Pete, please guide us through your background and your role as VP of Fintech Solutions at Member Driven Technologies?
I have over 25 years of experience in financial services, spanning front-office and back-office operations, payments, IT processing, consulting, mergers, conversions and integrations. Prior to MDT, I spent over 15 years at Jack Henry with my last position being the director of Symitar implementations.

Even in my previous role, I admired MDT’s deep commitment to clients, employees and its dynamic culture, which are major reasons I ended up here. My passion is helping credit unions leverage the most effective technology and solutions to meet their unique needs and ultimately enhance member service, helping solidify our credit unions’ position as the financial partner of choice in their communities. As VP of Fintech Solutions, I support our clients with fintech integrations and strategy, helping them navigate today’s complex landscape to remain competitive and successful.

For banks and credit unions, what are the key considerations when evaluating potential fintech partners?
When evaluating potential fintech partners, there are several factors that institutions should consider to ensure alignment with their innovation goals and strategic priorities. First, prioritize fintech investments based on cost-effectiveness and their impact on the institution’s overarching strategy. Does the solution solve a pressing problem or business need? Some common top priorities include digital banking solutions, payment systems, efficiency improvements, and security/fraud prevention technologies along with technology that can drive deposits.

It’s also critical to make sure the potential partner has a strong values and culture match. If the fintech doesn’t align with the institution’s long-term vision, the implementation is likely to be disruptive instead of transformative. Finally, thoroughly evaluate the fintech’s track record (which should include reaching out to others who have leveraged the technology), their approach to data security and compliance, and its ability to integrate seamlessly with existing systems.

Prioritizing fintech partners based on overarching strategy, culture and values alignment – as well as extensive due diligence – will be best positioned for success.

What are the common pitfalls that financial institutions should avoid during the fintech selection process?
A major one is innovation for innovation’s sake. Community-focused institutions in particular have limited time and resources, so it’s critical for their attention to be dedicated to deploying technology that squarely supports the organization’s high-level strategy. If innovation is not a key part of your credit union’s strategy, then avoid the ‘shiny new thing’ and focus on investing in technology that augments your institution’s competitive differentiators.

Another common pitfall is only assessing the fintech’s sales and business development team. While these contacts might be great, what will matter most is connection and collaboration with who the institution will be working with on a daily basis, such as the fintech’s operational and support teams. Make sure there is good chemistry between key players.

How important is it for a fintech solution to align with the existing processes and culture of a financial institution?
It’s extremely important; even the most advanced technology can be harmful rather than helpful if it doesn’t align with the institution’s overarching mission or long-term vision. As part of this ‘vibe check’, institutions should evaluate the fintech’s commitment to the customer or member experience, their risk appetite and their view of technology’s role in the broader ecosystem. It’s important to understand how well the fintech solution integrates with existing processes, complements the company culture and advances organizational goals.

Please keep in mind that this isn’t the greenlight to make new fintech solutions to fit into existing processes that have been in place for 20 years. You will likely not gain the efficiencies you’re looking for if you take this approach. Be willing to consider different approaches to existing processes and make the changes that make sense from an ROI perspective.

Can you share some best practices for conducting thorough due diligence on potential fintech partners?
There are several key areas that should be thoroughly vetted to ensure a successful and secure partnership. This includes factors such as the solution’s technical architecture, integration points with existing systems, security posture and the company’s financial position. While this process is arduous, it’s extremely necessary; there is great financial and reputational risk involved in partnering with a company that doesn’t employ proper controls or fails to meet security standards. Here, it can be extremely beneficial to rely on trusted strategic partners for insight and guidance.

By conducting thorough due diligence and thinking long-term, institutions can identify solutions that not only help differentiate but also foster growth and lasting loyalty.

How can smaller institutions, with limited technology resources, navigate the vast array of fintech options available to them?
Navigating the fintech ecosystem can be especially difficult for smaller institutions without the extensive technology resources or in-house expertise available. This is where the right partner can make all the difference, one that is able to provide comprehensive support to guide institutions through the complex fintech ecosystem. Partners that help institutions bridge the fintech gap and understand and speak the fintech language are often a gamechanger for smaller institutions.

When it comes to integrating AI, what steps should financial institutions take to distinguish between hype and substance?
There is a lot of literature out there about AI needing a very structured waterfall approach to implementing this technology. If we’re talking about narrow AI, this approach makes sense because this technology has been around for decades and you’re likely already using this technology without knowing it. If we’re talking about the new Generative AI (GenAI), I don’t think a structured approach here is the right path, particularly for small institutions.

People have a very difficult time switching to new technologies and if you’re going to get the efficiency lift that GenAI promises, you have to change behaviors. It’s just nature, we all love a good habit (maybe it’s just me). But we have found that the best approach here is to pilot GenAI technologies. This approach gives your team a chance to test the new technology in a controlled environment and allows you to figure out the pros and cons without making a major investment in a platform that will likely be very different a year from now. Engaging strategic, and consultive partners is key here if you don’t have the technical expertise on staff.

What role does education and literacy around AI play in helping financial institutions make informed decisions about adopting this technology?
Education and literacy are huge. In general, people tend to fear the unknown, so it makes sense that institutions that fail to properly educate themselves about AI will avoid it. Ensuring key stakeholders understand AI’s potential – and risks – is a critical first step before a strategy can be formed. You can’t avoid AI’s impact. Your employees are likely using this technology now. Lean on industry groups, reputable publications and trusted partners to help share the most relevant AI information and content.

Can you provide examples of small-scale AI use cases that financial institutions can experiment with before fully committing to larger implementations?
As the hype and buzz around AI continues (and frankly, it’s exhausting), financial institutions are exploring several small-scale use cases before committing to larger implementations. For instance, they can start by integrating AI into simpler customer or member chats, where the AI can handle routine inquiries and free up human agents for more complex interactions. Keep in mind, quality here is extremely important as the chatbot is talking directly to your members. Another promising area is AI’s role in supporting the loan approval process by automating preliminary assessments and streamlining documentation review.

AI also proves beneficial in enhancing operational efficiencies by optimizing workflows, improving work quality, and proactively informing decision-making. And, it can support with crafting more personalized offerings, tailored to individual customer or member needs. Even if immediate action isn’t taken, it’s crucial for banks and credit unions to consider how AI could align with and support their service and brand strategy. Engaging with trusted partners and peers is a great starting point to stay informed about the latest advancements and potential applications.

Looking forward, what trends do you see in the fintech landscape that banks and credit unions should be aware of?
Origination and servicing in digital channels continue to be top of mind. Ensuring member engagement after they open their accounts is also areas of interest for our credit unions. We expect loan rates to start to decrease and as a result, lending volumes will go up (no surprise there). Make sure you have the right technology tools for loan origination in place before volume goes up. Also, you cannot be passive with respect to fraud and security. Using technologies to help mitigate these risks is a must for every financial institution.

We see a lot of interest in technologies to provide services for non-interest income. Business Banking and the associated fee income is big right now. Also, is there a way to use Faster Payments (FedNow/RTP) to generate non-interest income? Perhaps.

BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) continues to get a lot of press and frankly, the adoption numbers are really amazing. But with multiple due dates and rising delinquencies, it does make me wonder if this new service is really helping or hurting consumers.

Anything from the CEO Forum we could highlight?

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Nico, we’re delighted to have you at FintecBuzz. Could you start by sharing your professional journey and how it led you to co-found Clair?
I began my professional career after college at J.P. Morgan, where I worked on projects involving hourly rideshare drivers. This helped me gain a deeper understanding of the fintech space and the obstacles that workers face to reach financial stability. Despite already earning their pay, they don’t have immediate access to it, if they need to cover for unexpected expenses. After working an hourly job in college, I experienced firsthand how incredibly frustrating it could be to wait weeks for my paycheck, and sometimes even longer as a result of processing errors. As a student managing my personal budget, in a new country, I could only imagine the level of frustration for individuals providing for their families financially.

