 Hello and welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm Dave Nicholson and this is part of our continuing coverage of Google Cloud Next 2021. We have a very interesting subject to discuss. I have two special guests from Google to join me in a conversation about the financial services space. I'm joined by Yolanda Piazza, Vice President of Financial Services Sales for Google Cloud and Zach Moff, Managing Director for Global Financial Services Solutions for Google Cloud. Yolanda and Zach, welcome to the CUBE. Thank you for having us, we can forward to it. Well, it's great to have you here. Financial Services is really an interesting area when you talk about cloud because I'm sure you both remember a time not that long ago when we could ask a financial services organization what their plans for cloud or what their cloud strategy was and they would give a one word answer and that answer was never. So Zach, let's start out with you. What has changed? Are you and Yolanda going to tell us that in fact financial services organizations are leveraging cloud now? Yeah, it's a very exciting time to be in the cloud space and financial services because you're exactly right, David. It's people are starting to make the transition to cloud in a real way and a lot has gone into that. As you know, it's a highly regulated space and so there were a lot of legitimate reasons around getting kind of the regulatory frameworks in place and making sure that the risk and compliance pieces were addressed. But then there was also, as you know, technology is a major backbone for financial services. And so there's this also this question of how do we transition? You know, and a lot of work and time has gone into moving workloads, thinking about like what is the sort of the right migration strategy for you to get from the current situation to a more cloud native world? And to your point, we're really early. We're really early, but we're very excited and we've been investing heavily on our side to get those foundational pieces in place. But we also realized that we have to think about what are the business cases that we want to build on top of cloud? It's not just a kind of IT modernization, which is a big part of the story. But the other part of the story is once you get all of this technology onto the cloud platform, there are things that you can do that you couldn't do on-prem situations. And a lot of that for us is around the data, AI and ML space. And we really see that being the way to really unlock huge amounts of value. Both of them require massive amounts of compute and really breaking down all of these silos that have really developed over time within financial institutions and really moving to the cloud is the way to unlock a lot of that. So we're really excited about a lot of those use cases that are starting to come to life now. Yeah, so I want to dig a little deeper on some of that, Zach. But before we do, Yolanda, make this real for us. Give me some examples of actual real-life financial services organizations and what they're doing with Google Cloud now. Yeah, absolutely. And I think we're really proud to be able to announce a number of new partnerships across the industry. You think about Wells Fargo, you think about Scotiabank, you think about what we're doing with HSBC, they really are starting to bring to life and recognize that it's not just internally. You have to look at that transformation to cloud. It's really how do you use this platform to help you go on the journey with your customers? I think a move to a multi-cloud common approach for our customers is, and our clients is exactly what we need to be focused on and they have a kind of- Hold on, Yolanda. I'm sorry. Did the Google person just say multi-cloud? Because multi-cloud doesn't sound like only Google Cloud to me. Can you- Absolutely. And I think Wells announced it's taking a multi-cloud approach to its digital infrastructure strategy, leveraging both Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. And the reason being is they've openly communicated that a locked in and proprietary systems isn't the way to go for them. They want that open flexibility. They want the ability to be able to move workloads across the different industries. And I think it's well known that this aligns completely with our principles. And at Google, we've always said that we support open, multi, and hybrid cloud strategies because we believe our customers should be able to run what they want, where they want at. And that was exactly the philosophy that Wells took. And if you look at what they were trying to do, is they're looking to be able to serve their customers in a different way. I think that it's true now that customers are looking for personalized services, instant gratification, the ability to interact where they want and when they want. So we're walking with the Wells teams to really bring to life through AI, our complex AI and data solutions to really enable them to move at speed and serve their customers in a rapidly changing world. So Yolanda, part of the move to cloud includes the fact that we're all human beings and perception can become reality. Issues like security, which are always at the forefront of someone's mind in financial services space. There is the perception and then there is the reality. Walk us through today where perception is in the financial services space. And then Zach, I'm gonna go back to you to tell us what's the reality and is there a disconnect? Because often technology in this space has been ahead of people's comfort level for rational reasons. So Yolanda, can you talk about from a perception perspective where people are? So I have to tell you, we are having conversations with both the incumbents and traditional organizations as well as the uprising, the fintechs and the neo banks around how does technology really unlock and unleash a new business model? So we're talking about things like how does technology and help them grow their organization? How does it take out costs in that organization? How do you use our cloud platform to think about managing risk, whether that's operational, whether it's reputational, industry or regulatory type risk? And then how do we enable our partners and our customers to be able to move at speed? So all of those conversations are now on the table. And I think a big shift from when Zach and I both were sitting on the other side of the table in those financial services industries is a recognition that this couldn't and shouldn't be done alone. That it's gonna require a partnership. It's going to require, I'm really shifting to put technology at the forefront. And I think when you talk about perception, I would say a couple of years ago, I think it was more of a perception that they were really technology companies. And I think now we're really starting to see the shift that these are technology companies serving their customers in a banking environment. So Zach, can you give us some examples of how that plays out from a solutions perspective? What are some of the things that when Yolanda are having conversations with these folks? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I think there's three major trends that we're seeing where I think we can bring the power of sort of the Google ecosystem to really change business models and change how things are done. The first is really this massive change that's been happening for like over 10 years now, but it's really this change in customers expecting financial institutions to meet them where they are. And that started with information being delivered to them through mobile devices and online banking. And then it went to payments and now it's going into lending and it's going into insurance, but it changes the way that financial services companies need to operate because now they need to figure out how to deliver everything digitally embedded into the experience that their customers are having in all of these digital ecosystems. So there's a lot that we're doing in that space. The second is really around modernizing the technology environment. There is still a massive amount of paper in these organizations. Most of it has been transferred to digital paper, but the workflows and the processes that are still needing to be streamlined. And there's a lot that we can do with our AI model and technology to be able to basically take unstructured data and create structured data. Think Google Photos. You can now search for your photo library and find pictures of you on bridges. The same thing we can now do with documents and routine interactions with chatbot. People are expecting 24-7 service and a lot of people want to be able to interact through chat versus through voice. And the final part of this that we're seeing a lot of use cases in is in the kind of risk and regulatory space. Coming out of the financial crisis, there was this need to massively upgrade everybody's data capabilities and control and risk environments because so much it was very manual and a lot of the data to do a lot of the risk and control work was kind of glued together. So everybody went off and built data lakes and figured out that that was actually a really difficult challenge and they quickly became data swamps. And so really, how do you unlock the value of those things? That's those three use cases. There's lots of things underneath those are areas that we're working with customers on. And it's like you said, it's really exciting because the perception has changed. The perception has changed that now cloud is the sort of future and everybody is kind of now realized they have to figure out how to engage. And I think a lot of the partnership things that Yolanda was talking about is absolutely true. They're looking for a strategic relationship versus a vendor relationship. And those are really exciting changes for us. So I just imagined a scenario where Dave, Zach and Yolanda are at the cloud pub talking after hours over a few pints. And Dave says, wow, 75%, 80% of IT is still on premises. And Yolanda looks at me and says, on premises, we're dealing with on paper still. Such is the life of a financial services expert in this space. So Yolanda, what would you consider sort of the final frontier or at least the next frontier in cloud meets financial services? What are the challenges that we have yet to overcome? I just mentioned the large amount of stuff that's still on premises, the friction associated with legacy applications and infrastructure, that's one whole thing. But is there one thing that in calendar year 2022, if you guys could solve this for the financial services industry, what would it be? And if I'm putting you on the spot, so will you. No, no, no, I'm not gonna hold it to just one thing. I think this shift to personalization and how does the power of AI and machine learning really start to change and get into way more predictive technologies? As I mentioned, customers want to be a segmentation of one. They don't want to be force fit into the traditional banking ecosystems. There's a reason that customers have on average 14 different financial services apps on their phones. Yep, less than three to 5% of their screen time is actually spent on them. It's because something is missing in that environment. There's a reason that you could go to any social media site and in no time at all be able to pull up over 200 different communities of people trying to find out financial services information in layman's terms that is relevant to them. So the ability and where we're really doubling down is on this personalization and being way more predictive understanding where a customer is on their journey and being able to meet them at that point whether that's the right offers whether that's recognizing to Zach's point that they've come in on one channel and but they now want to switch to another channel and how did they not have to start again every time? So these are some of the basic things that we are really doubled down on how do we start to solve in those areas? I think also the shift I think in many cases especially in the risk space it's been very much a what I would call a people process technology approach start to imagine what happens if you turn that around and think about how technology can help you be more predictive internally in your business and create better outcomes. So I think there's so many areas of opportunities and what's really exciting is we're not restricted we're having conversations that are titled the art of the possible or the future of or help us come in and reinvent. So I think you're going to see a lot of shift probably in the next 12 to 18 months I would say in the capabilities and the ability to service the customer differently and meet them on their journey. Well it sounds like the life of a cloud financial services person is much more pleasurable than back when it consisted of primarily running into brick walls constantly. This conversation five or 10 years ago would have been more like please trust us, please. Give us a shout. I think Zach and I both from Minnesota we couldn't have joined at a more exciting time. It's the lacle or whatever you want to call it but it is a completely different world and the conversations are fun and refreshing and you can really start to see how we have the ability to partner to change the landscape across all of the different financial services industries and I think that's what keeps Zach and I going every day. And you said earlier that you alluded to the idea that you used to be on the other side of the table in other words in the financial services industry on the customer side. So you picked the right time to come across. Without a doubt, without a doubt, yes. Well you know with that I want to thank both of you for joining me today. This is really fascinating. Financial services is something that touches all of us individually in our daily lives. It's something that everyone can relate to at some level and it also represents that tip of the spear, the cutting edge of clouds. So very interesting. Thank you both again. Pleasure to meet you both. Next time, hopefully it will be in person and we can compare our steps that we've taken during the conference. With that, I'll sign off. This has been a fantastic CUBE conversation part of our continuing coverage of Google Cloud Next 2021. I'm Dave Nicholson. Thanks again for joining us. Thank you.