Rachael Rowe: Welcome to the Seismic Sessions podcast, where we explore the stories, strategies, and innovations shaping the future of financial services.
I’m Rachael Rowe, Regional Vice President at Seismic, and I’m thrilled to be your host today, alongside my wonderful co host Gemma Livermore.
Gemma Livermore: Thank you. I’m Gemma Livermore, Head of Financial Services Marketing at Seismic, and together we are here today to uncover how partnerships are driving transformation in the financial services industry. For me, this is a really exciting topic, and we’ve got two incredible guests joining us today.
Rachael Rowe: That’s right, Gemma. We’re delighted to welcome Esra Demir and Marcus Martinez to the show today. So if I could ask you both to please introduce yourselves to our listeners. And Esra, if I start with you.
Esra Demir: Yeah, sure. Pleasure to be here. Esra Demir. I’m heading up our digital partnerships practice in HSBC. I’m part of a group called Emerging Technology Innovation and Ventures and currently based in London.
Rachael Rowe: Fantastic. Thank you. And Marcus?
Marcus Martinez: Well, thanks for having me. So, Marcus Martinez, I’m an Industry Advisor at Microsoft, working mostly with banks in the EMEA region. So, it’s great to connect.
Gemma Livermore: Wonderful. Thanks for both being here today. We start off every single podcast by asking our guests what enabling financial services means to them. It means something different to virtually everybody that we’ve had on the show, so I like this part. Esra, if we can go to you first.
Esra Demir: I’ve been thinking about it and I said banks and financial institutions exist because money exists. And money exists because we want to have an efficient way of storing and exchanging value. And for me, enablement is about actually creating that value and being the partner in creating that value.
Gemma Livermore: Nice. I like that. Marcus.
Marcus Martinez: Yeah, I think for me it is about integration with the customer lifestyle. Or the business owner lifestyle. I think most of the history of financial services is about friction, for good reasons, you know, to manage risk, be compliant. I think where we see the market going is when financial services almost become invisible. And that means that it’s fully integrated with your, you know, lifestyle. Think like, getting an Uber car from going from point A to point B. You don’t think about the geolocation, you don’t think about the payment aspect. You just want to access some form of utility. I know we are far from that, but to me, that’s the ultimate purpose of FSI. And I think over the next 24 months, I think it will be even more important, because we need to find new drivers of prosperity. And in my mind, these will come from the smaller business, which comprises 99 percent of the economy. So I think that’s the goal, drive prosperity and, you know, integrate with our lifestyles.
Gemma Livermore: I like that. And that enablement is really coming across, like, although you say we’re not there yet. I was quite amazed that recently I went to Switzerland and it was the first time I’d been to another country and not touched. a single piece of the local currency. And I came back and I was like, wow, that really was frictionless to your point.
Esra Demir: Yeah, I agree. I used to collect currencies.
Gemma Livermore: Oh, yeah, same.
Esra Demir: Now I have none. Sometimes you go to a country then you just forget that you actually need a wallet and cash. You can’t just keep paying with your, like, tapping your phone.
Rachael Rowe: I also like the invisible aspect because, you know, it’s an old adage, people don’t want a mortgage, they actually want to buy a house. And it’s around the outcomes that we’re looking to drive with financial services.
Marcus Martinez: I think probably the most interesting example, it’s probably the web, the internet. I remember when that was a thing. And today, nobody talks about the internet. It’s just something that exists now, so it’s the same thing, it becomes invisible.
Gemma Livermore: For those that have listened to our podcast before, you’ll know we follow the same structure on every conversation and we use Seismic terminology.
So we look at the tremors and that’s where we look back at where the movements of change began, at the epicentre, where we are now. And then we look at the aftershocks, which is my favourite part because it’s the blue sky thinking of where we think things are going to shake up in the future.
Rachael Rowe: And this framework will guide us as we explore, not just the innovations that are happening now, which we’re already starting to unpack a little bit, but also the broader context and future opportunities which are shaping the industry. So let’s start with tremors.
First question to you, Esra. You’ve been instrumental in fostering partnerships between startups and tech giants. How have these partnerships evolved to meet the demands of the financial services sector?