This served as my inspiration for creating Clair, a solution to provide a flexible way for employees to get a portion of their pay before payday. Solving the gap between work and pay, and with 78% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck the ability to access their next paycheck ahead of the designated date can make all the difference.

How has payroll technology traditionally operated, and why do these methods no longer meet the needs of today’s employees?
While payroll providers have traditionally issued paychecks on a biweekly cycle, the world is moving toward faster technology and instant money transfers, yet payday remains stuck in an outdated system. Our perspective at Clair is that people should be allowed to get paid as soon as they clock out, especially since they’ve already done the work to earn that money.

Additionally, payroll technology has historically been clunky, which means it’s difficult and time-consuming for employees to use. More employers are recognizing these pain points, as 58% mentioned technology integration as one of the top areas of improvement for their payroll providers, and another 29% said tech modernization is a major concern. In order to meet the needs of the modern workforce, Clair decided to partner with a national bank to provide compliant earned wage access (EWA) to America’s workforce. Our team has worked tirelessly over the past few years to offer a banking infrastructure and compliance framework that makes accessing on-demand pay seamless. We’ve brought this – and our proprietary technology – to industry-leading HR platform partners like Gusto and TriNet, so the companies using their tools can easily offer on-demand pay to their workers.

We just announced in July that Clair grants employees at many of Gusto’s 300K supported businesses access to sign up for On-Demand Pay right in the Gusto Wallet app. This makes Gusto the first partner to announce Clair’s new embedded On-Demand Pay product, which leverages proprietary technology to provide an embedded, compliant EWA solution that integrates directly into workforce management and payroll applications.

We also recently partnered with payroll infrastructure company Check, which selected Clair as its first EWA partner. HR platforms using Check to build and launch their payroll businesses can seamlessly opt into offering Clair’s fully compliant, On-Demand Pay solution, without any impact to payroll and changes to HR.

It’s been a busy year for our team, but we’re happy to be at the forefront of a larger shift toward embedded finance in the HR and payroll industry.

Can you explain how embedded finance is converging with payroll technology and what benefits this convergence brings to both employers and employees?
We’re seeing more embedded finance tools integrated into HCM platforms for seamless use and adoption. APIs, for example, allow for financial experiences to be embedded into existing HR apps to create a “one-stop shop,” providing a more user-friendly design similar to that of consumer apps. About 41% of employees are already overwhelmed by the number of tools and technologies they’re required to use, so streamlining their HR tech stack is key.

By providing employees with one platform where they can access multiple benefits, including financial wellness tools, HR can have a better view of what’s important to employees in the workplace. This can help executives make data-driven choices, reduce the time and resources required to train employees on new benefit tools and help overall employee satisfaction and productivity.

With a top-requested benefit like earned wage access, for example, building an embedded experience is key. It’s typically complicated for HR tech to build, so finding a compliant partner that has the right tech infrastructure in place is critical. Clair’s On-Demand Pay product removes all manual work required to roll out the benefit, and that includes any manual changes to employee counts or payroll.

Why is it important to give employees flexibility when they get paid, and how does this flexibility impact employee satisfaction and retention?
For employers who are still dealing with labor shortages in essential fields like healthcare and manufacturing, offering flexible benefits like on-demand pay can be a game changer in employee satisfaction, which leads to retention. With benefits like on-demand pay, employers can help their workers get better financial footing and stand out in the labor market. Companies that go one step further to ensure embedded finance benefits are available within their existing HR apps can also gain a significant advantage, such as lessening burnout among their HR teams and prioritizing workers’ well-being and user experience, to ultimately differentiate themselves as a top employer.

With 68% of employees using financial wellness services provided by their employers in 2023, up from 51% in 2012, what does this trend indicate about the evolving needs of the workforce?
This indicates a few things about today’s workforce. They’re dealing with stressors – like unexpected expenses, student loan payments, or inflation increasing the cost of living – and they appreciate the help and support of their employers. They also want both long-term and short-term financial wellness benefits. Offering 401(k)s for long-term savings is important but many workers need help now and can benefit from access to their pay outside of the bi-weekly pay cycle, budgeting tools, financial education and more. Simply put: Employees want more flexibility and control over their finances and financial wellness benefits help deliver that.

Why is it crucial for payroll tech providers to partner with financial wellness benefit providers who understand regulatory complexities and ensure long-term compliance?
Service disruptions can be a headache and if a financial wellness benefits partner isn’t compliant, it can turn into a nightmare for employers and their employees. That’s why it’s critical to identify a partner who not only understands regulatory complexities but is also compliant, which gives employers peace of mind while extending support and buy-in from executives. When it comes to EWA in particular, it’s no longer just an advantage but rather a need as the CFPB recently proposed that EWA products should be recognized as loans, and states are also constantly enacting their own laws. This can lead to interrupted service with EWA providers that are not compliant, when laws change.

Additionally, Millennials and Gen Z-ers make up the majority of today’s professionals and have grown up with consumer-friendly apps with embedded finance experiences, like Venmo and Uber. As a result, they now expect the same app and software experiences that prioritize convenience and are designed with sleek and simple interfaces. By embedding financial offerings into HR management apps, users can easily find what they need without the extra step of extensively searching workflow documents or contacting customer support. With the help of innovative HR tech and fintech teams leveraging APIs and building proprietary technology, this experience can be brought to life. By minimizing employee confusion and lessening time-consuming questions for HR teams, workplaces can also see a rise in employee engagement rates.

Based on your experience, what advice would you give to employers looking to update their Workforce Management and Human Capital Management systems to better meet the needs of their employees?
Make it as easy as possible to keep everything integrated! Employees do not have the time or energy to navigate a new app or tool in their workflow management processes. They’re already occupied with their daily job responsibilities, so the additional task of spending time updating payroll information or logging into yet another insurance portal creates productivity obstacles. By making tools simpler and more seamless, workers are more likely to utilize them on a day-to-day basis and it makes it easier to onboard future employees.

In closing, what final thoughts or key messages would you like to share about the future of payroll technology and the importance of integrating financial wellness services for a modern workforce?
Embedded finance is key to reshaping the way employers approach employee benefits and workplace management. It’s been exciting to see the demand for financial wellness benefits increasing recently among employers and professionals. We’re excited about expanding access to On-Demand Pay and to see the noticeable impacts on employees’ lives.

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Mireille, please tell our readers a bit about your journey and what led you to your current role as CMO of Regnology.

Over the past two decades, my career as a marketing professional has been deeply rooted in supporting enterprise financial software companies. Early in my career, I had a brief stint with a niche vendor specializing in connectivity for listed derivatives. I then spent nearly 12 years at Murex, where I grew into a marketing leader within a global organization. This period was a remarkable chapter in my career, during which I honed my skills in all areas of marketing and communications. I also gained valuable insights into the challenges of financial and capital markets, thanks to the expertise of the subject matter experts I worked with. This experience enabled me to develop agile methods for building a scalable marketing organization capable of keeping up with Murex’s rapid growth, as the company tripled in size, revenue, and geographical footprint, becoming one of the most recognized global leading providers of front-to-back-to-risk trading platforms. I reconnected with electronic trading and connectivity during my tenure at Ullink, applying the foundational skills I had developed early in my career to support the company’s growth ambitions and its subsequent merger with Itiviti. After a detour with an AI start-up specializing in NLG reporting solutions, I rejoined Itiviti in 2020 to work with Rob Mackay, who had been appointed CEO in 2019. Following the acquisition by Broadridge, I supported the company’s transformation into Broadridge Trading and Connectivity Solutions and spearheaded the branding strategy. My move to Regnology was largely motivated by the opportunity to work again with Rob, Linda Middleditch (Chief Product Officer) and other colleagues who had played a key role in Itiviti’s success story.

Given your extensive experience in the software industry, what are some of the most significant changes you’ve observed in marketing over the past two decades?

