Louise has deep experience across the financial services industry, capital markets, consumer banking, transaction banking, wealth and asset management. She is member of the Technology Sector at Russell Reynolds Associates. Claire-Louise joined Russell Reynolds from McSherry Brown, a boutique search firm she founded in 2008. The company primarily focused on recruiting and developing diverse leadership in the cyber, digital and technology space – with a particular specialization in financial services. Much of Claire-Louise's career has been spent advising international clients in the financial services, FinTech, payments, private equity and technology industries on their recruitment strategies and hiring, as well as offering career coaching to senior executives in global institutions. Prior to founding her company, Claire-Louise was a director and head of the technology practice at the Trafalgar Partnership. Claire-Louise holds a BA with honors in geography and environmental policy from London South Bank University.-------For more information:https://www.russellreynolds.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cmcsherry/?originalSubdomain=uk-------About the HostsMatthew 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 speak with Kevin McLoughlin. Kevin is partner and co-founder at MTech Capital. He has spent 22 years in insurance investment banking. Along with his brother they created MTech Capital as a venture capital firm that invests in technology companies operating in the insurance industry.  Kevin talks with us about how digital technology allows insurance companies to advance their operations and offer new products, but how adoption has been a slow process. As venture capital investors, he explains how MTech is being patient and navigating the industry as insurance becomes more embedded in daily life. Kevin does stress the importance of digital transformation, and how the use of the cloud and technologies like AI and ML can be game changers for insurance and banking. -------3 Takeaways:AI will transform the insurance industry. With the advent of machine learning and artificial intelligence, it creates enormous opportunities in the insurance industry to aggregate new data and to analyze existing data.There are clear parallels between the evolution of FinTech and InsureTech. There is a strategic imperative in insurance to adopt technology for digitalization. Many processes now can be automated using combinations of technology, OCR, machine learning, and natural language processing, and others.A big and important trend is cloud computing. Kevin believes that insurance companies on the one hand understand that to really make use of machine learning in all parts of their business, they need to move their data up to the cloud. At the same time there can be resistance and reluctance to do that because they are used to the on premises systems they have today, so there is fear of losing data.-------Key Quotes: “You'd be hard pressed to come up with I think another industry that uses data more than insurance. I mean the whole industry is actually predicated on data. There's nothing tangible about it.”“AI will transform the insurance industry. I have no doubt. The industry needs time to develop these use cases and measure the efficacy of technology in various parts of the business. Personally, where I see the most potential for value creation through technology will be using machine learning, on the underwriting front.”“Insurance is all about probabilities. That's really what it comes down to. What is the probability that a business or a person is going to have a claim?”“The fascinating potential of AI here is to be able to assess a whole lot more of these factors that maybe never occurred to actuaries or data scientists, that there might be some correlation and to identify correlations, which actually have quite predictive power about the probability of a claim.”-------Best Career Advice:At some point pick your niche and go deep in it to make yourself invaluable to your employer.-------Bio:Kevin McLoughlin, Partner and Co-Founder at MTech CapitalKevin McLoughlin spent 22 years in insurance investment banking, most recently as the Global Head of Insurance Investment Banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, and prior to that, as Global Head of Insurance Banking at Citigroup. He also spent 7 years as an executive at AIG. Kevin maintains senior level relationships across the insurance industry globally, having advised many of the largest companies during his banking career. Kevin holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BA from Boston College. He is based in London.MTech Capital is a venture capital firm with offices in Santa Monica and London investing in technology companies operating in the insurance industry.  We define the insurance sector broadly to encompass all of the businesses that insurance companies are in, including asset management, wealth management and other financial services.  We look for founders with the vision and ambition to change the insurance industry using technology.  We invest across all stages and our primary focus is in North America and Europe.Our founding partners have 45+ years combined of FinTech venture investing, insurance, and insurance investment banking experience, with a long family history in the insurance industry — the 4th generation.  We are redefining venture capital by creating an ecosystem for InsurTech founders and strategic investors.Technology will revolutionize all aspects of the insurance industry, vastly improving the customer experience, automating many aspects of claims and policy administration, enabling deeper insights from data for underwriting, and providing the foundation for entirely new models of insurance.  MTech Capital is committed to backing founders who have solutions for the hard problems facing the insurance industry.Our investors are leading insurance companies, brokers and agent networks in the US and Europe. We have longstanding relationships across the insurance sector globally. We help founders navigate the insurance industry and provide strategic advice. Typically we seek board representation. MTech Capital Elevate is our program for connecting founders and their teams with trusted, experienced mentors from among MTech's investors.   We provide our strategic investors with insight on InsurTech trends and early access to the most innovative entrepreneurs who are transforming the industry. Our goal is comprehensive coverage of the InsurTech markets in North America and Europe, while highlighting companies that are strategically relevant for each of our investors.MTech Elevate gives insurance executives an opportunity to get an insider's understanding of startup culture while acting as mentors to founders and their teams. Over time this cross-fertilisation may accelerate cultural change in your organisation.  If you are an InsurTech startup seeking capital, an insurance company seeking strategic insight, or an investor who would like to capitalize on the early innings of the insurance revolution, we welcome the opportunity to speak with you.-------For more information:https://www.mtechcapital.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-mcloughlin-london/-------About the HostsMatthew 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.