Esra Demir: I think if you go, maybe not too far behind, but five years ago, you would think that it would be only a few select really cool senior leaders who have a clue what they are doing, and they are very well connected. They would explore this type of idea. It wouldn’t be mainstream. Now, this is where we started from. And then I think some of us started to realise this is something good to explore. A few things happen as the financial institutions, especially with organisation like mine, with legacy platforms and having footprint in so many different jurisdictions and having so many complex requirements. You need to find more innovative solutions. And sometimes the pace of change you needed to go through was not fulfilled by the pace of change. You can do it alone. So you needed to seek partnerships. And those partnerships started to come from either tech giants, because you have that trusted relationship, or it needed to come from your portfolio companies through your ventures, or some other startups that you are exploring certain things together, because they were niche enough to do that
Gemma Livermore: Yeah, makes sense. Marcus, with your extensive experience advising Tier One financial institutions, how have partnerships with the tech companies helped to transform that traditional banking operation?
Marcus Martinez: It’s a long term trend that we have seen in financial services where maybe 50 years ago a bank, you know, the usual suspects like HSBC, Barclays, Lloyds, would need the technology to improve the operating models. However, at that time, technology was super expensive, so you have to do it yourself. And that was what we call operating like a black box, not a black box, but like in silos. Everything inside the organisation is built by, you know, the organisation itself. With the advent of the web, we start to see that the bar to enter this market was much, much lower because suddenly if you knew as an entrepreneur that lending, commercial lending, underwriting was a problem for a bank, you’d say, well, actually, I have access to the technology now. I have access to clouds. I, maybe I can do that 10 times better, 10 times cheaper. And that’s the reality today. So whatever any bank is thinking about doing is highly, highly likely there’s someone in the fintech ecosystem doing exactly that 10 times better, 10 times cheaper. And that created a new source of complexity, because now you have a bank, which has a lot of, let’s say, business logic inside, and that needs to be externalised to create partnerships. And that’s I think what I think we’re still there yet, to some extent, like, trying to reassess the way we do things inside the bank and say, actually, is so overly complicated to your point about legacy, but there’s a better way. And that’s, I think, what’s triggering, you know, partnerships.
Esra Demir: I think we’ve been challenged. And instead of being beaten, we chose to partner.
Marcus Martinez: Yeah, well, yeah. Interesting you say that. Yeah, interesting.
Rachael Rowe: It’s interesting when you look at the journey, isn’t it? Because we saw a huge explosion of fintech and we had incubators and banks seeding their own incubators.
And you talked a bit about, you know, their portfolio companies, et cetera, and looking to find solutions that way. And I think more recently we’re seeing much stronger ecosystem development, where it’s much more of an open sharing of technology. How are you seeing that, in the current kind of climate?
Esra Demir: I think there is no single world innovation left or will be left soon. I think we will need to consider it as two words: open innovation. So I don’t see us having an isolated funnel of ideas coming through a journey and getting into production and scale. I think we will need to cross pollinate internally and externally on an open platform. So I do not think we can continue to take a bigger slice from the same pie. We need to work together to grow the pie.
Gemma Livermore: Okay. Yeah. So you look at that maturity level rather than the, when we look back at the tremors, it’s where the partnership starts. And then maybe as we move into the epicentre, it’s how you mature those ones that you already have. I like that.
Marcus Martinez: Yeah, I think there’s an interest in complexity that emerges from this kind of situation because when you think about, partnerships that are established between large organisations the fintech space or even outside fintech, you start to create a completely new level of complexity and that requires a new different way of thinking about how to operate the bank because suddenly it’s not necessarily about, it’s almost like the difference between building a lego brick one by one or reusing lego bricks that exists and assembling them in a different way. And there’s no limitations. You think about music, right? If you got a piano, there’s a fixed amount of, you know, keys there that you can play in music, but there’s no limitation of music that can be played. So in banking, I think it’s exactly the same thing. So it doesn’t matter if two banks, two competitors using the same, you know, FinTech or the same solution because the differentiation will come from the way you assemble these propositions.
Gemma Livermore: I like that. So they’re using the same piano, but playing different music.