My passion for marketing stems from its role as a core business function, bridging the gap between supporting a strategic vision, crafting a value proposition, engaging target audiences, and delivering business impact. In the early days, marketing was often considered primarily for its creative aspects, sometimes relegated to a support function disconnected from the core business, particularly in the B2B realm. The go-to tactic for lead generation would be in-person events or tradeshows with a heavy reliance of print collateral and goodies. Today, this perception persists in some cases, reducing marketing’s role to tactical execution of short-term sales activities. However, the rise of digital, evolving buyer behaviors, and the growth of the martech landscape have highlighted the strong correlation between effective marketing and business success, proving its capacity to accelerate growth and scalability.
Key changes include:
● Marketing activities are now quantifiable, offering data-driven insights into the effectiveness of channels and content in engaging audiences and showing their impact on revenue.
● Digital channels have become essential elements of a company’s growth strategy. Websites and social media must be both attractive and seamlessly integrated with CRM systems and marketing automation.
● Content has taken center stage, and as we move towards a cookie-less world, the quality of content and its alignment with the target audience’s pain points will become even more critical.
This comes with an imperative to adopt a holistic approach building on a keen understanding of the market and its dynamics, investing in digital marketing and consistently executing multi-channel campaigns by leveraging automation and the capability to deliver personalized messages.

Regnology focuses on regulatory reporting. How do you approach marketing in such a niche and specialized industry? / You’ve led marketing efforts at companies like Murex and Itiviti. How does marketing in the fintech industry differ from other sectors you’ve worked in?

Regulatory reporting is inherently complex, demanding organizations to adhere to detailed and varying standards across jurisdictions while accurately capturing, processing, and reporting large volumes of data. As a marketer, I apply the same principles here as in any other field I’ve worked in. Success in marketing hinges on engaging with subject matter experts and leveraging their insights to inform the marketing strategy. Understanding how our technology helps regulators and the regulated solve the regulatory data conundrum, streamline the reporting and data collection processes and offer augmented infrastructures leveraging cloud and AI is crucial for crafting relevant messages. Equally important is aligning with the sales team to ensure we create deliverables and execute activities that achieve the necessary scale to reach both current and potential customers. Content marketing is a fundamental driver, though the channels for regulatory reporting are probably scarcer compared to the trading space for instance. Although Regnology is a young brand with just three years of existence, we have the significant advantage of leveraging over 25 years of expertise and recognition, supporting thousands of financial institutions in their reporting processes and covering over 70 financial authorities across the world. We also host the RegTech Convention, one of the largest conferences dedicated to financial regulation, now in its 31st year, providing a unique forum for regulators and the regulated to discuss current regulatory and technology topics.

M&A preparation and strategy are critical areas in your expertise. How do you align marketing strategies with broader business objectives during mergers and acquisitions?

From a marketing perspective, mergers and acquisitions present the challenge of integrating new elements into the overall offering while keeping the value proposition consistent and enhancing it where necessary. It’s crucial to manage change effectively while ensuring business continuity. The due diligence process is essential for understanding the new entity’s value proposition and identifying how it contributes to the organization. This enables us to anticipate the impact on ongoing marketing programs, whether they strengthen existing offerings, expand geographical reach, or target new audiences. Integration unfolds in phases over time, involving a continuous learning process where people, cultures, and work habits intersect. Although it doesn’t happen overnight and comes with its challenges, M&A ultimately serve as powerful growth accelerators. For Regnology, considering the specificities of regulatory reporting, M&A have accelerated knowledge transfer, added expertise, and efficiently expanded our footprint.

AI is rapidly changing the marketing landscape. How do you see AI influencing marketing strategies and initiatives today and in the future?

I believe AI will deeply integrate into marketing, influencing a wide range of channels and tactics. In the martech space, AI can already help automate processes and fine-tune campaign tactics in SEO and paid advertising for instance, enhancing their precision and effectiveness. It also helps to optimize content for search engines and improve campaign performance by identifying the most successful strategies. Furthermore, AI supports content creation by uncovering innovative business ideas, jumpstarting content production and developing more personalized and tailored messages.
I see AI as a valuable tool for taking over routine, repetitive tasks, allowing marketers to concentrate on strategic efforts. It also has the potential to provide exceptional data intelligence by recognizing patterns, offering fresh insights and provide advanced analytics.
However, as AI usage becomes widespread, there is a risk of uniform content and tactics being disseminated across organizations. I think that in a world where the use of AI is widespread, developing a unique and distinctive voice will be more than even a key differentiator to deliver successful marketing tactics.

What are some challenges you face when rebranding or launching new products, and how do you overcome them?

The marketing challenges with Regnology are diverse and complex. The company brand is young and aiming to gain global recognition, the organization is integrating multiple tech stack into its offering through its active M&A, the product vision is driven by technology innovation and constantly evolving, which adds another layer of complexity.
The decision was taken early on to develop Regnology as a branded house rather than a house of brand. By implementing a company-led brand strategy, we aim to amplify the investment made to introduce Regnology and use it as an umbrella brand that extends to our entire solution offering.
Regnology has a singular focus on regulatory reporting. Our goal is to develop Regnology into a household name synonymous with “Regulatory Reporting” and “Tech” expertise, reflecting the foundation of our company name. This caters for the potential disruptive effects of M&A avoiding confusion and cannibalization across our tech stack. Additionally, we want to prevent the need for repeated overhauls of our brand system when integrating new offerings. We are developing a brand system that permeates from the company level to our platform and all solution lines, while still giving room to assess the brand equity of acquired companies and products and integrate them into the brand system.
From a branding perspective, my goal is to achieve high brand equity by consistently enhancing brand recognition across all touchpoints at the company, platform, and solution levels.

Lastly, what advice would you give to aspiring marketers who want to make a significant impact in the fintech industry?

My advice to an aspiring marketer aiming to make a significant impact in the fintech industry is to cultivate a strong sense of curiosity. You need to be equally passionate about mastering marketing strategies and understanding the intricacies of the financial industry. Treat marketing as a core function and forge strong alliances with product and sales teams, as well as HR (for employer branding for instance), customer success, and partnership divisions. Harness the power and insights provided by AI and digital marketing but remember to blend in the art of marketing to create meaningful connections and memorable experiences for your target audience.

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Srikrishnan, it’s great to have you with us. Can you start by sharing a bit about your professional journey and what led you to co-found Rocketlane?

I did my bachelor’s in Computer Science & Engineering and went to one of India’s top B-schools – IIM Bangalore from 2005 to 2007. Post that I’ve been in in product companies – first building product, and later building the business. I’m a techie at heart and started my career in B2C products – across Verizon, Rediff.com, and a start-up called Jigsee. It was 2012 when I started my first start-up with a couple of close friends, and my B2B SaaS journey started with that venture. We were lucky to be acquired by Freshworks in 2015, and learned a lot about building and running a SaaS business in the 4 and a half years we spent there post-acquisition. Inspired by the success and impact I saw at Freshworks, I started Rocketlane in 2020 with the same co-founders – Vignesh and Deepak.

How does Rocketlane plan to utilize the Series B funding to advance its AI integration in the professional services sector?

We’re integrating advanced AI capabilities to revolutionize project delivery, governance, and operations with copilot experiences, automations, forecasting, insights, and recommendations.

What specific inefficiencies in customer onboarding and project management does Rocketlane aim to address with its AI-driven approach?

In our previous roles at Freshworks, we noticed that the customer onboarding phase was under-serviced, crucial for gaining customer confidence but plagued by gaps in collaboration and visibility, making value demonstration challenging. Existing tools failed to provide cohesive visibility or enforce our playbook, leading to siloed work streams and inevitable escalations. Realizing the opportunity, we spoke to other companies facing similar issues and decided to create Rocketlane—a product designed specifically for customer onboarding and client project delivery, ensuring the right visibility and experience throughout the client delivery journey.

What strategic advantages does Rocketlane foresee by integrating AI into operations, project delivery, governance, and insights?

Rocketlane is able to make better governance, increased automation and efficiency available out-of-the-box for its customers through AI vs. having to set up elaborate rules and integrations to accomplish the same. This means more customers will use the intelligent capabilities and leverage the full power of a PSA solution. This ultimately means Rocketlane customers will see more success with the platform and be happy advocates.

