 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019, brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to UiPath Forward Three. This is UiPath's third North American conference. We're here at the Bellagio Hotel. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events. We extract the signal from the noise. We pick the brains of experts. Kevin Crone is here. He's the financial services intelligent automation leader at PWC. Kevin, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me. You're very welcome. So financial services has always been kind of a leading indicator of technology adoption. I presume that automation is no difference. You know, you're in the New York area. You're belly to belly with the financial services companies, the big whales. What's going on in FS these days? Sure. So as we look across the financial services industry, they were one of the leaders with automation more because the overarching business environment really forced them as we looked at the regulatory burden that a lot of our banking clients were under over the past decade kind of post crash. That really has kind of forced two things. One, it's limited the amount of discretionary spend that they have to spend on really big technology transformation projects. It's also forced a lot of margin pressure and having to think about differently how they can run their business at a much lower and more effective price point. And so that's driven automation to the top. And we've seen tools like UiPath and kind of the broader RPA ecosystem becoming kind of the right technology at the right time of being able to really kind of embrace that right sizing agenda in the financial services sector. Yeah, and financial services at the macro level, they're a little bit out of favor right now. What we thought was this rising interest rate environment and that's reversed. And so that's not necessarily good for them. So they got to look for other ways to sort of drive the bottom line. So maybe you could talk a little bit about generally where you're seeing automation, back office, front office. Think about the maturity curve. What are the leaders doing? What's the sort of best practice right now for intelligent automation, RPA? Sure, so as we look at intelligent automation right now, I think one of the interesting things, financial services was an early adopter. So a lot of the big banks and asset managers and insurance companies really started investing in this class of technology four, five, six, seven years ago. And so we're actually seeing the early returns from those which is informing how this topic goes to other industries. But I think as we look at those returns, we see a couple of major challenges. There's challenges with getting this scaling technology. There's challenges with getting the right return on investment and proving the business case. And there's challenges of really thinking through kind of change management and what impact that this is going to have on the workforce. And getting maybe taking down a level to the policy place. I think one of the challenges we've seen is there's almost a split happening and how our clients are thinking about this. In one end, it's really around solving some of the media's hardest end-to-end process automation challenges. And that in a lot of cases means having to leverage RPA but also means having to leverage other technologies, really embracing artificial intelligence, looking at things like intelligent data extraction and conversational interfaces and really thinking through both how do you re-engineer a process and then how do you automate it end-to-end. On the flip side though, that only covers a certain portion of the organization. We're only kind of going after called the whale processes within the organization. We see a second channel which is really, how do you think about changing the nature of work and everything else that you do? And the concept of citizen-led innovation is really starting to take off and be embraced. And kind of put simply that's putting some of these tools in the hands of business users that are clients, not the technology departments, and letting them actually drive automating some of the mundane things that they do on a day-to-day basis. And so you're seeing kind of this enterprise channel and the citizen-led channel kind of emerge as the two-track approach to automation. So that's interesting. Okay, so the ladder changing the nature of work is you're seeing largely automating existing mundane processes kind of paving the cow path as I sometimes say. However, if it's not the most efficient process to begin with, they need to sort of re-look at that and that maybe falls into the former category. The enterprise-led. And so where are people investing in both? Are they just hitting the low-hanging fruit? We're seeing an investment in both. And PNBC has used that a well-functioned automation program should have both channels and each channel should be informing the other. So if citizens are coming up with ideas of things that they can automate themselves, that's great. But those should also be contributed into the kind of broader ecosystem and there may be what's called grander ways to solve that problem both from a technology perspective and from a process-re-engineering perspective. Is there an automation ex-officio? Is there a chief who's sort of looking at all this stuff or is it more organic? It's one of the, I think, interesting things we've seen and learned from our clients over the past couple of years is we thought there would be an emergence of a chief automation officer or something like that. Really, the automation agenda's owned in so many different places within our clients and it's not consistent client to client. In some cases, it's really a CIO-owned topic. A lot of cases, it's more of a chief operating officer, chief digital officer, chief transformation officer. We're also seeing a push at the chief HR officer level because this is really, there's a big