Marcus Martinez: Exactly, exactly, And I don’t think there’s a limitation for that. Because not everything inside the bank will be, let’s say, replaced by whatever is happening outside. So got an organisation like HSBC. There’s so much intelligence inside that is just the source of their competitive advantage. That will never become something that a fintech company would do. And I think that’s probably the challenge, is to find that kind of balance. How much you allow to be, let’s say, outsourced versus what you keep inside that makes it different. I think that’s probably the struggle that’s ongoing,
Gemma Livermore: And as we move into the epicentre side, what do you think are the key milestones that we’ve been through until we get to today that have really shaped that digital financial ecosystem that we sit in now?
Esra Demir: For me, two things come to mind are open banking and cloud adoption. Open banking, because when the external bodies governing you start to say that you will need to have standardised application interfaces, you have no choice but to give it. The moment one of the organisations start giving it and the customers, consumers, users start understanding what it means for them, then it becomes an external pressure on you to adopt and provide. I think that was one infliction point in my mind. And the second one is maybe it was a shift. It’s not an infliction point of so much but cloud being widely adopted and trusted.
Gemma Livermore: Yes. Yeah. The trust was a huge shift, wasn’t it?
Marcus Martinez: Agree.
I love the open banking analogy. I think it’s something that is probably underappreciated in the industry. These regulatory frameworks to exchange data clouds, well, that’s music to my ears. And I would add another one, which is the mobile, the smartphone, which for me, that’s such a very interesting thing, because when you think about the smartphone, everything you can do today with your, you know, this device, it creates a pressure on the industry to become more contextual. Because now, I don’t remember, I think it was Lloyds, the Lloyds CEO said some time ago that the busiest branch was the Blackfriars train at 7 a. m. Because everybody’s using the app at that stage, at that moment in time. So I think for me the reason this is a milestone is because it forces the bank to be contextual and consider new types of data. So for example, if you think about historically having your geolocation at this moment in time was not important, it wasn’t irrelevant. But when you think about fraud. There are solutions in the market that will say, what angle Marcus is holding his phone? You know, how quick is the keystroke? You know, is he walking? And all this, you know, data in smartphones becomes something that banks are using to detect fraud. And so I think for me, this will keep going because the smartphone is becoming more powerful. and of course, like how many minutes we’re running without talking about AI, right? And I think last year with the let’s say the open launch of GPT 3 or 3. 5. That was something that I think we’re still seeing the consequences of.
Rachael Rowe: And it’s really interesting as you’re talking through these milestones. It’s just occurring to me that there’s a greater degree of collaboration as we go along that timeline. So if we move the epicentre, because I feel that the history, to some extent, is relatively short, and it’s where we are now in the future, which is really the main focus. So if we think about collaboration as a catalyst for innovation, I guess, Marcus, if I start with you, what role do you see partnerships playing in driving innovation within areas like payment systems, customer experience, regulatory compliance. We started to kind of dance around some of these a little bit, but maybe if you could share some specific examples.
Marcus Martinez: Yeah, I think there’s an interesting, not dependency, but a synergy between fintechs and tier one and tier two banks. I think the first one is about industry domain knowledge. So even though a bank may decide to build a specific solution for a specific problem, that’s not the main purpose of a bank. So that’s why I sometimes question the scale of technology teams in banks. Because a financial institution, from a historical perspective, of course, they need to have a big muscle to deliver tech. And I think the way partners add value to this relationship is by bringing this domain knowledge. As I said before, they’re probably doing something 10 times better, 10 times cheaper, and that creates a lot of value. And I think the other thing is around, how I would say that is the resilience aspect. So when you think about a bank in the traditional operating model, where you have everything, not everything, but most of the capabilities in house. It’s almost like a honeypot. There are many things that can go wrong just because of the complexity. So when you create a more decentralised operating model, as a consequence, your operational resilience goes up. Because not everything is inside the same institution. And I know there’s a debate about, you know, the degree of dependency, locking effects, there’s like a whole new topic. But I think top of mind for me, that would be the main two things, the value and the operational resilience.
Gemma Livermore: Definitely. Esra, how about we now talk about meaningful innovation? Because obviously innovation can take us off into so many different directions. How do you ensure that partnerships between banks and tech companies lead to that meaningful innovation?
