 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. Welcome back, everyone. We are kicking off day two of theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit here at AWS re-invent. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this panel. We have Sumed Mehta, he is the Chief Information Officer at Putnam based in Boston. We're Boston people together. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. On Nitin Gupta, he is the Partner and Solutions Lead Financial Services at AWS. Welcome, Nitin. And Shail Jane Back again for more, who leads the data business group in North America at Accenture. Love you so much the last time. Yes, we can't get enough of each other. So thank you so much for coming on the show. We're talking about the data journey in financial services. So I'm going to start with you, Sumed. Tell our viewers a little bit about Putnam, your asset center management, your employees. Sure, so Putnam is a global firm. We are a leader in mutual funds, in the mutual fund business. We are an 84 year old organization. We're based in Boston. And we are known for innovation. We've done a lot of firsts in our industry. And our focus has always been looking after the needs of our shareholders. So even as we launch digital transformation, we launch it with the lens of making sure we are covering the needs of our shareholders. So what was the impetus? What was the driving force to embark on this cloud journey? Sure, so look, we cover the financial markets. We cover industries. We look at our own industry as well. Things are changing rather rapidly, right? If I may just turn it around a little bit. Last year's letter from our CEO, Bob Reynolds, said that Putnam now has more, increasingly more four and five star funds, according to Morningstar, than we've had as a percent of total funds ever before. We had inflows when the rest of the industry were having outflows. We built a digital platform, and we said digital technology at Putnam is how we're going to view the internal technology department who will help enable our company to go and provide the investment insights directly to our advisors and to our shareholders so that they can benefit from the performance that we are delivering, right? We can only do that through a change. What's really going on in our industry is that there's more choice that's now available to shareholders than ever before. So while we talk about there's outflows in our world, there's actually a lot of flow happening, right? So it's for us to figure out how are the tastes changing? What are people buying? What do advisors need? When do they need them? And can we position ourselves to service them at scale? And so those are the things that are driving our business for us to continue to serve the shareholders' needs. We really need to be in tune with where the market is. So we're helping do that at Putnam through technology. So Shail and Nitin, I mean, what he's just described is this enormously changing landscape and financial services disrupted by a lot of new entrants, a lot of financial tech, a lot of different kinds of technologies. A lot of industries are experiencing this rapid pace of change. How do you, Accenture and AWS, work with Putnam amidst this tremendous change? And how do you sit down with the client and sort of work out where do we go from here? Yeah. So, you know, I want to touch upon a couple of things that Sumedhiya said and Rebecca you said. So, you know, one is that cloud is a journey. It's not a destination that you're trying to get to. And then the other thing that you talked about is change. So we are in this cycle right now where there's a lot of change happening at an industry. We are in this cycle where, you know, I think there's 38 trillion dollars or something which is just getting transferred from one generation to the other. I'm not getting any of it, unfortunately, but you know, all of this change that is happening in the industry, what is really required is you need something in terms of technology, a platform that allows you to move quickly and adapt really quickly to this change. And I think that's where cloud comes in. When we talk about all the new generation technologies, like data, machine learning, artificial intelligence, how do you leverage all of those? How do you fail quickly? How do you test, experiment, run thousands if not millions of experiments and see what will work and what will not work and do that in a very cost-effective way? And cloud is a very easy, it's an effective way to do it. And the way AWS is helping our customers, obviously, you know, we announced a bunch of services yesterday, we already, we have the widest and the deepest tack that is there in the industry today. You know, the strength of our partners, Accenture. So, you know, Accenture has been one of our longest-handing partners, also in financial services. And you know, working with them, working with our partners to enable our customers. But then we are also investing very heavily in building our industry capabilities, our account team, solution architects, professional services, security professionals, helping our customers answer all the questions that they would need to answer as they go in this journey with us. So, it's, you know, we are in this with them for the long haul and, you know, super excited about the partnership. So, from our perspective, I think we view the world as at a point where we're post-digital, where digital was to put a front end that made your engagement with the customers much better. But now we're talking about Intelligent Enterprise, which is to really digitize the company from the inside out. So, not only you need cloud for agility and all the other benefits that cloud offers, but you also need to look at data as the vehicle that would actually not only transform the culture of the company, but also be able to integrate with your partner. So, for example, Sumet talked about, you know, getting mind share from the advisors. Well, if you can exchange data, integrate data much better, faster with them, and serve data to them in shapes and speeds that they need, they'll be more amenable to put you on their roster as well. So, I think we're seeing a change that's mostly driven by the fintech industry disruption that's happening as well. And there is no better time than now with the cloud and data to really help transform companies like