This episode features Zia Yusuf. He is Senior Vice President, Strategic Ecosystem & Industry Solutions at VMware. In this position, he leads the teams responsible for building joint horizontal and industry-centric solutions with the company's ecosystem partners across Dell, global cloud providers (Hyperscalers), global system integrators, and global ISVs. Zia chatted with us about his outlook on economic development, emerging markets, and the use of technology to benefit and enhance business as a competitive capability. He provides thoughts on reimagining how companies and customers operate in a changing world affected by enhanced digital transformation. Zia discusses how startups and large incumbent companies approach the adoption of new technologies, as they try to reconcile with the past while promoting advancement for the future. He also talks about how AI and ML are game changing technologies that are going to have a big impact on financial services.  --3 Takeaways:As we go into the future of multi-cloud, modern apps, and the edge, we need to more effectively invigorate different types of partners. There are a multitude of ways that we need to work with Hyperscalers to make sure that customers can get the full spectrum of multi-cloud solutions. We need to look at more verticalized solutions, so as you think about modern apps and edge solutions, we need to be more aware of the requirements and demands from a retail company versus a financial services company versus a healthcare company. SaaS Technology allows you to iterate much faster and much cheaper than ever before. Companies need to take advantage of that more. While many do to some degree, there is still not enough of an experimentation on the business model. Any company that wants to compete, whether it's a startup or a larger legacy company, needs to have a robust ecosystem strategy. You won't survive if you try to go at it alone. Partnerships, especially technology partnerships, for more established companies allow them capabilities to accelerate their pace of innovation rather than just building it themselves. --Key Quotes: “There are very significant technology innovations and changes that are happening in the financial services industry, maybe to some degree even more disruptive than are happening in other industries. And so, whether you are a large commercial bank, investment bank, mortgage house, whether it's blockchain or AI, or the advancements in mobile and robotic process automation, it's a very significant series of in some sense a perfect storm of these technologies coming together.” “People forget how foundationally our lives have changed in a relatively short period of time. I think technology has been in some sense that great equalizer. There's a lot of people in the world that still don't have access to their digital services. The digital divide is very real, even in the US, it is very real.” “Whether it's VMware or any other large tech company, you can only be successful if you truly leverage and put together a very significant ecosystem of complementary solutions.” “When you talk about a transformation journey, a lot of time is spent on a company's technology transformation, and it's important. A lot of time is spent on the business process transformation and the business model transformation, which is also super important. Not enough time is spent on the people side of it and the cultural transformation.” “I think the accounting and economics of how we run our lives needs to change. And, if that happens, people will understand the true impact of that. We are custodians of this planet for the next generation, and we're not doing a great job of it. Unfortunately, until many of us have more hard days in the summer than we've ever had before, and you have floods like in Pakistan and other parts of the world, hopefully that generates more change than not. It's an important piece of where VMware takes it seriously and seeks to play the role that it can. It's all our responsibility.” --Best Career Advice:“Think of your life as a career with a long arc, as opposed to a series of jobs and how do I get the next job? Am I getting a raise? Am I not getting a raise? Think a few years out and you'll think about the world differently.” --Bio:Zia Yusuf - Senior Vice President, Strategic Ecosystem & Industry Solutions at VMwareZia Yusuf joined VMware in 2021 as VMware's Senior Vice President of Strategic Ecosystem and Industry Solutions, responsible for building joint horizontal and industry-centric solutions with our ecosystem and alliances across Dell, global cloud providers (hyperscalers), global system integrators, and global ISVs. Prior to VMware, Zia was a Senior Partner & Managing Director at Boston Consulting Group (BCG)—serving as a core member of the firm's Technology Advantage, and Technology, Media & Telecommunications practices. At BCG, Zia worked with a wide range of technology clients on issues related to software, technology strategy, and the resulting go-to-market approach including pricing, ecosystem strategy, and digital transformation to drive growth. He also led the effort to establish the Silicon Valley office for BCG and was the global IoT lead for the firm. Before BCG, Zia was CEO of a leading IoT startup called Streetline, and an executive vice president at SAP where he served as head of the global ecosystem and partner group managing a network of 7,500 partners, SAP's award-winning online communities of innovation, and the $125 million SAP NetWeaver Fund. He also founded and led the SAP Corporate Strategy and Design Services team and has served as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs and an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Sutter Hill Ventures & Norwest Venture Partners. Zia started his career at the World Bank Group working on health care projects in Southern Africa and project finance projects in South and East Asia. Zia has also served as an associate consulting professor at Stanford University's Design “D” School where he taught classes on user-centric design and design thinking for large organizations to accelerate innovation. Zia has a passion to enable education for all and has served on several non-profit boards on the topic, including currently serving on the board for the Silicon Valley Education Foundation. Zia holds a bachelor of arts from Macalester College, a master of science in International Affairs from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. --For more information:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ziayusuf/The Cube: Zia Yusuf, VMware | VMware Explore 2022