Esra Demir: For me, I think ChatGPT was a good test. Because we’ve been working with Microsoft when they announced their partnership with OpenAI. I was super excited to understand what GPT can do in the context of financial services. And when I was trying to explain it within the organisation, it was a different journey, versus the moment ChatGPT was launched and public knowledge, the amount of requests that was incoming to me and my team was completely different, and that then presents itself beautifully as a problem, and therefore an opportunity to solve is people then all of a sudden found a very nice hammer and looking for their own nails. For me, I think the primary, the most important thing is what is the problem that we are falling in love. And I think most organisations, most teams, most people make the mistake of falling in love with a solution
Gemma Livermore: Before finding the problem?
Esra Demir: Correct. Yeah. So, I think the problem, and, or the opportunity, it could either present itself as a problem to you or an opportunity is the most important thing. And then when somebody wants to work in partnership, because I see myself as the enabler of the partnership with big technology companies and my company, and therefore I would ask what is the opportunity or problem you would like to solve? Is this a real one? Do we have the data? And why in partnership with that organisation? What’s in it for them? And what is the superpower that we are leveraging from them? And then the initiative therefore will create the trifecta of value, the end user will benefit from it. My organisation and the partner organisation will benefit from it. It will either provide a solution at scale or it will be scalable. And last but not least is the blueprint because I don’t think we should do something because it’s novel and fancy and one off. I think we should do repeatable, reusable things and therefore it becomes innovation because otherwise it conflicts with my two internal design principles. It needs to be sustainable and it needs to help grow the pie together.
Gemma Livermore: I guess that’s where the partnership element comes in. And when we earlier on looked at how things used to be, it was just a one hit wonder of solving a problem. Whereas now it’s more about having a partner that grows with you and works with you as you grow.
Esra Demir: And and I think previously, going back to the beginnings of the partnerships, I think if we were buying a solution from a tech company, big or small, it would consider quote unquote partnerships. For me, it’s just a transaction. The true partnership is that, do we have that conversation that the technology company goes and therefore builds the right product and capability? Do we then have the right support from the technology company to turn it into a solution using our internal know how? And then it becomes a partnership. Otherwise, it’s a mere sales transaction.
Gemma Livermore: Yeah. And what do you look for when you’re trying to discover whether someone is just a transactional solution as opposed to a partner? What is it that you see there?
Esra Demir: I think the uniqueness is again so unique. It’s not different from what I look at, whether it’s a meaningful innovation, it’s still about the user. Whether as an individual banking customer or is a corporate client that we are serving, or maybe it is something that would be a user of the technology company. So let’s say we are working on a maps related geolocation related project and we will innovate together. Will the end like ultimate maps user will benefit from it?
Marcus Martinez: Yeah. If I add to that, I think there are two elements that I like to consider as well. I think one is around the value that delivers for the customer. And what I mean by that is the level of intimacy that the solution enables, because, for example, when you serve a customer, regardless of the product, there’s a specific amount of data about the customer that you consider to provide that service or to sell that product. I think what I have seen as a trend is that good solutions provide a higher, higher level of resolution about the customer, almost in a way that you can anticipate intent. But the other side of the coin, which is the employee experience as well. And for me, this is pretty much two sides of the same coin. So, are you enabling this value to be created? Are you enabling this customer experience? But what’s the impact for people working inside the bank? Is that making them save more time? Is making the work more interesting? And I think these two things go hand in hand, and is a key factor, I think to consider partnerships as well.
Gemma Livermore: Definitely. And Rachael I’d love to bring in your viewpoints at this stage because I know you work for a lot of tier one banks and see what partnership looks like from the other side, give both sides of the story if you like. So how does Seismic enhance the success of these partnerships?
Rachael Rowe: Yeah, absolutely. And I love the framing here because I think for us it’s all about really creating process improvement, and or solving for an identified problem, to your point, Esra. And if we, if we look at Microsoft, for example, Seismic’s built on Azure. So we enjoy a really close relationship with Microsoft. Microsoft really drives productivity across the organisation with Seismic, we are laser focused on go to market effectiveness. So if we look at one particular use case, let’s talk about Seismic meetings, for example, we address the cycle of preparation, present and follow up. And within that we use content skills, learning and enablement all within the Seismic cloud. The intention is, I would say, it’s threefold. The first is to meet the seller where they are so that you know, they’re not going from one environment to another. It’s frictionless in terms of the seller experience. We’re really providing the tools to accelerate the sales cycle so that, you know, there is an end aspiration.