question certain terms of thinking about kind of skills and how you equip your workforce with the right digital skills for the future, which is now putting HR at the table for this, which is the place where I think traditionally with big technology transformations, they've never really sat. So in thinking about ROI, you've laid out this sort of bifurcated paths, two vectors, the hard sort of end-to-end problems and then the sort of low-hanging fruit changing the way to work. I would presume the second one gives you the quick hit, faster break even, but probably lower net present value. And so maybe you could talk a little bit about the ROI equation and how people are looking at that. Yeah, it's interesting because I think, to your point, I think an enterprise-led initiative, you're going to want to define a business case and say this is why we're doing it and what we're looking to achieve. Going down to CISNLED channel, that's a harder thing to do because you don't want to stifle innovation in your organization. One of our views is that the people that sit closest to the business process are the ones that should be coming up with the right ideas if they were given the right upscaling, the right tools at their disposal. But it's a bottoms-up exercise. And so again, going back to the concept of having kind of an ecosystem with both an enterprise channel and a citizen channel is important because at the enterprise level, you're going to need to understand what type of benefits are actually being created at the micro level and figure out two things. One, are there things that have we built enough that we can start to release capacity from the organization? Or is there something else that, if I put in, will allow us to really think about transforming our business? So it's a lever, it's not the end solution, right? When I tell people that don't know what RPA is, they say, yeah, it's a lot of back office stuff. It is. But we heard today from one of the keynotes that we got to move from the back office to the front office. How much is that happening in financial services and how much of a holistic end-to-end strategy are you seeing? I'm sure you guys are promoting that or fans of that because you're going to get a much bigger business impact. It's transformational, but where are we at in the maturity of that all? Yeah, it's interesting, right? So we, staying on the steam of the enterprise and citizen-led innovation levers, the enterprise innovation levers tend to be focused more in the back office, high transaction volume type processes. I think when we look at the citizen-led channel and a lot of the ideas that have been coming out and with our clients are starting to brace us, they tend to be more front office-oriented processes. There's lots of things, especially client servicing or tasks that are done that are somewhat mundane and the business case isn't necessarily about capacity. It's about client experience and customer service. So you can take the wealth advisor that has to log into five different systems to answer a simple client question. That's a process that being able to actually have an automated way to generate that same thing at their fingertips could be really powerful. And so there's a big push there. I think the interesting part on going back to your business case question from before is that the business case for a lot of those types of automations, it's not just a factor of have we built enough that we think that there's benefit. It's also about adoption. So if I build a robot to automate that wealth advisor process that I just noted, if 50 wealth advisors can adopt that rather than one wealth advisor, it's going to be a much greater business case. And that's a different way of thinking about business case in the RPA sense because most people tend to think here's a process, this process, I have five people who run this on a day-to-day basis. And here's my business case. In this case, I built something really innovative. If I can get 100 people to use this because it takes 10 minutes out of their day, there's real time there, but it is causing a lot of our clients to think differently. So you talked about three things. As challenges scale, the business case, which you just talked about in change management, is that part of the, and they're interrelated, is that part of the challenge with scale? It is part of the challenge. I mean, just building on the last point around adoption, that what we're doing, what we're talking about here at the RPA, I think people that live in the RPA space day-to-day, this dust, this almost becomes second nature and like, yeah, the technology's not that complicated, this is very basic, but you start going out to an entire organization and especially outside of technology, it's new. And so the change management's really important. And it's important, we view from two lenses. One is really thinking about how do you upscale your workforce at a minimum so they know what technology's actually out there. It doesn't necessarily mean you're going to make everyone a bot builder in your organization, but knowing what RPA is and knowing that, hey, I have some tools to go help solve, I give the business problem is really important. But the second point that we think is really important in here is the ability to really think about the, what the long-term impact of the overall organizational model and how that actually adopts to using automation over time. And that ties into change management, which is the other thing, people don't like change. The other thing, we heard this morning, Craig LeClaire, the forestry analyst, talked about how a lot of robots are idle, sitting around idle at the orchestrator. So I was thinking, well, we're seeing SaaS models emerge and UiPath announced their cloud product. And I would expect you're going to see new pricing models as well, kind of usage-based pricing, which is kind of generally not how things are priced today, but is that something that customers are