3 Takeaways:AI is not new, but Cloud based Machine Learning has been the game changer through providing seemingly unlimited capacity to do different kinds of projects, stand up more analytical environments, and to do trials and explore innovation, all in a way we couldn't afford historically. Learn both technology and the business sides. If you have both of those, you are the junction point. You are the person, enabler, and the go to between business and technology that can be an asset for financial services.  Cloud providers are going to get regulated, similar to how utilities such as electricity and water are treated. As the cloud, AI, and ML become much more integrated and migrated into the cloud, oversight will be required to regulate what happens and how systems are operated.--Key Quotes: I really can't state [enough] how important it is to try and get a global view, to get out of your home country, and to work in different countries around the world to experience cultures and experience different peoples of different backgrounds, because it's so much value to you in your career to understand different viewpoints and not just be monoculture.Some of my proudest moments [have been] watching people who I've managed, grow and become self-sufficient and basically overtake me, and become incredible valuable assets to whatever organization they're working for. I really do love watching people grow and become their best. In very simple terms, if you imagine you're a water company in the UK. If you go bankrupt on a Friday, the water still flows on a Monday, because you're regulated to make sure that there is a company with enough capital in it to keep the water flowing and to make sure that that water has an operational process, no matter what happens to that company.  The same will happen to cloud providers. They're becoming too critically important for national and countries. They will become utilitized and they will have to be regulated like a utility. --Best Career Advice:Get a global view outside of where you live. Gaining experiences from different people, cultures, and backgrounds can provide you a lot of value in your career. This will allow you to have a lot of different perspectives that can help you throughout business interactions.--Bio:Ray O'BrienChief Operation Officer at QuantexaRay is Chief Operation Officer at Quantexa. He is known to inspire business growth through innovative thinking, strategy and a global perspective. Ray is an international business leader, board member, independent director, and advisor with a unique mix of expertise in Data, Analytics, Technology, Risk and Finance. Ray is a proven influencer who makes an impactful difference operating with Boards and C-Level decision makers.Ray graduated from University College Dublin in 1989 with a degree in mathematics and computer science. He joined Kleinwort Benson as an equities trading systems developer and in 1991 moved to Nomura, within futures and options trading. Two years later, he joined risk at Banque Paribas, before moving to the risk area at Deutsche Bank in 1997.In 2001 Ray left Deutsche Bank to form a risk management consultancy based in London and Germany that included among its customers: Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse and HSBC.In 2004 Ray joined HSBC as a member of the executive committee for HTS Global Banking & Markets (HTS GB&M). Ray has managed a number of business areas within HTS GB&M, including Global Transaction Banking, Global Banking, Operations, Risk and Finance software and change delivery. Ray moved to the Global Risk function in 2012 and became the Global Risk COO and Global Head of Risk Analytics. In June 2021 Ray left HSBC and started the life of a Pluralist. --For more information:https://www.quantexa.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ray-o-brien-a8079a1b8/?originalSubdomain=uk--About the HostsMatthew 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.