And we’re looking to help drive revenue. and then finally, we really provide that critical data and insights to drive those feedback loops. We’ve only touched on AI. I’m sure there’s gonna be a lot more to come. As we know, data is a key piece of that and having confidence and understanding you have quality of data is really important. And all of this within the spirit of continual growth. Improvement because I think your point about strategic partners as opposed to someone providing you with a point solution, once you’ve solved that problem, was it that problem you’re trying to solve? Or is that actually masking something bigger behind it that is now exposed that you need to address? And I think it’s having confidence that you have the partners in place to help you evolve and grow as an organisation and kind of co create solutions that help drive your business forward. So I guess that that moves to the future.
Gemma Livermore: Yeah, and I’d just like to touch there. I really like even the language that has changed in our industry.
As you look at these things, you know, you look at things like copilot enablement. It talks about that, shared goal that you’re doing it together. You know, you’re going to make someone’s life easier. And to your point that you said earlier, you know, it’s working together for that same goal and growing together. So I’ve really noticed a shift in language, which is worth touching on, I think. But yes, my favourite part, the aftershocks.
I love this bit because it’s all the blue sky thinking and I love hearing what people think is going to happen in the future. So yeah, Rachael.
Rachael Rowe: Excellent, yes, so the aftershocks.
So let’s look at the future of financial innovation through partnerships. And Esra, if I start with you. So as you look ahead. What trends do you see shaping the future of partnerships in Financial Services? Quite a broad question, so you can take it where you like.
Esra Demir: I would like to give one example which is a tangent, however it’s important in the way of thinking. So if you, pay attention to how the London city is shaping itself to prepare itself for bigger innovation cycles coming and some guidances that’s been given the universities even the physical buildings the way that they need to build Needs to have public facing levels and venues for public to intermingle with academia which goes back to open innovation. Which goes back to your question for financial partnerships and innovation in the future to be successful. We need to now start breaking that thinking on the boundaries of us being a highly regulated industry to a highly connected industry. I think it needs to manifest even the way that we present ourselves in the physical world. Do we have spaces where our clients and customers come and sit and work with us on the solutions and the problems? That is the client and customer aspect. On the partnership aspect with the technology companies, the startups, scale ups, big tech, it’s about, do we ask each other the incisive questions, which might be uncomfortable to ask and or answer today? I’m willing to go on that long term journey because let’s be honest, all of us are incentivized with certain shorter term cycles. We are publicly traded. We have investors, we have society, we have our own employees, own leaders to answer to. How we will be making that work for us to have that strategic, incisive, bold questions asked and answered together in the long run.
Gemma Livermore: And that’s where growth happens, isn’t it? It’s in those uncomfortable questions that people might not want to ask, so they are important.
Esra Demir: And that will be the point. We will start solving the exact root cause of the problems instead of treating the symptoms.
Gemma Livermore: Yeah. Marcus, how can banks continue to leverage tech partnerships to stay competitive? Obviously, we’ve touched on AI and cloud computing, and that’s going to have a big impact as we look into the future.
Marcus Martinez: Yeah, I agree. I think these probably are the foundations of, you know, partnerships going forward.
The reason I say that is because over the last, you know, ten years, we have been creating this massive ecosystem of partners, which Seismic is part of. And there are loads of advantages by leveraging Microsoft Azure marketplace.
Gemma Livermore: That’s what I was going to touch on. I love the way that not only do you partner with banks, but you then bring in other technologies to partner with those banks, with the marketplace. So if we could touch on that.
Marcus Martinez: Yeah. We have seen a lot of traction recently on transactions through the marketplace.
Gemma Livermore: Could we explain for our listeners who might not know what it is, what the marketplace is, and how MAC agreements work?
Marcus Martinez: So think about the app store you have in your mobile, right? It’s the same concept but for enterprise. So you have these, let’s say, apps available in Azure where you can easily integrate with your, you know, applications inside the bank.
So it’s not a plug and play process. But compared to the other scenario where you source the application separately, it’s much, much simpler from a commercial and technical perspective. So Azure Marketplace provides this breadth and depth of many applications across many domains and across many, many industries.
