 Live, from New York, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Global Summit 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back, we're here at the Javits Center in New York City for AWS Summit. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host is Corey Quinn and happy to welcome to the program, Scott Mullins, who's the head of Worldwide Financial Services Business Development with Amazon Web Services based here in the Big Apple. Thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having me, Stu. Thanks for having me, Corey. All right, so we had obviously financial services, you know, big location here in New York City. We just had Fenra on our program, had a great conversation about how they're using AWS for their environments, but give us a thumbnail, if you will, about your business, your customers and what you're seeing there. Sure, we're working with financial institutions all the way from the newest FinTech startups, all the way to organizations like Fenra, the largest exchanges and broker dealers like NASDAQ as well as insurers and the largest banks. And I've been here for five years and in that time period, I actually went from being a customer speaking at the AWS Summit here in the Javits Center on stage, like Steve Randers was today, to watching more and more financial institutions coming forward, talking about their use of the cloud. Yeah, before we get into the technology, you know, one of the biggest trends of moving to cloud is, you know, I'm moving from CapEx more to OpEx. And oh my gosh, there's uncertainty because I'm not locking in some massive contract that I'm paying upfront or, you know, depreciating over five years, but I've got flexibility and things are going to change. I mean, I'm curious what you're seeing is kind of the financial pieces of how people, you know, both acquire and, you know, keep on the books what they're doing. Yeah, it can be a little bit different, right, than what most people are used to. You're used to kind of that muscle memory and that rhythm of how you procure technology in the past and there can be a stage of adjustment. But cost isn't really the thing that people, I think, look to the most when it comes to cloud today. It's all about agility and FINRA is a great example. Steve has talked about over and over again, over the last several years, how they were able to gain such business agility and actually to do more, the fact that they're now processing 155 billion market events every night and able to run all their surveillance routines. That's really indicative of the value that people are looking for. Being able to actually get products to market faster, reducing development cycles from 18 months to three months, like Alianz, one of our customers over in Europe has been able to do, being able to go faster, I think actually Trump's cost from the standpoint of what's that biggest value driver that we're seeing our customers going after in financial services. We're starting to see such a tremendous difference as far as the people speaking at these keynotes. Once upon a time you had Netflix and folks like that on stage telling a story about how they're using cloud to achieve all these amazing things, but when you take a step back and start blinking a little bit, they fundamentally stream movies and yes, produce some awesome original content. With banks and other financial institutions, if the ATM starts spitting out the wrong number, that's a different point on the spectrum of are people going to riot in the street? I'm not saying it's further along, people really like their content, but it's still a different use case with a different risk profile. Getting serious companies that have world-shaking impact to trust public cloud took time and we're seeing it with places like FINRA, Capital One has been very active as far as evangelizing their use of cloud. It's just been transformative. What does that look like from being a part of that? Well, you know, it's interesting. So, you know, you just said it, financial services is the business of risk management. And so, you know, to get more and when you see more and more of these financial institutions coming forward and talking about their use of cloud, what that really equates to is comfort. They've got that muscle memory now, they've probably been working with us in some way, shape, or form for some great period of time. And so, if you look at last year, you had Dindo Vecchio from Guardian Life Insurance come out on stage at ReInvent and say to the crowd, hey, we're a 158-year-old insurance company, but we've now closed our data center and we're fully on AWS and we've completed the transformation of our organization. The year before you saw Goldman Sachs walk out and say, yeah, we've been working with AWS for about four years now and we're actually using them for some very interesting use cases within Goldman Sachs. And so, typically what you've seen is that over the course of about a two-year to sometimes a four-year time period, you've got institutions that are working deeply with us, but they're not talking about it. They're gaining that muscle memory, they're putting those first use cases to begin to scale that work up and then when they're ready, man, they're ready to talk about it and they're excited to talk about it. What's interesting though is today we're having the same summit that we're having here in Cape Town in Africa and we had a customer, Old Mitchell, who's one of the biggest insurers there, they just started working with us in earnest back in May and they were on stage today. So you're seeing that actually beginning to happen a lot quicker where people are building that muscle memory faster and they're much more eager to talk about it. You're going to see that trend, I think, continue in financial services over the next few years. So I'm very excited for future summits as well as re-invent because the stories that we're going to see are going to come faster. You're going to see more use cases that go a lot deeper in the industry and you're going to see it covering a lot, a lot more of the industry. It's very much not, IT is no longer what people think of in terms of tech companies in San Francisco building