3 Takeaways:  Be open minded in your work and development. This includes everything from how you work, where you work, and what you work on. Consider taking risks and exploring new experiences, while also taking advantage of utilizing new tools and technologies to aid your work.Leverage your expertise in different ways while also gaining exposure to different things. Use what you know to help propel you forward, build upon the knowledge you already have and expand it into other areas. Using your knowledge and skills in new and different areas could go a long way to benefit your career.Allow for automation. Seek out new opportunities where you can utilize technology to do some of the work for you. Innovative and emerging technologies can help solve industry challenges related to data management and analysis.--Key Quotes:   “When we looked at challenges for AI and machine learning, I think we still saw that there is an overall discussion about how do you actually connect the data, manage the data, and really also get access to the right kind of data to then add analytics on top of that.”“I think it is very important to make sure that whenever you create any kind of model, whether it's with or without AI, it should be done in a proper way. And, keeping the ethical aspect and diverse aspects in the core of it.”“I think what public cloud has been able to do is really to create this whole new ecosystem of different startup companies and new capabilities for the market.”  --Best Career Advice:  Understand yourself, your business, and your customer. Open up your sights to new opportunities and technologies to help you achieve the highest level of knowledge, efficiency, and success. In doing that, also continue to use the expertise you have gained throughout the years and build upon that as you are exposed to different things.   --Bio:    Hanna Helin  Global Head of Technology Innovation, CTO Office at London Stock Exchange Group  Hanna Helin has worked in a variety of technology and business leadership positions. She is experienced in developing, leading and executing large technology and data initiatives. In her current role as a Global Head of Technology Innovation, Hanna is leading LSEG's Technology Innovation across their global Technology organization including 13,000 people. She has a keen interest in innovation, new technologies and the FinTech industry. Hanna has two Master's degrees from ESCP Europe and University of Vaasa. She has lived in six different countries in Europe and Asia and is now based in New York City.     --For more information:  https://www.lseg.com/  LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/hannahelin/--About the HostsMatthew 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.

3 Takeaways:The hardest (and most important thing) your company can do is invest in cultural and operational transformation.Don't sell your technology, sell business outcomes empowered by the right technology. The most successful companies we read about in five years will be the ones that best communicate a common vision, have the strategy to pursue that vision, and whose teams are aligned behind the scenes.Key Quotes: “Evolutionary change is iterative. It's making things a little bit better within the current paradigm. This is revolutionary change. We need to have constructive disruption.” - Joel“I don't believe whatsoever in innate talent, I believe a hundred percent in our ability to invest in ourselves, invest in our teams, and develop what we need to be successful.” - Joel“It's less about building better technology and this endless rat race against finding a new feature or something that's going to improve the technology or the product. And it's more about how does everything integrate and come together? How do I work cross-functionally across my organization, across the ecosystem to deliver outcomes?” - Joel--LinksJoel Neeb LinkedInJoel Neeb TwitterJoel Neeb InstagramJoel Neeb Website--About the HostsMatthew 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 traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

3 Takeaways:The future of finance is in the hands of non-financial companies thanks to embedded finance.  This enables companies to embrace FinTech solutions for their customers to sell more of their core product.  As this is an added service, it can be priced competitively as the margin comes from the core product.  It's up to legacy financial institutions to work out how to aid or compete.Crypto and Cash are both in our future.  If you can handle the risk, try putting some of your money in crypto, but be prepared to lose it. Every new opportunity is a little bit scary, but don't let that put you off learning more about the metaverse.Key Quotes: “As the gold rush...now, we always look at history. Some people found gold, but very few. The ones who always made money are the ones who sold the shuffles. And I'm looking here at the metaverse, who's going to sell the shovels?” - Spiros“We said it here first. I think the game will shift that everyone will try to do everything, but It's easier for non-financial company to provide some financial solutions on top of your core business then for bank to provide something else.” - Spiros“I'm a huge fan of AI, but that doesn't mean I don't have to discuss trying to secure jobs, reskilling people, because at the end of the day, what's the point of all this technology if humans live worse?” - Spiros--LinksMargaris VenturesSpiros Margaris LinkedInSpiros Margaris Twitter--About the HostsMatthew 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 traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

3 Takeaways:An organization is more defined by the people that work there than the technology they create.Make sure employees know what their value is to an organization and encourage them to define their goals.Seek out mentors and offer mentorship. The education on both sides makes it possible to challenge old ways of thinking and discover new solutions.Key Quotes: "Having a clear career path and journey for everybody is important.” - Colin“Technology doesn't necessarily differentiate your company or your capability - your people do.” - Colin“I've gone off using this term soft skills because they're not soft at all. I call them human skills. What are the human skills that we have to develop to become even more effective in our roles?” - Colin--LinksColin Bannister LinkedInColin Bannister TwitterColin Bannister Blog--About the HostsMatthew 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 traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