Gemma Livermore: So just as an example for listeners. To explain a little bit further, some of our clients have a Mac agreement with you, and then they go into the Azure marketplace and they buy Seismic in that marketplace. In the same way I buy lots on Amazon, don’t tell my partner, but it makes it that easy and accessible
Marcus Martinez: And actually that decreases the consumption of the Mac, as well with banks. So that’s something we have seen a lot of traction and of course the A.I. aspect is another thing. So when you think about, you know, using a large language model today, it does require a huge, you know, capital investment. And it’s not something that makes sense for an institution to do that separately. So by leveraging cloud and all the AI capabilities it really helps you as an organisation to focus on what you do, which is providing financial services, not necessarily building a large language model. And I think talking about A.I. We have over the last, you know, few years, adding 1800 new models on our clouds. So if you’re thinking about depending on the problem you want to solve, there’s, of course, GPT, but there are many others like Mistral,Llama, Phi, and the small language models. So when you think about this environment or this infrastructure, it really gives you all the ingredients for you to be innovative, and I think that’s how we, I think, see ourselves, is how, you know, are we enabling people in the organisations to be more innovative?
Gemma Livermore: I think that’s gonna be a huge thing in the future. You know, it comes back to what we said at the beginning, isn’t it? It’s taking away that friction. So allowing people to grow in an innovative way and a very easy way without any friction.
Marcus Martinez: And the other thing I’ll add there is the cost of experimentation as well, because that’s one of the interesting things when you’re working with, you know, big hyperscalers is that the cost of experimentation is really low. Like if the product doesn’t fly, that’s absolutely fine because, you know, all the things are pretty much an API or an integration layer, it’s not something that you have to rebuild from scratch, so. And I think that’s your point about innovation. I think that’s where probably our industry needs to change its mindset, because historically we are afraid of mistakes. For good reasons, We are a financial services industry, we cannot make mistakes.But with this kind of infrastructure, you do lower the cost of mistakes. And that falls now within your risk appetite as a bank. So I think that’s probably one of the key things that we need to consider.
Gemma Livermore: I could go off on a tangent here, so I’m looking down to keep myself on track
Marcus Martinez: Good,
Gemma Livermore: I love, I love this part.
Rachael how will Seismic’s offerings evolve in that aspect to support the growing needs of financial institutions and their partners?
Rachael Rowe: Yeah, really good question. Innovation is in our DNA, you know, we are a technology company at the end of the day. And as you mentioned, we are privileged to have over 400 financial services customers. and amongst those we have 24 of the 25 largest asset managers just throwing some numbers out because I know we’re all kind of essentially numbers people at heart. but what that does mean is that we have a solid foundation to draw upon, to help drive our innovation. So we are looking to do the adjacent possible in terms of what we have today, where we could be tomorrow, and we do a lot of co-creation with our existing customer base as well. We have a very flexible, extensible platform, and so we are able to build in requirements of market leading organisations, and in many cases that then becomes the next evolution of our solution. but I guess underpinning that the key trends that we see within financial services really are that this need for hyper personalisation, I think it’s something that we all recognise. You’ve talked about this frictionless FS experience. The need to do more with less. Which is being driven by this complex, economic environment in which we find ourselves. And I think it’s a corollary of that and perhaps also of AI, need to simplify the tech stack so that you have confidence in your data and you don’t have an amorphous technology estate where you know you have black holes and you’re not quite sure where the insights are that that you need and then underpinning this. Obviously, it is all driven by AI enhanced workflows. So to bring all this together in a meaningful way, we put our customers customers. At the centre of what we do. That’s the lens through which we view the world. and really, it’s enabling our customers to evolve their customer experience to deliver a world class experience. Because I think really, particularly in FS, you know, we have an environment where you’ve got shrinking margins, there’s cost pressure, you know, there’s a very intense competition and CX is really that battleground where, you know, the competitive advantage is being sought. and so that is where we really help to move the needle.
Gemma Livermore: Something as we look into the future that I think invaluable as all of this grows, are those feedback loops that you mentioned earlier and using technology to see what is working, especially when you’re looking at being client centric. What’s landing well? What’s working with them? So that you can fail fast to your point that you said earlier, Marcus, you know, having that risk appetite to do it. But within a budget, I think that that ability to look at engagement levels and have those feedback loops is going to be so imperative, especially when we look at the next generation of customer experiences and what that looks like. We went to a talk recently, where I’m looking at Rachael as I say that, where we learned that there’s for the first time ever that there’s five generations in the workforce at the moment.