In what ways does Rocketlane differentiate itself from traditional PSA software in terms of enhancing client satisfaction and project success rates?

Rocketlane is purpose-built for professional services delivery. It combines project management, resource management, communication and collaboration, reporting and analytics, financial management, and project automation capabilities into one sleek platform. Our customers do not need to switch tabs and flit between spreadsheets to keep track of projects.

How do real-time insights play a role in Rocketlane’s strategy for enhancing team collaboration and decision-making?

Real-time insights on our customers’ usage of Rocketlane help us understand how our product UX and flows impact adoption of various impactful capabilities we build for customers. The data and insights help us come up with new hypotheses, as well as validate existing ones, especially when we are able to slice and dice the data by cohort, industry, use case, etc.

How does Rocketlane ensure data privacy, accuracy, and consistency through AI automation, and what impact does this have on service quality?

Rocketlane takes the security and privacy of its customers seriously. Our services are tested automatically on every SDLC lifecycle. Thousands of tests ensure that the quality of the software we release to our customers meets our stringent guidelines. All customer data is physically or logically separated from each other and encrypted at rest and in transit. These and other controls we’ve implemented ensure we can meet compliance standards like SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA while maintaining a service SLA of 99.9% or higher.

How does Rocketlane balance automation with maintaining a personalized client experience in professional services?

Rocketlane’s automation and intelligent capabilities focus on providing the right alerts and insights in a timely manner, nudging users on actions, or providing an automated starting point for a personalized engagement. Customers use these automations, templates, and more as a nudge or an initial draft that they can work on top of to then personalize the experience – which also could be aided by AI.

Srikrishnan, what personal strategies do you employ to stay ahead in the rapidly evolving tech landscape?

• Spend deliberate time brainstorming with customers, partners, and internal team members to see what interesting and high impact ideas they have, and where they are seeing success with new products and technologies.
• Thought exercises around what kind of new product or technology can disrupt Rocketlane today.
• Part of the product/tech team is always experimenting with new technology and showcasing the experiments in weekly demos for the rest of the company to riff off on.
• Innovation seldom occurs in isolation. Watching out for innovation in other industries can carry very important clues for what can work in your own space. So, following the media to track innovation in adjacent spaces or parallels from other industries.

Finally, do you have any parting thoughts or advice for our readers about the future of AI in professional services and project management?

AI is going to aid services and project delivery professionals in a big way – increase our efficiency, identify risks, and help us codify our ways of working better.Embrace it and enable it by ensuring the data going into these AI enabled PSA and PM systems is maintained accurately at all times. By letting AI do its part – summarization, alerts, insights, document or email generation, etc., we can focus on the “human” aspects of client project delivery, and on developing the right plays to react to the insights, warnings, and inputs from AI.

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Erin, to kick things off, could you share a bit about your journey and what sparked your interest in enhancing financial fitness for consumers?
I began my career working at a bank in 1998 and then shifted to the fintech side in 2002 when I joined Digital Insight (which was acquired by NCR in 2014). Now, I am the executive director of product management for digital banking at NCR Voyix, helping community financial institutions digitally transform and enhance their product roadmap initiatives.

I have always been particularly passionate about financial health and wellness. After all, even small behavior changes can lead to meaningful impact. Over the past couple of years, my team and I have been focused on how we can empower community institutions to better support their customer and communities through unique experiences and easy self-service tools. This initiative is especially important as consumers across the country struggle with persisting inflation and a high cost of living.

I believe in community institutions’ power to help their customers improve their financial fitness and gain confidence in their financial decisions, and I’m proud of my team’s work to create tools to support those efforts.

In today’s economic climate with high inflation and living costs, what do you think are the most pressing challenges for lower and middle-income consumers and how can financial institutions help?
Inflation, loan interest rates, rising cost of living, and most recently the resumption of student loan payments have added significant financial burden to consumers across the country. As this economic uncertainty continues, one challenge is that many banks and credit unions still have a ‘one size fits all’ approach to helping customers and members with their financial fitness. There is a significant opportunity for community institutions to leverage data to create unique experiences for different segments, using technology to personalize experiences at scale and having a “one-to-one” experience.

However, there are challenges associated with where their customers are receiving their financial advice. Younger generations are generally not coming to the branch when they need assistance; instead, they’re looking to unverified influencers on TikTok or other social media sources.
To help overcome these roadblocks, banks and credit unions are taking on a more informed approach powered by real-time data, providing customers with resources, tools, and education within the context of their individual journey. Incorporating resources where customers are allows them to better understand, apply and retain the information, ultimately making it more impactful.

Community financial institutions remain the backbone of local economies and are uniquely positioned to support consumers and businesses during economic turmoil. To effectively do so, they must adopt personalized and contextual insights, backed by data.

Open APIs are becoming a game-changer for financial institutions. How do they foster innovation and broaden the range of tools available to customers?
With the advent of open APIs, it is suddenly possible for banks and credit unions to innovate more quickly than ever before, connecting with partners of choice or creating their own content to offer new and exciting technology. However, this can only happen if the bank or credit union’s architecture enables it. Platforms that are cloud-based and API-first, with a proven track record of reliable, successful integrations, should be prioritized.

Such architecture is also critical to unify channels, which is becoming increasingly critical for institutions. Traditionally, channels such as digital banking, the contact center, the branch, etc., have operated in siloes, creating disconnected customer and member experiences and inefficiencies for the institution. With an open, API-first architecture, it becomes possible to connect touchpoints, creating a consistent, efficient experience that isn’t defined by channels alone.

In a digital-first world, how can banks and credit unions ensure they maintain the human touch in their digital interactions?
Effectively humanizing the digital experience has never been so important. This means leading with empathy throughout the customer experience – in person, online or on their phones. Even something as simple as analyzing the language used in an error message can have a major impact. Banks and credit unions should evaluate everything with a person in mind – are you delivering relevant information in a human way, making them feel comfortable and supported along the journey? Personalization is a key factor here as well. Money and finances are extremely personal and should be treated that way.

Humanizing digital in this way is only possible through the effective use of data, using it to uncover crucial consumer behaviors, channel preferences, transactional patterns, and key events in the consumer journey. The banks and credit unions that prioritize looking for ways to incorporate more empathy and personalization within their platforms will be well positioned to strengthen relationships and drive loyalty with their customers and members.

What are some practical steps financial institutions can take to lead with empathy and personalize the digital experience for their customers?
Personalization really means showing the consumer that you know and care about them; they’re not just another number. Doing so effectively requires creating digital experiences that feel like they’re catered to each individual user. Even if low loan rates or high deposit rates are what got the consumer in the door, it won’t be what keeps them there. The financial institutions that emphasize building and maintaining relationships will be better positioned for loyalty and success.

AI is rapidly evolving in the financial sector. How should banks and credit unions approach AI integration to ensure it adds real value rather than just following trends?
There’s no denying that AI has significant potential, from creating personalized interactions with each consumer at scale and increasing efficiencies. Institutions should evaluate how AI can help institutions improve certain processes. For example, more are leveraging AI for lending decisions instead of just relying on traditional factors.

Banks and credit unions should keep in mind that AI, and especially generative AI, is only as strong as the data and information behind it. AI is not a magic bullet; there is notable work required to train AI to make it effective. The right data and training are needed, as well as ongoing human oversight.

Speaking of data, we’ve already established that the effective analysis and use of data is critical across the institutions. This is also where AI can have significant impact, allowing banks and credit unions to better collect and analyze this data. Such efforts will enable them to better anticipate customer and member behaviors and offer more accurate contextual assistance, such as tailoring their website content to specific needs.

For institutions starting their AI journey, what advice would you give on setting realistic expectations and effectively managing the implementation process?
Banks and credit unions should first ask themselves what they’re trying to accomplish with AI; it shouldn’t be adopted just for innovation’s sake. For example, do they have more of a need to enhance back-office efficiencies or do they need to offer different ways to support users? Be selective and prioritize; you don’t have to do everything all at once. Experimenting and making adjustments along the way will be critical in the process.