3 Takeaways, beyond Data is NOT boring:The data that you throw away is the data that tomorrow you might be able to use. For instance, as part of a machine learning model that could bring true value to an organization.It's important for organizations to have explicit statements about their AI ethics.Federated learning has some magical capabilities, especially for financial services customers, when it comes to building predictive models without violating local laws on how data is stored or used because the data never leaves the premises.Key Quotes: "In some sense, we all need to be pack rats when it comes to our data.” - Josh“I think it's critically important for organizations to speak explicitly about data ethics with the people or organizations from which you are collecting data and be very clear with them, as well as with your employees, about what it is that you're willing to do and not do with that information.” - Josh“Data is where it all happens. That's the fuel that runs all the ML stuff...The issue is how do we get our hands around all that data, and how do we get it to the point where it is appropriate for building predictive models? Just because you have the data doesn't mean that the data has been cleaned, curated and de biased - so that it's actually in shape to be used for building models.” - Josh--LinksJosh Simons LinkedIn--About the HostsMatthew 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 traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

3 Takeaways:Nonpublic market information, like planned mergers and acquisitions and market strategies, are now being specifically targeted by cybercriminals as high value targets.Customers see cybersecurity as a competitive issue. They are increasingly investing in proactive security measures like DevSecOps and looking for greater collaboration with information security teams, operations teams and development teams to do security by design - to make it even more difficult for cyber exploits to happen.Promote your CISO to report directly to your CEO. They should have a separate security budget from the IT budget and should have veto authority over what the CIO does with regard to anything that would exacerbate the attack surface and allow for island hopping or destructive attacks to occur.Key Quotes: "When you want to get to true business and digital transformation, it's really inextricably linked to high-quality cyber protection, and the need for tight collaboration between all the teams that run these organizations is really critical.” - Jennifer"Cybercriminals are more likely to try and commandeer the digital transformation of the institution to use it against their constituency rather than just burglarize the institution as a whole. This shift is important because cybercriminals want to misuse the trust in the company, in the brand, to attack the company's constituency.” - Tom"Cyber teams need almost a blank check to keep pace with how frequent and fast the pace of change is with criminals and how sophisticated and differing their various approaches to exploits are.” - Jennifer“This is a dramatic governance issue in this sector when you have your CSO reporting to your CIO, because from an American football perspective, it's like having your defensive coordinator report to your offensive coordinator. It's upside down.” - Tom“This level of investment funding, the level of intensity of focus from the cyber teams, all the way up to the CEO, is likely going to be something permanent. And I think there are lots of investments that teams can do to outfit themselves better with the kinds of technology they need to be able to do behavioral analytics or threat hunting with. I don't see a time where cybercriminals are like, ‘ah, you got me. There's no money left in this.'” - Jennifer--LinksJennifer Manry LinkedInTom Kellermann LinkedInTom Kellermann Twitter--About the HostsMatthew 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 traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

Episode Notes3 Takeaways:Spend lots of time with customers. That's the best way to effectively communicate the services on offer and to get an honest barometer check on how well a customer's needs are being met.Creating a broad, customer-focused definition of success motivates the entire organization to think about how and what needs to be done to ensure customers are satisfied. When it comes to distributed enterprise and distributed workforce, the last thing you want is to go back to the mainframe closed days. Then you completely stop innovation because you're tying application development velocity straight into infrastructure. That's never been healthy, and it never will be the right approach going forward.Key Quotes: "Customers are not necessarily looking for products and technologies. They're looking for partners themselves who are going to be able to take them into the future.” - Sumit“Software is about creating a vision, a destination, what I call a dream. Until customers see and envision the dream the same way as you do, and our teams fulfill that dream in a structured and methodical way, none of us are successful.”  - Sumit“Matching the solutions and then making [customers] successful is the core DNA and the job of sales, which is misunderstood until you've done it.” - Sumit--LinksSumit Dhawan LinkedInSumit Dhawan Twitter--About the HostsMatthew 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 traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

3 Takeaways:Technology changes are hard, but they're never quite as hard as the people, process and organizational changes that need to happen - the culture changes.The notion of agile portability is critical and getting progressively easier.When going through a digital transformation, it's really important to talk about it openly as a community - what's working, what's not, and to learn from it.Key Quotes: "I think VMware is on a journey. If we're successful, people will think very differently of us. They will not think of us as just a virtualization company. They'll think of us as a multi-cloud modern application...and that's a great opportunity.” - Kit“From a VMware standpoint, we're leveraging Kubernetes as a standard framework...and then building integrated functionality on top of that. So the end result for customers is that it's just a seamless experience. And yes, Kubernetes is there under the covers, and you can absolutely interact with it if you want to, but you also don't have to.”  - Kit“That notion of culture change is extraordinarily difficult and will be by far the hardest part about any sort of transformation.” - Kit--LinksKit Colbert LinkedInKit Colbert TwitterKit Colbert Blog--About the HostsMatthew 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 traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

