Technology Innovation in Large Banks with Stephane Malrait and Toby Dixon

Bradley Howard: Do you always  start  with  a  new  technology  and  see  how you  can  use  it?  Or  sometimes  do  you  look  at  challenges  within  the  business  and  think, "Oh  we  can  solve  that  using  X,  Y  and  Z,"  which  doesn't  always  need  to  be  the  latest  technology?

Stephane Malrait: It's  a  very  good  question  and  I  think  it's  a  mix  of both to be honest.

If  the  business  is  not  aware  of  what  is  available  to  them  as  new  type  of  technology,  you  will  never  move.  A  good  example  is  when  the  iPhone  came  out.  Everybody  was  on  Blackberry  and we were very happy to be on  the  Blackberry  phone.  They  didn't  know  they  needed  to  change  but  then  a  new  tech  arrive  and  everybody  jumped  to  that  new  tech  because  there  were a lot  more  functionalities  in  this  new  type  of  solution.

 And  I  think  here  it's  the  same.  It's  the case that sometimes  the  demand  comes  from  the  business,  system  is  too  slow  or  too  outdated  and  we  need  to  change,  and  then  we  push  to  make  some  automation  or  change  the  technology,  but  other  time is the other  way  around,  and  we  find  technology  company  or FinTech  company, we  have  very  good  solution  and  we  say, " Oh, it  can  help  us  to  dramatically  improve  the  way  we  do  business  so  we  should  integrate  with  them."  A  good  example  will  be  natural  language  processing.  In  NLP,  we  have a lot  of  text,  we  have  a  lot  of  data,  and  we  didn't  know  we  could  do  a  lot  more with  that  type  of  information  until  we  discovered  there  are  NLP  solutions  out  there  who  can  help  to  get  more  than  translating,  unformatted  data  to  formatted  data  point  based  on  the  text  or  the  chat  that  we  have,  and  then  using  this  data  to  improve  the  customer  experience.  So  this is more  technology  led  than  business  led,  but  at  the  end,  the  result  is  the  same,  you  have  an  improvement  that  you  want to have. Listen to the rest of this insightful conversation between Stephane Malrait MD Global Head of Market Structure and Innovation for Financial Markets at ING, Toby Dixon, Delivery Director, FS, Banking & Capital Markets and Bradley Howard, Dive deeper into what builds technology innovation in the banking and capital markets arena as two seasoned professionals talk through what trends are currently shaping the industry and some of the lessons they learned in the technology innovation programs they were a part of from a dual perspective: ING - a bank's and a service partners. Should you have any questions – don’t hesitate to contact them or us directly. Subscribe to get notified when the next two episodes of our series dedicated to the banking and financial industry will be released. Until next time!