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Arthur, welcome to Fintec Buzz. To start, could you please share a bit about your professional journey and what led you to become the Vice President of Financial Crime at WorkFusion?

Thank you! Before joining WorkFusion in 2022, I spent more than 20 years in anti-financial crime programs across financial institutions, tackling the same complex banking problems our customers face today: sanctions, anti-money laundering (AML), fraud, and Know Your Customer (KYC). My professional journey includes American Express, UBS, Commerzbank, and Rabobank. Combined with my legal and compliance experience as a practicing attorney, you could say that I have been readying myself for WorkFusion for years! I joined WorkFusion because I saw it as a game changer for the anti-financial crime industry, with pre-packaged AI Assistant Digital Workers that could complete many of the rote, mundane, repetitive tasks as well as help tackle the false positive problem.

Banks face numerous challenges with AML and Sanctions regulatory compliance. From your perspective, what are the biggest obstacles financial institutions encounter in this area?

The three biggest challenges with AML and Sanctions regulatory compliance are evolving regulations, risk mitigation, and staff management. Banks and financial institutions have struggled with the same challenges for decades. The combination of manual work, large numbers of false positives, and limited capacity combined with increasing volumes creates a vicious cycle. The shortage of full-time analyst staff, whether due to hiring freezes or the general lack of L1 analyst availability, results in FinCrime compliance teams becoming massively overwhelmed, which can lead to burnout among existing staff and difficulties maintaining effective and efficient compliance operations.

Additionally, the sheer volume of alerts that needs to be reviewed, dispositioned and investigated for AML and Sanctions compliance is enormous. And 99% of these alerts are false positives. This leads to inefficiencies as compliance teams spend considerable resources, time, and effort reviewing alerts that ultimately do not represent genuine risks, diverting attention from higher risk and more critical investigations.

Can you explain what AI Digital Workers are and how they function within the context of financial institutions?

WorkFusion’s AI Digital Workers are AI AML and Sanctions analysts that come out of the box with up to five years of experience in a specific job role. They are technology controls that mitigate risk and can integrate into financial institutions seamlessly, increasing their compliance team’s capacity. Think of WorkFusion’s AI Digital Workers as employees that have infinite capacity to automate alert reviews and document-heavy, tedious, and error-prone work.
We launched our AI Digital Workers in 2022, after in-depth conversations with how our customers were using our machine learning and automation. We learned that many had given the technology a human name and interacted with it like it was an employee. That was the beginning of packaging the technology up as personified AI solutions – they each have a human name, a human persona, and were trained to do a specific job in AML and Sanctions compliance. We have Evelyn, who does adverse media monitoring and sanctions/PEP screening alert review; Tara, who is a transaction screening analyst; Isaac, who is a transaction monitoring investigator, and many more focused on KYC and pKYC.

Our AI Digital Workers improve the quality and consistency of the work being done, help mitigate risk, improve operational effectiveness and efficiency, and help ensure a positive customer experience. They are also easier and faster to onboard than a traditional employee or outsourcing the work. They improve compliance with detailed narratives and complete audit trails. They also make work easier for analysts by taking on the document-heavy, tedious busy work that is typically done by Level 1 analysts. It turns the analyst from hunter-gatherers to true risk analysts. This helps reduce employee burnout and improve job satisfaction. For example, we have even seen U.S. Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) officers doing the work of L1 analysts because they were so short staffed. An OFAC officer shouldn’t be dispositioning sanctions alerts, especially when there is technology that can alleviate that burden.

How are AI Digital Workers helping financial institutions meet compliance with regulatory bodies such as the BSA, AMLA, OFAC, FinCEN, OCC, and FDIC?

There is already a collective push toward integrating technologies to augment, liberate, and improve human intervention and judgment, which will enhance operational effectiveness and efficiency, while reducing errors. Government agencies, regulatory bodies, and financial crime oversight organizations, including the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), with its AML Act of 2020 and Innovation Initiative, explicitly advocate for innovative approaches to address various challenges to mitigate financial crime and AML and Sanctions compliance risks.

An enormous amount of manual work and false positives exist within financial crime programs — onboarding, periodic reviews, risk assessments, transaction monitoring, sanctions alerts, and quality control — making it time-consuming and error-prone. For example, with manual operations, a transaction may get delayed for hours due to similarities of one on the OFAC sanctions watchlists. Consider this: Level 1 analysts can typically work 200-300 sanctions alerts per day. Yet when sanctions alert volumes spike, financial institutions can face up to 500-800 daily sanction alerts. This becomes not only overwhelming but impossible without automation.

AML and Sanctions compliance can be significantly eased through automation, reducing the amount of time-consuming and tedious tasks worked by human staff and allowing analysts to concentrate on genuine risks.

Addressing AML risks is a critical task for financial institutions. How do AI Digital Workers contribute to mitigating these risks effectively?

WorkFusion’s AI Digital Workers significantly enhance the ability of financial institutions to mitigate AML and Sanctions compliance risks by automating repetitive and data-intensive tasks traditionally performed by human analysts. These AI AML and Sanctions analysts are technology controls that organizations can use in their risk mitigation toolkit. By automating these job roles, there is increased consistency and quality of reviews, material and immaterial errors are reduced, alert surges have nearly zero impact, they avoid missed escalations and missed true positives, and avoid delays leading to poor customer experience. Ultimately, AI Digital Workers improve overall risk management and operational effectiveness and efficiency by freeing up human analysts to focus on high-risk areas.

In your opinion, why is it essential for financial institutions to innovate their AML and Sanctions compliance programs continuously to mitigate risk?

Continuous innovation in FinCrime compliance programs is essential for financial institutions to effectively mitigate risk because the landscape of financial crime is constantly evolving. As illicit activities become more sophisticated, so must the tools and strategies used to combat them. Traditional manual processes are inefficient and increasingly inadequate in addressing the complexities of modern financial crimes. Innovating with AI and machine learning allows organizations to keep pace with the rapid changes in transaction patterns and regulatory requirements and expectations, ensuring they can detect and respond to threats more swiftly and accurately. Additionally, regulatory bodies such as FinCEN and the Office of Foreign Assets Control (FCA) advocate for innovative approaches, underscoring the importance of leveraging technology to enhance compliance efforts and reduce the risk of non-compliance and associated penalties.

There is often caution among financial institutions when it comes to implementing AI. What are the primary concerns, and how can these institutions overcome them?

The primary concerns around implementing AI are data privacy, model risk management, and security issues, the potential for bias in AI algorithms, the complexity of integrating AI with existing legacy systems, and regulatory compliance. To overcome these concerns, we recommend that institutions take small steps. Ensuring robust data governance and security measures can address privacy and security issues. Implementing transparent and explainable AI models can help mitigate biases and increase trust in AI-driven decisions. Ensure you follow internal governance when planning, implementing, and deploying any AI use case. Follow your model risk management framework and testing protocols, and put analytics, monitoring, and guardrails in place to ensure the AI solution is working as intended and within acceptable parameters. Partnering with experienced AI solution providers can facilitate smoother integration with legacy systems and ensure compliance with regulatory standards.

Leveraging the benefits of Generative AI without adding risks is a delicate balance. How can financial institutions achieve this balance effectively?

Generative AI and the LLMs that support it have absorbed the mindshare of the AI market. To best achieve its promised value — particularly in financial services — organizations need to not only seek the benefits but mitigate the risk. To do this, they need to look to processes that combine the best of LLMs and complement them with traditional AI and human-in-the loop.

To go deeper, financial institutions can achieve a balance in leveraging Generative AI by implementing comprehensive risk management strategies encompassing both the technological and operational aspects of AI deployment. This includes developing clear policies and guidelines for AI usage and ensuring that all AI-generated outputs are subject to human review and validation to prevent errors and biases. Employing robust data governance frameworks will help maintain data integrity and security. Regular staff training and upskilling on AI tools and their implications can foster a better understanding and more effective use of these technologies.