3 Takeaways:Security and especially cybersecurity is a scary reality across financial services. New technologies bring new risks and the bad guys only have to be successful once to make it worth their while.  Listen to Tom and Chris for thought-provoking approaches.People should be seen as an investment, not a cost. To get the most from this investment, focus on getting the best from people by playing to their differences and strengths (or as René Carayol calls them, their Spikes)  rather than trying to transform them to fit into a bell curve. You can find more about René on his website or on LinkedIn or check out his book Spike.AI is with us and will only get more immense and intense. We hope to focus more on this in the future. Until then, Louise Öström has recommended the book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century: Yuval Noah Harari and especially as an audiobook.Key Quotes: “Look for the things you excel at, and focus on those, rather than worrying about the areas where others could be better.” - Matthew"There is a need to invest in people in a way that makes them feel special, valued and not just a resource, a number or a row on a spreadsheet. You cannot change a conservative,stuffy, risk and control-based culture overnight, but it needs to change if financial services wants to regain its crown as the place where technical talent wishes to work.”  - Matthew “There is no question that we are on the march to quantum, although we are a little way off from quantum supremacy, but crypto has to keep up and be steps ahead if we are to stay ahead of the bad guys.” - Matthew----About the HostsMatthew 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 traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

3 Takeaways:For exchanges, geographical sovereignty is a big deal when it comes to cloud data service providers. Because exchanges support many different regulators, they need to think about where the data sits, who operates that platform and who has access to the data - even if it's encrypted.Security and data protection are important when considering a move to the cloud, but it's necessary to make the business case. When you look at cloud fit, you need to decide whether you retain what you have, rehost it, replatform it, refactor it or consolidate it with something else.Cost as a driver doesn't always necessarily stand on its own, and you can't get the business case if you're just looking at a lift and shift. So you really need to look at the broader value chain of what cloud gives you. Sometimes that means rearchitecting the platform to be cloud native to ensure that you're getting the benefits of those new and broader services.Key Quotes: “You need to operate in this combined ecosystem of legacy and new world, and make sure that you can bring those platforms together and operate them as one.” - Allison"With new technology adoption, you need to drive cultural change as much as technology change… That's for us where our Center of Excellence has really bridged that gap and understanding - it helps with challenging the status quo, getting people to think outside of their comfort zone." – Allison“You definitely won't get cost advantages if you're doing the same thing in the old way, but in a new world.” - Allison--LinksAllison Krill LinkedIn----About the HostsMatthew 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 traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on LinkedIn. 

3 Takeaways:Always invest time and effort in eliminating non-value added work and automating where possible. You can't continue to come back and ask for more money without demonstrating that you're being responsible with the budget already given. Make sure your tech experts feel connected to the customer experience. Ask IT to do ride alongs - listen to someone on the desk. Do empathy interviews and talk to people. The growth mindset of the organization - the willingness to do new things and manage through change with positivity and energy - is paramount to making all of the technology work to its fullest capability. You need to get buy-in to move forward.Key Quotes: "Customer interaction is a really important thing to spend time on. So I definitely encourage people who are in tech to go talk to customers. You immediately know how important you are to the business.” - Jennifer“The theme I hear in most of these customer interactions is every one of them is grappling now with a transformation journey that they knew they had to make but now are having to do it on an even more accelerated timeline. I think all of them had multifaceted plans but now are having to execute on some of them in days and weeks as opposed to quarters of years.” - Jennifer“Teammates should look for ways to eliminate costs on one side so that they can free up money for new innovation and new investment on the other. You can't just continue to radically grow your technology dollars year over year. You've got to start to tidy up the house in order to make room for new things.” - Jennifer--LinksJennifer Manry LinkedInWomen Who Code--About the HostsMatthew 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 traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

3 Takeaways:Be very clear about why you want to go to a cloud model, and make sure you can get out when you want.The keys to success are attitude, belief and people. Hire people with diverse skill sets and actively encourage them to collaborate.If going to a cloud model is about cost savings, don't put old workloads into something fancy. Don't put the pigs in the ferrari.Key Quotes: "You can make a hundred PowerPoint slides, but the magic happens on the ground. And the magic happens when people work with people.” - Louise“The best advice I could give any company within the financial industry is to think about why you want to go to the cloud. What is it you want to achieve? Make sure you don't lock yourself in. Don't put all your eggs into one basket.”  - Louise“Everyone in the banking finance industry globally is struggling with the same challenge. It's not just you. You might be right there in the darkness feeling overwhelmed or don't know where to start. They're all in the same situation. Seriously, you're not alone.” - Louise--LinksLouise Öström LinkedInLouise Östrom Twitter--About the HostsMatthew 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 traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