products. It's banks, it's healthcare and these companies are transitioning to become technology companies. But when your entire, as you mentioned, the entire industry becomes about risk management, it's challenging sometimes to articulate things when you're not both on the same page. I was working with a financial partner years ago at a company I worked for and okay, they're a financial institution, they're ready to sign off on this, but before that, they'd like to tour US East One first and validate that things are as we say they are. The answer is yeah, me too. Sadly, you folks have never bothered to invite me to tour an active AZ maybe next year. It's challenging to, I guess, meet people where they are and speak the right language, the right piece for a long time. And that's why you see us have a financial services team in the first place, right? Because financial services or healthcare or any other industries, they're very unique and they have a very specific language. And so we've been very focused on making sure that we speak that language, that we have an understanding of what that industry entails and what's important to that industry because as you know, Amazon's a very customer-accessed organization and we want to work backwards from our customers and so it's been very important for us to actually speak that language and be able to translate that to our service team to say, hey, this is important to financial services and this is why here's the context for that. I think as we've continued to see more and more financial institutions take on that technology company mindset, I'm a technology company that happens to run a bank or happens to run an exchange company or happens to run an insurance business. It's actually been easier to talk to them about the services that we offer because now they have that mindset. They're moving more towards DevOps, they're moving more towards agile and so it's been really easy to actually communicate, hey, here are the appropriate changes you have to make. Here's how you evolve governance, here's how you address security and compliance and the different levels of resiliency that actually improve from the standpoint of using these services. All right, so Scott, back before I did this, I worked for some large technology suppliers and there are some groups on Wall Street that have huge IT budgets and IT staffs and actually were very cutting edge in what they were building and what they were doing and very proud of their IT knowledge and they were like, they have some of the smartest people in the industry and they spend a ton of money because they need an edge. Talking about transactions on stock markets, if I can translate milliseconds into millions of dollars, if I can act faster, so those companies, how are they moving along to do the, I need to build it myself and differentiate myself because of my IT versus, hey, I can now have access to all the services out there because you're offering them with new ones every day but geez, how do I differentiate myself if everybody can kind of use some of these same tools? So that's my background as well and so you go back to that and milliseconds matter, milliseconds are money, right? When it comes to trading and actually building really bespoke applications on bespoke infrastructure. So I think what we're seeing from a transitional perspective is that you still have that mindset with, hey, we're really good at technology, we're really good at building applications but now it's a new toolkit. You have access to a completely new toolkit. It's almost like the matrix, you know that scene where Neo steps into that white room and he says, I need this and the shelves just show up. That's kind of how it is in the club. You actually have the ability to leverage the latest and greatest technologies at your fingertips when you want to build and I think that's something that's been a really compelling thing for financial institutions where you don't have to wait to get infrastructure provision for you. Before I worked for AWS, I worked for large financial institutions as well and when we had major projects that we had to do that sometimes had a regulatory implication, we were told by our infrastructure team, hey, that's going to be six months before we can actually get your Dev environment built so you can actually begin to develop what you need and actually we had to respond within about 30 days and so you had a mismatch there. With the cloud, you can provision infrastructure easily and you have an access to an array of services that you can use to build immediately and that means value, that means time to market, that means time to answering questions from customers, that means really a much faster time to answering questions from regulatory agencies so we're seeing the adoption and the embrace of those services be very large, very significant. It's important to make sure that the guardrails are set appropriately especially for a risk managed firm but once you get that in place correctly, it's an incredible boost to productivity and capability as opposed to the old crappy way of doing governance of oh, it used to take six weeks to get a server in so we're going to open a ticket now whenever you want to provision an instance and it only takes four, yay, we're moving faster. It feels like there's very much a right way and a wrong way to start embracing cloud technology. Yeah and you know, human nature is to take the runbook you have today and try to apply it to tomorrow and that doesn't always work because you can use that runbook and you'll get down to line four and suddenly line four doesn't exist anymore because of what's happened from a technological change perspective. I think that's why things like AWS Control Tower and Security Hub which are those guardrails, those services that we announced recently that have gone GA, we announced them a couple of weeks ago and reinforced in Boston, those are really interesting to financial services customers because it really begins to help automate a lot of those compliance controls and provisioning those through Control Tower and then monitoring those through Security Hub and so you've seen us focus on how do we actually make that