Adopting a phased approach to AI implementation, starting with low-risk areas and gradually expanding to more critical functions, can help institutions mitigate risks while realizing the benefits of AI.

Could you share your personal strategy when it comes to staying ahead of trends and changes in the AML and Sanctions compliance landscape?

Staying well-informed and prepared will help you keep up with trends and changes in the AML and Sanctions compliance landscape. My strategy involves continuous learning and engagement with customers, other industry experts, and regulatory bodies. I regularly participate in industry conferences, webinars, and training sessions to stay informed about the latest regulatory changes and technological advancements. I also engage with professional networks and forums to exchange insights with peers and experts. Paying close attention to publications from regulatory bodies such as FinCEN, OFAC, and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) helps me understand emerging expectations and compliance requirements. Additionally, I invest time in to understand the latest advancements in AI and machine learning, as these technologies are pivotal in shaping the future of AML and Sanctions compliance.

Finally, what advice would you give to professionals in the financial industry who are looking to enhance their AML and Sanctions compliance programs with AI technology?

For professionals seeking to enhance their AML and Sanctions compliance programs with AI technology, my primary advice is to start with a clear understanding of your specific challenges and objectives. Identify the area where AI can have the most significant impact, such as automating repetitive task, aggregating data or documents, or reducing false positives needed to be adjudicated. It is crucial to partner with experienced AI solution providers who understand the unique requirements of the financial industry. Focus on integrating scalable AI solutions that deploy quickly with minimal customization.

Training and upskilling staff to work alongside AI tools are also essential to maximize the benefits and ensure a smooth transition. Maintain robust data governance and ensure transparency in AI decision-making processes to help build trust and compliance with regulatory standards. Continuously monitor and evaluate the performance of AI systems to adapt to any regulatory environment changes and improve their effectiveness over time. By following these steps, financial institutions can leverage AI to significantly enhance their AML and Sanctions Compliance programs.

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Could you start by telling us about your journey and what led you to create Corridor Platforms?

I have spent most of my career consulting or working in financial services firms. Improving decisioning and analytical capabilities to keep up with the latest innovations is something all firms struggle to do, especially regulated entities like banks. The existing decision management workflow involves many manual handoffs between data teams, modeling teams, strategy implementers, and governance groups leading to long lead times in developing, testing, and implementing any change in decisioning logic. Additionally, financial institutions (FIs) building big data and machine learning capabilities face one common issue: the more sophisticated the data, models, and strategies are, the longer it takes to go through governance and testing procedures for implementation in production. And the pace of change in big data, AI and now Gen AI is so fast that most financial institutions are struggling to keep up with agile competition.

To address this, we launched Corridor Platforms with a team of seasoned risk professionals. Our goal was to develop end-to-end digital decisioning capabilities that allowed regulated entities to innovate using cutting-edge AI and big data technologies on a highly automated and governed platform. By connecting Data, Modeling, and Decision Strategy workbenches, we are enabling FIs to experiment and keep up with the latest modeling advancements and then allowing them to quickly and seamlessly reap the benefit in production.

Another driving factor behind building Corridor was the slow pace at which FIs iterated on analytics and the inefficiencies they faced in deploying them to production. Traditionally, changing strategies and decisions has been a slow, manual process, taking weeks to months. In the digital age, where customers expect instant gratification and have multiple choices, it’s now an imperative for FIs to elevate their analytical sophistication and offer real-time decisioning to grow and sustain customer relationships. Our platform enables this by providing end-to-end connectivity, automating and compressing the change management lifecycle from weeks to hours. Our goal is to help FIs compete against new-age competitors and win the best customers in the digital era.

What are some of the core problems in decision workflow governance and automation that Corridor Platforms is designed to solve?

We are a decisioning workflow automation bench built on a foundation of data governance to help regulated companies leapfrog legacy AI decisioning processes and technologies to a NextGen Digital Decisioning platform needed to win in the age of digital transformation.

The platform has two distinct and connected modules that solve the core problems FIs currently face:

Data and Model Management – Introducing new and alternate sources of data, ensuring permissible usage across the decisioning cycle, and ensuring that the models built are compliant with fair lending and other regulations is a large challenge at most regulated institutions. In our experience, the underlying core issue that solves this challenge is connecting the Data, Modeling, and Business Strategy workbenches (teams and their tools). Eliminating manual handoffs reduces operational inefficiencies, creates transparency across the decision lifecycle, and provides auditability that allows for enhanced controls. Corridor achieves this connectivity and creates a single source of truth for all analytics and decisions, enabling FIs to experiment and keep up with the latest modeling advancements without disruption.

Strategy Automation – Changing strategies and decisions, in most organizations, is a slow manual process resulting in a lag of weeks to months. Strategies are evaluated, sent for approvals, programmed by technology, and tested before putting into production. In the age of digital offerings, where consumers are able to compare alternative offerings simultaneously, every hour is material as one reacts to changes in competitive or economic conditions. We have created end-to-end connectivity that enables automation and compresses the change management lifecycle into hours rather than weeks/months. A core theme of the platform is ensuring FIs maintain the highest regulatory standards even while moving to real-time decisioning. Our goal is to help clients manage and win against traditional and new-age competition, especially through challenging economic cycles.

Another critical design focus is to ensure that the platform is plug-and-play and that it integrates quickly through APIs with legacy infrastructure, making time to market and impact a clear differentiator. Corridor is highly modular and recognizes that most banks have built some components of a connected decisioning life cycle. We integrate with current components to fill in the gaps and have implemented the software at startups as well as highly sophisticated banks.

Given your extensive background at American Express, particularly with Big Data and Machine Learning, how do these experiences influence the technological direction of Corridor Platforms?

American Express has always been one of the leaders in financial services driving innovation and change to serve its customer base with the highest standards. It was also one of the first movers to adopt big data and machine learning in banking. The experience and learnings gained by driving innovation in analytics at Amex and before that as a consultant serving other leading banks are foundational in helping design a Next-Gen decisioning platform. The founding team of Corridor had the benefit of rethinking the entire process and designing from scratch a decisioning and governance automation platform based on our practical experience in understanding all the pain points that need to be addressed to enable advanced decisioning in regulated entities.

What sets Corridor Platforms apart from other solutions in the market when it comes to helping financial institutions innovate while maintaining governance standards?

Our platform operates as an open, flexible, and modular system. Unlike closed-off analytical products that restrict innovation to their specific toolkits and coding languages, we enable you to innovate using various ML libraries and feature engineering while seamlessly integrating into our interconnected decision management rail. Our design principle ensures easy integration and interchangeability of different decision components, so that you can innovate within these individual components while orchestrating the entire process with standardized automation on the platform.

Additionally, we enable FIs to build and own their core in-house capability instead of just renting it for long-term value, and we span across the entire customer lifecycle, be it origination, marketing, cross-selling, or loss management.

The other key differentiators of the platform can be described in four parts:

a. End-to-end Digital Decisioning lifecycle solution: Provides an end-to-end decisioning lifecycle solution that ‘strings the pearls’ for decision objects of data, feature, model and strategies/rules in a controlled interconnected shared digital workbench.

b. System of record for Analytics: The analytical decisioning platform from Corridor becomes the ‘single source of truth’ for ALL analytics at a regulated firm including past versions of analytics use cases which were approved and locked on the platform for post-production scrutiny by internal compliance teams or external regulators. While analytical systems can come and go, the system of record like Corridor memorializes these decision artifacts for review/investigation post-fact in perpetuity.

c. Systematic governance & compliance: The platform integrates systematic governance and standardized compliance at the ‘source’ when objects are created versus downstream where they are used. This paradigm of ‘Left Shift Decisioning’ where compliance happens upstream and allows downstream decisioning to be approved quicker with less surprise and enables speed with safety.

d. One click-to-production: We are one of the only firms where AI-powered decision artifacts move from analytical environment to production post compliance and approval in ‘one-click’ with no recoding. This reduces the time-to-market, ensures strict control of what decisions are put into production, and allows for post-decision regulatory oversight (e.g., a regulator inquiring, “Why was that applicant rejected four years ago?”).