3 Takeaways:When moving an application to the cloud, focus on the velocity of the move and the ability to revert rather than doing a lot of the optimization work on paper beforehand. Move and then optimize.Try to consolidate layers of redundant regulation that may have built up within an application over time. It saves customers time and money.Make sure the IT teams are seen as the heroes of the cloud transformation process because the applications they support typically produce some of the most critical business data for organizations.Key Quotes: "I'm incredibly excited that the industry has turned around to the importance of technology. We see more and more CEOs declaring themselves to be technology companies even though they're in non-technology industries. I think right now is just a fantastic time to be in tech.” - James“I think what's so compelling about where we are now is that we can really make heroes out of enterprise IT because of the cloud.” - James“When there's an excessive focus on trying to simply recreate a data center environment in the cloud - lock, stock, and barrel - that can very quickly impact the economics of moving to cloud in the first place.” - James--LinksJames Forrester LinkedIn--About the HostsMatthew 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 traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

Episode Notes3 Takeaways:Before kicking off an innovation project, make sure the proposed product has a clear business purpose and route to market. There are two kinds of innovation; Incremental Innovation - make things we already have better; and Disruptive Innovation - to change the game with something new or reimagined.The pandemic has increased interest in augmented reality and virtual reality possibilities in the realm of training and on-site quality assurance.Key Quotes: "To us a project is not successful unless it is graduated and adopted into a product, period.” - Chris“We're not trying to innovate around a one-off to make just one customer happy. If we're going to put something in a product, we want to ensure that this is something that a lot of customers really want and care about.” - Chris“I think a lot of times with innovation the mistake that gets made is you just start running without having a clear line of sight to what the destination is and think you'll figure it out along the way. Sometimes you do and you're successful, but a lot of times you don't and you're building something that nobody necessarily wants or needs.” - Chris--LinksChris Wolf LinkedInChris Wolf Twitter--About the HostsMatthew 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 traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

3 Takeaways:Cyber attacks targeting market strategies and nonpublic market information are growing.The healthcare sector has become a more vulnerable target for extortion because of the pandemic.Organizations should proactively hunt out cyber threats before digital transformations or the rollout of new technologies.Key Quotes: “The healthcare sector has been dealing with a secondary infection--their own cyber crime pandemic, and ransomware is to blame.” - Tom“SolarWinds was probably the most widespread systemic act of cyber crime or espionage in the history of the world.” - Tom“Proactive organizations begin with cyber threat hunting--essentially making sure that no one is in the bank vault when they close for the day.” - Tom--LinksTom Kellermann LinkedInTom Kellermann TwitterModern Bank Heists 4.0 ReportCarbon Black Inc.The Howlers--About the HostsMatthew 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 traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on LinkedIn.

[Thimon de Jong](https://www.linkedin.com/in/thimon/?originalSubdomain=nl) is a keynote speaker and founder of the strategy foresight firm [Whetston](https://www.whetston.com/). Thimon walks us through his predictions for the future of office life, the fate of cash and his idea for a bank app that could be the next big thing. **About Matthew**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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewoneill/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/MatthewON). **About Brian**Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-hayes-global-transformation-infrastructure-leadership-innovation-cyber-cloud-digital-delivery/).

Multi-industry CIO [Bask Iyer](https://www.linkedin.com/in/baskiyer/) leads the Global Industry Solutions team for VMware. Bask tells us why every CIO needs to focus on operations before strategy, why nobody actually wants disruption, and how authenticity is key to creating a healthy workplace. **About Matthew**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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewoneill/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/MatthewON). **About Brian**Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-hayes-global-transformation-infrastructure-leadership-innovation-cyber-cloud-digital-delivery/).

We started Don't Break The Bank to ask and answer the questions that we didn't know we had when we worked in banking. With a year of shows behind us, Brian and I look back at some of our top episodes, consider what we've learnt from our guests, and attempt to suggest what 2021 might bring.

In this episode, Matthew and Brian are joined by VMware Vice Presidents of Blockchain, Tanya Shastri and Brendon Howe. Together, they explore the current state of Blockchain, why VMware has a Blockchain team, and the merits of an Enterprise Blockchain platform. **About Matthew**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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewoneill/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/MatthewON). **About Brian**Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-hayes-global-transformation-infrastructure-leadership-innovation-cyber-cloud-digital-delivery/).

Over the course of 2020, we've had the opportunity to share conversations with some of VMware's top experts, about issues that are keeping financial services professionals up at night. But we benefit from also sharing views from people in similar roles or positions and how they are handling the same challenges we're wrestling with. In this episode of Don't Break The Bank, our podcast for curious minds in the financial services industry, we speak to Violeta Ciurel, insurance giant AXA's transformation expert. Hear how this multinational FS provider tackled the pandemic, both in its earliest, most confusing of stages, and in the weeks and months that followed. **About Matthew**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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewoneill/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/MatthewON). **About Brian**Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-hayes-global-transformation-infrastructure-leadership-innovation-cyber-cloud-digital-delivery/).