pushing for? Definitely. I mean, I think there's two things we hear from customers in this space. I think as RPA, as a product is developed, I think there was a push with all the vendors towards kind of what's priced for a bot. But the concept of a bot is that it's somewhat ambiguous concept to a lot of our clients. And what our clients really want is to price that value, right? And to understand if I'm building bots that are covering this part of the organization, I'm appropriately paying for this, rather than worry about how much workload did I put onto one bot versus another? I think with the mass adoption of cloud and the fact that the RPA ecosystem is quickly moving from a non-prem solution to a cloud-based solution, I think a lot of this is just going to happen naturally. I'm over time. I think the other really important part in there is not to just make this a technology question about the pricing. It's also a question on value delivered and realizing the benefits case and can you actually tie what those realized benefits are to what the actual price that you're actually going to pay for the software is? All right, you ready for some curve balls? Sure, I love it. Okay, so you're a thought leader. You work for one of the largest consultancies on the planet, global scale. You guys do some really great work. Disruption, we talk about digital transformation. Automation obviously plays in there. Blockchain, AI, RPA, et cetera. Do you think that banks will lose control of payment systems? I'm not, I would say the biggest problems that banks are facing with regards to that isn't necessarily whether they control the payment system or not. I actually think it's how effective they can run the system internally. I mean, I'm an automation guy, right? My goal is to make clients run as efficiently and as effectively as possible. And I look at a lot of the legacy debt that sits within a lot of our clients infrastructure. I think that's the biggest problem to tackle. I think if they don't tackle that and are not successful with topics like RPA and automation, it's going to create the forces of nature that allow some of the broader disruption to happen. So, at least in my mind, it's one of these things that you have your agenda and what you can control. These are the things that you actually should be focusing on. So you're set up to compete with some of the big disruptors in the future. Yeah, interesting. I mean, that's one industry, there's a disruption all around us, but that's one industry along with healthcare and defense that hasn't been highly disrupted yet because it's very high risk. Not only that, they've got very strong relationship with the government, and they're big and they're well funded, but it seems like that disruption scenario is coming to financial services. When you talk to people in the industry, they certainly see it, but there's also a lot of complacency. It's like, hey, we're a big FS, we're doing really well. Thoughts on that? There is, we look across, and I'll just say kind of technology investment in the banking sector, big banks and asset managers, insurance companies are some of the biggest spenders on technology out there. And if you look at a lot of the commentary that comes out of analyst calls, there's a pretty consistent push, A, to talk about a banking organization as a technology company or some form of that, and there's also a big push to talk about how much money they're spending. That's great, but we've also, I think when you kind of look under the covers, there's been a lot of historical challenges with implementing big technology projects and banks. There's a lot of legacy debt that's been built over the past 25 years and complexity, really thinking about this from a front to back perspective, like from the point, taking the trading side of a bank, looking at the point of trade entry through post-trade processing, through finance processing, through kind of every step in the life cycle, it's still run from a technology perspective, probably not as efficient as possible. And I think especially when you get outside the front office area and some of the training areas and look at that. So there's a ton of opportunity for improvement and kind of building on the last theme. I think to the extent that technologies like RPA and automation are embraced, it helps think about that problem a little bit differently and gives us a chance to tackle some of these big, meaty, legacy problems that have been around for a while. If we're successful at this and we can force the ROI to be proved, we can force the change management exercise to happen, I think it sets our clients up for success to avoid some of these disruptive factors. Yeah, so huge opportunity then for UiPath and some of its competitors. Penetration-wise, adoption-wise, what inning are we in? Ending two, we're in early days. I mean, I think we've seen a ton of interest, a ton of excitement from our clients, but our surveys of the financial services industry, most clients will acknowledge they're past the piled and proof of concept phase and they're maybe even past the first 10 bot phase, but they're not at scale, right? And I think until three things happen, I think until we can prove that the technology is being used from an organizational coverage across a much wider swath than it is today, I think when we can prove that there's actually real demonstrable benefit happening from an organizational operating model perspective and to the extent that the workforce is actually embracing this and not posing it, I think we'll be in a much better position to say, hey, we're now getting to inning five or six and this picture's becoming more complete, but it's still early. A lot of opportunities. Kevin, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to have you. Thank you for having me. All right, thank you for watching. We're right back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE live from UiPath Forward 2019. At the Bellagio, right back.