Could you share an example of how Corridor Platforms has helped a financial institution optimize its decisions in real-time?

A US G-SIB bank was looking for ways to reduce the time and resources required to develop and deploy models in its credit card business. As a highly regulated entity, a priority for the client was to increase speed to market while demonstrating to internal stakeholders and regulators that model, operational, and compliance risk remained the same or ideally decreased. The client engaged Corridor Platforms to perform a rapid diagnostic pilot, focusing on the capabilities of data provisioning, model development, model validation, and deployment to production.

Use of Corridor Platforms reduced model development, governance, and deployment timelines by 30% to 40%. The platform significantly enhanced governance and controls with standardized interfaces, automation of workflows, and greater transparency to reduce friction and inefficiencies. In addition, the team identified significant transformational opportunities by moving manual processes to the platform including model performance tracking and alerts, ongoing approval management, etc.

With the rapid advancement of AI and big data technologies, how do you ensure that Corridor Platforms stays ahead of the curve in terms of innovation and effectiveness?

Corridor Platforms is highly modular and enables FIs to slot in or slot out their decision components with the latest technology without disrupting their existing workflows – enabling them to always stay ahead of the curve in terms of innovation.

Corridor continuously evaluates new and cutting-edge trends in AI/Gen AI algorithms being used in new use cases and how the platform adopts or integrates into it, ensuring our technology is always ‘Current’ for our clients.

In addition, we have launched a starter validation kit called Gen Guard X (Project GGX) in partnership with Oliver Wyman where we have lifted and shifted the product to enable risk management of Gen AI pipelines. Project GGX enables robust governance and provides a centralized and highly integrated platform for evaluating and managing risk at every point of your GenAI application pipeline in a tightly controlled & governed environment.

How does your team’s experience with managing multi-billion-dollar lending portfolios contribute to the development and functionality of Corridor Platforms?

Corridor is founded by industry practitioners and experts who have honed their expertise by working in the industry for more than three decades.
Our technology solves the practical problems faced by companies regularly by combining the knowledge of industry experts and the design and technical skills of a highly skilled and current technology bench. We have built a system that we felt we would have benefited from tremendously when we were on the business side.

What were some of the significant challenges you encountered while building Corridor Platforms, and how did you overcome them?

Starting a business from scratch has its many challenges. One of our main obstacles was creating a team that could blend the experience of industry practitioners with a talented younger cohort skilled in the latest tech and analytical advancements to make our vision into reality. We have kept the company lean with minimal layers to ensure efficient problem-solving and we are able to create and maintain a next-gen platform that is evolving rapidly with new innovations in data and analytics. Our aim is to always stay ahead of the curve for our clients so that they can experiment and deploy the latest advancements in decisioning analytics, AI and GenAI.

As someone with a deep background in risk management, how do you see the future of risk management evolving, and how is Corridor Platforms positioned to address these changes?

Risk Management has evolved significantly in the past years, transitioning from a back-end support function to a key enabler allowing banks to innovate and advance their products and services to serve their customer base with excellence. In my view, this trend will continue as data analytics-driven decisioning becomes prevalent across all industries, especially in banking. From marketing, underwriting to customer cross-selling, all functions are now utilizing the latest innovations in Artificial Intelligence and predictive analytics to improve their products and services. With these advancements comes the responsibility to govern data usage, control systematic bias, ensure proper monitoring for accuracy and compliance – all functions which rely on risk management expertise.

What are your long-term visions for Corridor Platforms? Are there any exciting developments or expansions on the horizon that you can share with us?

We aim to be known as the best-in-class decision management platform for the build, evaluate, govern and implement cycle across large and mid-market FIs. We are also rapidly expanding our RiskDecisioning.ai offering in the mid-market segment. Our new Build-Operate-Transfer offering is targeted at smaller banks and credit unions. This turnkey solution not only equips them with the platform and capabilities to quickly become best-in-class but also includes dedicated consulting teams that can help set up, deliver benefits and then train the banks to take over tasks to ensure self-sufficiency.

To remain at the forefront of innovation, Corridor Platforms and Oliver Wyman recently launched Project GGX, a generative AI initiative focused on safely deploying GenAI in large, regulated enterprises and safeguarding against unintended LLM risks. Combining Oliver Wyman’s risk management expertise with Corridor’s advanced technology, the project aims to test, measure, and monitor the novel risks associated with GenAI.

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Chris, please give us an overview of your role at Xactly, its approach to product development, and how it has evolved in recent years.
As the SVP of Products at Xactly, I manage Xactly’s global Product Strategy, Product Management, Product Marketing, Product Operations and Product Success functions and am responsible for optimizing Xactly’s products to reinforce our position as the only AI-powered platform that combines revenue intelligence and sales performance management to help organizations transform their revenue operations. In my role, I focus on formulating and executing product strategies that drive sustainable competitive differentiation and market leadership, allowing organizations to unlock their full revenue potential.

Our approach to product management has evolved substantially over the years. We’ve complemented our annual roadmapping process with a long-term innovation framework and a short-term agile development process. This allows us to balance our focus on where we need to go over the next few years with what we need to get done in the next quarter or two.

What inspired Xactly to move from a traditional annual product roadmap to a multi-year innovation framework and quarterly agile development process?
Technology is evolving at a pace we’ve never seen before and with the emergence of Generative AI, the pace is only going to accelerate. Xactly has also been on a portfolio management transformation for the past few years; maturing from a multi-product organization to a true platform-first organization. To allow us to exploit the ever-changing technological climate and to effectively execute upon our product strategy transformation, we realized we needed to institute ancillary processes around the traditional annual roadmap planning process.

How do you balance the need for long-term visibility with the flexibility of short-term agile planning?
Although an annual roadmap establishes the key areas of focus for the upcoming year, agile development ensures we’re decomposing our roadmap into manageable bodies of work to allow us to deliver new features and products in a highly predictable way. By incorporating a multi-year innovation framework, we’re able to objectively determine where we should be placing our bigger bets and track the potential impact of those innovations along their journey to market.

What were the biggest challenges Xactly faced when transitioning to this new agile development approach, and how were they overcome?
The risk of change fatigue comes with any process transformation. We’ve discovered significant operational benefits by applying our quarterly agile process, which we’ve leveraged for a few years now. Earlier this year, we determined it would be best if we temporarily pause making additional changes to the process to allow our R&D teams to focus on executing the process, rather than continuing to refine it.

How has the adoption of a multi-year innovation framework impacted Xactly’s ability to innovate and respond to technological changes?
Our multi-year innovation framework has had a profound impact on our ability to innovate and respond to technological changes. We now have the capacity and tools to objectively assess the choices we should make, which could take multiple years to manifest into material benefits for our customers. Innovation is typically one of the most difficult things to get right. However, it’s required if you want to stay ahead of the market. The harsh reality is that most long-term innovation attempts don’t pay off for organizations. We’re using our innovation framework to stay on the right side of that equation.

How has the shift to a quarterly agile development process affected team dynamics and collaboration within Xactly?
Xactly has always been a highly collaborative organization, but the application of our agile development process has unlocked a whole new level of cross-functional collaboration. In most research and development (R&D) organizations, engineering and product are separate functions expected to work closely together. That’s the case at Xactly. But with the agile development process, our teams operate as one. Due to the planning we incorporate into the process, we’ve also seen the collaboration with our peers in go-to-market and customer experience improve as well. The process drives visibility and alignment.

In what ways has customer feedback been integrated into the agile planning process, and how has it influenced product development?
Software companies take risks in various ways to drive innovation and stay competitive, such as adapting new technologies like AI. Since we are constantly taking risks, we need rapid and timely feedback to determine what’s working and what requires a pivot. At Xactly, we leverage a launch strategy which allows us to release new capabilities in phases to solicit feedback early and often before those capabilities go to general availability (GA). For example, we might release a new capability to pilot, where technically the feature is code-complete, but we expose it to select customers, internal stakeholders, and partners to work with it and provide feedback. This allows us to apply improvements to the capability as we progress through the Beta phase; such that when we get to GA we’ve hardened the capability and have a degree of confidence regarding the value it will unlock for our customers.