And when you think each of them have a very different way of wanting to work and take on financial services. So that’s gonna be really important. Is there anything you’d like to add on that level?
Esra Demir: That was exactly what I was thinking because statistically, all of us in this room are expected to live above 100 years of age, which means we will need to think of the long term, long game. And the question about the importance of collaborating, partnering. It’s about as simple as we can go fast alone or we can go further together. I And I feel like we have no option to bet for the longer term.
Rachael Rowe: Well said. Well said. And I think as we wrap up, I’d like to get from both of you your final reflections on the importance of collaboration and in driving financial innovation. So if I start with you, Marcus.
Marcus Martinez: Yeah, I think that’s something that depends on how you define collaboration, because I think that’s meaning is changing because of AI. So when you think about collaboration, I think about collaboration between people, which I think it’s super important. But to me now there’s also the collaboration with the machine, with AI. And the reason I say that is because many of the problems we face today in our industry, I think the complexity surpasses our human capacity to think or reason on top of that. And that’s why we do brainstorming sessions to, you know, have a problem and we need ideas. But doing brainstorm sessions, you cannot do a brainstorm session with, you know, every single problem you face. But today you can, right? Because if you have, for example, CoPilot working with you. And I do that every day to say, well, I think that’s a good idea. Give me 10 reasons why this is a bad idea. And suddenly CoPilot will say, actually, you missed all these points. And I keep on that loop until suddenly, you know, I end up with an idea that was much better than I was just sitting in front of the computer and trying to articulate my thoughts. So, to me, that’s a similar construct when you think about large organisations and, and, and smaller organisations because, and, I mean, partners, fintechs, because this feedback loop is becoming more, more efficient. So, when you think about historically for an organisation to change their products, the release cycle will be really, really long just because of all the inherent complexity of the process. But today, if you have an AI agent embedded in your application, as a partner, you can say, actually, there’s this use case or this feature that we haven’t thought about, but suddenly it’s becoming important for this customer. And that feedback loop becomes much, much smoother and, I think, easier to manage. And I think that’s what we’re going to do. So collaboration for me is really, of course, keeping these human connections. But I think there’s a new actor on the scene now, which is the, you know, the A. I think so for me, I think that’s something we discussed a few weeks ago about the creativity imperative. So in my mind, I think we are in an industry that’s highly analytical, for good reasons. Yeah. But I think all these things that are really analytical, very structured, I think AI is just taking over. It’s just a matter of time. The only thing really that where I think will really, really differentiate is by bringing our human, you know, creativity and, you know, ingenuity,
Gemma Livermore: EQ may now become more important than IQ because you’re bringing that part and applying it a lot. The human element. Yeah. And I love to see, as somebody who supports diversity and inclusion, I love to see where that will take us
Marcus Martinez: Yeah, yeah
Esra Demir: I think my points were in a different landscape, but I was thinking of being sort of systematically important in the size and scale that we represent, like our, our organisations in the industries they operate. They are systematically important, which is a privilege and a duty because in this age of AI, I think some of the barriers will be lowered while some of them will be higher. And it’s on us to make sure our societies, customers, clients, investors do not get hurt. And then we are the voice that needs to be heard. And we are also the custodian for the data, for the value, for the information, And we are the true enabler of that value creation and exchange. So that’s where my thoughts are for the future in partnership.
Gemma Livermore: Yeah and I like the fact that you frame it as a privilege as well as because it puts that positive, yeah.
Rachael Rowe: I love that and I really like the theme that’s gone through this whole conversation, which has really been about collaboration and partnerships and you know, working together to develop greater value. And I guess I would like to wrap up, inviting our listeners to explore a little bit. How seismic can help streamline and enhance their partnership strategies. so most of our customers have invested heavily in their strategic tech pillars. So Microsoft, Salesforce, Snowflake, whatever it may be with Seismic. It’s not about adding more. It’s about unlocking the value of the potential that you have within those pillars. So we’re scalable. We have flexible solutions, and the intention is really to help maximise the value of the investments that have already been made. But I’m excited this conversation has evolved. And I think that maybe this would be something we could pick up in a year’s time.
Gemma Livermore: Excellent. Well, thank you very much for joining us today. I could have gone on for a lot longer and I’m hoping that our listeners enjoyed it as much as I did.
Rachael Rowe: Thank you. Thank you both.