easier for customers to do? We know that risk management, we know that governance and controls is very important in financial services. We actually offer our customers a way to look from a country specific angle at the different countries and the rule sets and the requirements that exist in those countries at how you map those to our controls and how you map those into your own controls and all the considerations that you have. We've got that on our public website. If you went to atlas.avs right now, that's our compliance center. You could actually pick the countries you're interested in and we'll have that mapping for you. So you'll see us continue to invest in things like that to make that much easier for customers to actually deploy quickly and to evolve those governance frameworks. Yeah, and things like with artifact where it's just grab whatever compliance report you need, submit it and then it's done without having to go through a laborious process. It's a quick button, receive compliance in some cases. If you're not familiar with it, you go into the database console and you've got artifact right there and if you need a SOC report or you need some other type of artifact, you can just download it right there through the console. Yeah, it's very convenient. Yeah, so Scott, you know, talked about some of the GRC pieces in place. What are you seeing trends out there kind of globally? You know, GDRP was something that was on everybody's mind over the last year or so. California has new regulations that are coming in place. So anything specific in your world or, you know, just the trends that you're seeing that might impact some of the environments? I think the biggest trends I would point to are data analytics, data analytics, data analytics, data analytics, and on top of that, obviously machine learning. Data is the lifeblood of financial services. It's what makes everything go. And you can look at, you know, what's happening in this space where you've got companies like Bloomberg and Refinitiv who are making their data products available on AWS so you can get V-Pipe on AWS today. You can also get the electron platform from Refinitiv. And then what people are trying to do in relation to, hey, I want to organize my data. I want to make it much easier to actually find value in data. Both either from the standpoint of regulatory reporting, as you heard Steve talk about on stage today, FINRA is building a very large data repository that they have to from the standpoint of a regulatory perspective with CAT. Broker dealers have to actually feed the CAT. And so they're also worried about here in the U.S., how do I actually organize my data, get all the elements I have to report to CAT together and actually do that in a very efficient way. So that's a big data analytics project. Things that are helping to make that much easier are leg formation. So we came up with leg formation last year and so we've got many financial institutions that are looking at how do you make building a data lake that much easier? And then how do you layer analytics on top of that? Whether it's using Amazon Elastic MapReduce or EMR to actually run regulatory reporting jobs or how do I begin to leverage machine learning to actually make my data analytics from the standpoint of trade surveillance or fraud detection that much more enriched and actually looking for those anomalies rather than just looking for a whole bunch of false positives. So data analytics I think is what I would point to as the biggest trend and how to actually make data more useful and how to get to data insights faster. It's on the one hand, it seems like there's absolutely a lot of potential in this. On the other, it feels in many cases with large scale data analytics, we have all these tools for machine learning and the rest that we can wind up passing out to you but you need to figure out what to do with them, how to make it work and it's on clear outs of a few specific use cases and I think you've alluded to a couple of those how to take in a typical business that maybe doesn't have an enormous pile of data and start applying machine learning to it in a way that makes intelligent sense. That feels right now like a storytelling failure to some extent, industry wide. We're starting to see some stories emerge but it still feels a little gold rushy to some extent. Yeah, I would say, my advice would be don't try to boil the ocean or don't try to boil the data lake. Meaning you want to do machine learning, you've got a great amount of earnestness about that but pick your use case. Really hone in on what you're trying to accomplish and work backwards from that and we offer tooling that can be really helpful that with SageMaker you can train your models and you can actually make data science available to a much broader array of people than just your data scientists. And so where we see people focusing first is where it matters to their business and so if you've got a regulatory obligation to do surveillance or fraud detection those are great use cases to start with. How do I enhance my existing surveillance or fraud detection so that I'm not just waiting again through a sea of false positives. How do I actually reduce that workload for a human analyst using machine learning? That's a one step up and then you can go from there. You can actually continue to work deeper into the use case and say okay, how do I treat those parameters? How do I actually look for different things than I'm used to with rules based systems? You can also look at offering more value to customers with the next best offer. With Amazon Personalized we now encapsulate the service that we use on the amazon.com retail site as a service that we offer to customers. So you don't have to build all that tooling yourself you can actually just consume Personalized as a service that help with those Personalized recommendations for customers. Now, Scott really appreciate all the updates on your customers and the financial services industry. Thanks so much for joining us. Happy to be here guys, thanks for having me. All right, for Corey Quinn, I'm Stu Miniman back with more here at AWS Summit New York City 2019. Thanks as always for watching theCUBE.