We've all had our worlds turned upside down in 2020 but as we begin to shift to a new normal, what are the long-term impacts to the way different industries actually work? For many in the financial services sector, the enforced shift to remote working has accelerated what were previously trends on the horizon. In our latest episode, two of VMware's leading experts on digital workspaces, Spencer Pitts and Guru Venkatachalam, talk about how banks and other FS providers are keeping their workforces online, and what they're seeing from FS customers in Europe and Asia. **About Matthew**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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewoneill/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/MatthewON). **About Brian**Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-hayes-global-transformation-infrastructure-leadership-innovation-cyber-cloud-digital-delivery/).

In episode 9 of the podcast Matthew and Brian are joined by VMware's CTO, Greg Lavender for a fascinating conversation about everything he's learnt in making the switch from customer side to customer advocate. Greg offers great insight into what he's hearing from FS organisations today and advice on what he would do differently if he worked for a bank again. **About Matthew**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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewoneill/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/MatthewON). **About Brian**Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-hayes-global-transformation-infrastructure-leadership-innovation-cyber-cloud-digital-delivery/).

Through necessity, the Financial Services sector is one of the most secure in the world; it's also one of the most targeted by sophisticated cyber criminals (or adversaries).In our latest episode, one of the world's leading cyber security experts, Tom Kellermann, talks with us about how the threat has gone from bank heist to hostage situation, and what financial service providers can do to combat it. **About Matthew**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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewoneill/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/MatthewON). **About Brian**Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-hayes-global-transformation-infrastructure-leadership-innovation-cyber-cloud-digital-delivery/).

Is sustainability shaking off its CSR/tick box origins and taking its place as a true differentiator and innovator? To find out, Matthew and Brian are joined by Nicola Acutt, VMware's Vice President for Sustainability, in the latest episode of Don't Break the Bank. Nicola shared some fascinating insights and relates them to VMware's own route to sustainability – extremely pertinent when more FS providers are aspiring to be technology companies with banking licenses. **About Matthew**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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewoneill/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/MatthewON). **About Brian**Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-hayes-global-transformation-infrastructure-leadership-innovation-cyber-cloud-digital-delivery/).

In this episode, Matthew and Brian are joined by Enrico Boverino. The three compare notes on the missed opportunities they've experienced on both the vendor and buy-side of the financial services industry and look at how differing priorities effect how they make and manage change. **About Matthew**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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewoneill/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/MatthewON). **About Brian**Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-hayes-global-transformation-infrastructure-leadership-innovation-cyber-cloud-digital-delivery/).

In this episode, Matthew and Brian speak with Martin Eves, director for Cloud Foundation in EMEA at VMware, all about how enterprises within the financial services industry are rising to the challenges of technology evolution. **About Matthew**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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewoneill/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/MatthewON). **About Brian**Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-hayes-global-transformation-infrastructure-leadership-innovation-cyber-cloud-digital-delivery/).

Recorded on March 24 2020, Matthew O'Neill, Brian Hayes and Rory Choudhuri discuss business continuity during a global pandemic and the challenges financial services organisations face when undertaking this radical shift to remote working. **About Matthew**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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewoneill/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/MatthewON). **About Brian**Brian Hayes is an audiophile, dad, builder of sheds, maker of mirth, world traveller and EMEA Financial Services Industry Lead at VMware.You can find Brian on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/brian-hayes-global-transformation-infrastructure-leadership-innovation-cyber-cloud-digital-delivery/).

It doesn't matter what bank you work for, or where you are in the world, there's one thing that units all IT decision-makers at banks - cyber security. In this episode, Matthew chats to Scott McKinnon, Business Solutions Architect at VMware, about how the threats banks face are changing, what that means for the security they put in place, and the implications if they get it wrong. **About Matthew**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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewoneill/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/MatthewON).

Spencer Pitts, Chief Technologist for EUC in EMEA for VMware, joins Matthew to chat all things End User Computing. They discuss how banks and other financial service providers are transforming the way they work, the implications and the steps they take to overcome those obstacles. **About Matthew**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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewoneill/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/MatthewON).

Matthew is joined by Joe Baguley, CTO for EMEA at VMware, to discuss everything from mainframes to applications, the state of IT to the existence of cash. **About Matthew**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](https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewoneill/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/MatthewON).