What metrics or key performance indicators does Xactly use to measure the success of its agile development and multi-year innovation framework?
The KPIs we measure related to our agile development process are primarily focused on velocity and adherence to the committed scope. This ensures we’re building and shipping code quickly. The measurements of success for our innovation framework are different and depend on the innovation we’re contemplating. Those measurements could be related to validating product-market fit, understanding the potential profitability of the capability, or even bringing clarity to the total development timeline.

What advice would you give to other software enterprises looking to implement a similar agile development and innovation framework?
My advice would be not trying to operationalize both of these processes at the same time. First, you should identify what the biggest current challenge is and if it is related to development velocity and alignment or related to driving competitive differentiation. Based on that, choose the most appropriate process that addresses the current challenge. Then when operationalizing one of these processes, ensure you have executive buy-in and acknowledge it will likely take multiple years to get right. With the proper governance model, organizations will know when they’ve optimized enough and can then reap the benefits of the improved process.

How do you foresee the agile development process evolving at Xactly in the next few years, and what future trends do you anticipate in product roadmapping and innovation?
In the next few years, I’m looking forward to continuing to increase our pace of innovation leveraging these processes. We’ve taken the time to build an integrated framework balancing short-term and long-term planning and we can now benefit from that.

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Tell us about your background and what drove you to work in your current field.

I left school at 16, not out of a desire to start working immediately, but because the traditional educational system felt constrictive. The challenges were not just academic; my childhood was overshadowed by the strife at home, where the constant discord between my parents created a chaotic environment. In that turmoil, creativity became more than an escape, it became a means of survival.

This wasn’t merely about discovering a passion; it was about preserving a part of myself that the pressures of a typical path could have easily extinguished. My professional journey began in creative production, a field where I could transform my ideas into reality and empower others to explore their own creative potential.

As I climbed through the ranks, from my initial steps at FMG to my leadership role at Ceros, my career was more than about ascending a corporate hierarchy — it was about proving that adversity could be a catalyst for innovation. My tenure at Ceros was driven by a core belief in the vital role of creativity and its power to inspire and transform.

Recently, I made the significant decision to step down as CEO of Ceros. This move was guided by the same principles that have always directed me — authenticity and a deep understanding of my own capabilities and the needs of the company. Recognizing that Ceros required a different type of leadership to thrive, I chose to pass the mantle to someone equipped with the precise skills needed for its next chapter. This transition marks not an end, but a transformation — an opportunity to explore new paths and continue advocating for creativity from a new perspective.

As I continue to serve on Ceros’ board and support our new CEO, my journey remains fueled by a relentless passion for creativity, a trait that has defined my entire career and will continue to define my future endeavors.

Why should creatives embrace AI as a collaborative companion rather than something to fear?

To put it bluntly, AI is here, and ignoring it isn’t just unwise, it’s a potential professional peril. The apprehension many feel stems from a perception that AI challenges the essence of what makes us human: our innate creativity.

Creativity isn’t exclusive to artists or musicians; it’s the fundamental trait that distinguishes us as a species. Our ability to imagine and create out of nothing is our unique gift. And yes, that can make AI seem like a threat. However, if we start viewing AI not just as a tool but as a collaborator, the entire scenario shifts.

Right now, as I articulate these thoughts, I’m collaborating with Gemma, my AI assistant. This interaction isn’t just functional; it’s transformative. Gemma isn’t just processing my words; she’s enhancing my creative expression.

Embracing AI as a collaborator is akin to forming a dynamic duo, like Batman and Robin. Sure, sometimes AI might come up with better ideas — just as any team member might. But that’s the beauty of collaboration. It pushes you, challenges you, and ultimately elevates your creativity.

By integrating AI into our creative processes, we enhance our capacity to innovate and execute, making the world a richer, more imaginative place. That’s the future I see with AI — where our creative spirits not only survive, but thrive through collaboration that knows no bounds.

Why does creativity matter in an ever changing AI-focused world?

Our world is facing a barrage of unprecedented challenges between climate change, societal shifts, economic upheavals, and energy crises. Each one of these issues is a path we’ve never trodden before. In such a landscape, creativity isn’t just useful, it’s crucial. It’s our most dependable guide through these uncharted territories.

Creativity allows us to imagine solutions where none seem apparent, to innovate beyond the limits of current knowledge and technology, and to see opportunities where others only see obstacles.

As AI continues to evolve and reshape our world, it too presents a sort of frontier. One that’s ripe with potential, but riddled with complexities. Here, creativity becomes more than a skill; it becomes our survival strategy. It’s what enables us to interact with AI not just competently but profoundly, ensuring that as we harness this powerful technology, we do so in a way that solves real-world problems and enhances human life.

What do you predict for the future of AI + creativity as more and more companies look to use it?

The union of AI and creativity isn’t just a trend; it’s the next industrial revolution. Only this time, it’s for ideas. As businesses increasingly harness this dynamic duo, we’re not just witnessing incremental changes, we’re standing on the precipice of a creative explosion.

So, what’s my prediction? Two years from now, there will be two types of companies: those that have harnessed AI and creativity to redefine industries, create groundbreaking customer experiences, and tackle the world’s most daunting challenges—and those that go bust!

Simon, how do you see AI enhancing creativity, and what is its current role and functionality in the world?

AI enhances creativity by helping you unlock new ideas and pathways we may have never thought of on our own. Quite frankly, AI helps you get started! It can be used as an extended team member or a creative collaborator, to evolve existing creative ideas alongside us, rather than just take over creative work entirely. And this is exactly how its current role in the world should be viewed as — a collaborator! Not something to fear or a threat.

If you have that mindset, you will be way behind the advancements happening at every business right now in the world. AI pushes you, challenges you, and elevates creativity in unthinkable ways.

Can you share how you transformed Ceros through strategic decisions based on AI and technology?

My vision for Ceros was driven by a core belief that unlocking creativity matters. And that creativity is a special recipe that only humans have, and it’s magical.

When I really started to understand and utilize AI, and see what it could do, it was like a lightbulb went off. I thought, ‘what if we could combine this incredible technology with the raw creativity of humans?’

I knew that if we tapped into how creative humans are and we mixed this with incredibly collaborative technology, this would be something that no one has ever seen or experienced. It would really empower brands to create richer, more engaging experiences with their content and tell better stories. And that’s how Ceros got to where it is today!

How do you inspire people to be creative in all aspects of their work?

The four C’s are the simple framework to creativity, and have guided me throughout my entire life. These are Curiosity, Connections, Courage, and Celebration. If people embrace these things, it should inspire them to be more creative within their lives and work.

Curiosity is about being genuinely interested in the world around you. Remember, everything you see was created by someone no more intelligent than you. So, get curious, get playful, explore, and learn.

Connections are crucial. Look for links where others see none. Find those bizarre, seemingly crazy connections and combine them in unique ways to manifest something truly novel. That’s creativity!

Find the courage to share your creative ideas with the world. Be courageously honest with yourself about your strengths and weaknesses. Overcome your fears, doubts, and uncertainties, and take action.

Celebrate your creations! Enjoy how others interact with and experience what you’ve made. This joy will take you back to step one, making you curious and reigniting your curiosity about your next creative endeavor.

There is often a stigma against CEOs, especially in tech. How did your genuine, human approach help counteract this perception?
Being human is at the core of who I am. I’ve always stayed true to myself and been transparent about my motivations for building Ceros and managing the business when I was the CEO.

But a human approach isn’t just about being vulnerable, transparent, and authentic. This alone won’t do it. And being strong willed, determined, focused and tenacious alone won’t do it. You’ve got to put them both together to balance the soft and the hard. And that’s a good spot for me, I exist quite well there.

This has allowed me to have deeper connections with others and build more trust than I could’ve ever imagined. And the more trust you build with others, the more likely they are willing to communicate and trust you back.

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