Putnam. There's tons of innovation, right? We heard Andy Jassy talk about the plethora of the suites that are available to us. Our job is to learn what they are and how does it apply to our business? Because at the end of the game, you said it's about our shareholders. It's about the value that we can bring. But we want to harness the power of all of the innovation. And we can't, even though we've been an innovator, we're not going to innovate alone, right? So it's really helpful to surround yourself with partners who've done this before to be learning from others and bringing in the right tools at the right time so we can turn things around quickly, right? This is, we are obviously very conservative and risk averse when it comes to managing other people's money. So we have to be very, very careful. Having said that, you know, we want to learn about all the guardrails we can put in place so we can go faster and, yeah. I want to ask you something about what Shale had brought up and that is the cultural change within the organization because change is hard and so many people are resistant, particularly when things are going relatively well. And they say, why mess that up? What's the new technology? I love that. So how- Change is hard. Maybe it's the understatement of the week, right? Right, right. It's very hard and as you guys know, you know we're, it's not hard because people don't just want to change. It's, they are experts in things that they've been doing for the last 15 years, 20 years. They've been at our firm for a really long time. They really know how everything works from front to back. What happens though now, when we get a changing need from the market and people want to buy things differently and we want to sell different products and maybe we want to introduce new products to the market, we can create bottlenecks that slow things down if we are not careful. So this is where we want to learn about the two pizza teams and how you can do things faster. How can we apply that to our world? Which means business partners working with technology co-located in small teams being completely empowered to deliver solutions, right? Working with our risk and compliance people making sure that everyone's doing things that we are supposed to be doing. How do we put that to work in a financial services industry? So we're learning as we go. We're learning to break down the silos in the organization and it's hard all the way around because we're experts in our areas. We know what we've done really well but fortunately we have a leader in our CEO who's basically said that let's transform Putnam so that we become leaders in the digital era for financial services. So with his support, we can get the executive team aligned and as the executive team aligns then you find that people in the organization they want to work in this model. But we don't know yet what we don't know, right? So we know how to do things from yesterday. Now we're working together. So you guys have come in and this is where we've said bring in the people who've done this before and let's hold a session with 40, 50 people at Putnam and let's just learn about what that transformation look like at other places. So we don't make the same mistakes. Well that's what Andy Jassy said in his fireside chat this morning. He was talking about how he had surgery recently and the question you need to ask your surgeon is how many times have you done this surgery? Yeah, right. Because that is the critical thing and so having a trusted partner is so important. So how does it work though? Working together, collaborating on this relationship how are you ensuring that Putnam doesn't make mistakes and does do the right tool for the right job, Shale? So earlier this year we actually launched an offering called AWS Lighthouse with AWS and what it is is a collection of all of our assets, our thought leadership and architectures that we have garnered over the years having worked with clients like Putnam and helped them through the journey. So we've put them all together and we bring that forth. Thanks Putnam is one of the first clients actually to take advantage of AWS Data Lighthouse. And for example, we have a methodology that is specially customized for doing data on AWS. So things like that is what we bring to the table to help eliminate the risk that they may encounter. And data is critical to us, right? It's we manage a set of data assets and that's the engine of the organization. So when we look at cloud migration and we look at what's our data strategy, how are we building these so-called, you guys introduced the terminology for confirm data sets. Exactly. Then can we galvanize the rest of the organization around it from investment professionals to operational professionals who use that data every day, manage it, govern it, make sure that it is what it's supposed to be. And to do that in a cloud environment where their user experience becomes a lot simpler, a lot easier, almost takes IT a little away from the day to day we don't have to be in the report writing business because we can make them more self-service, right? That'll create efficiencies in our organization. Our clients are asking us to do things at a lower cost than ever before and introduce more products and more tools and more services, right? So I would just tie what Sumed just said with your question about culture. So if you can make it easy for people, for example, making things self-service and data that's discovered through a catalog. So you have a place where you can go and find all the data sets that are available. What is the quality? What is the veracity of data? And then be able to take a piece of that and try some experiments with it. I think that would enable the cultural change much faster. Because they are able to basically do their jobs better. Yes, yes. Isn't that what it's about? The happier employee is a more productive employee. Highly engaged employees, right? We don't want to be in a situation where there's disengagement between employees and the mission of our company. We want high engagement. We want people committed to what they're doing. We want to remove hurdles. And technology can produce great efficiencies, but it's not done right. It can also be a big hurdle. So we want to learn how to deliver the right tools, the right products to make it easier for. We like to say, bring delightful experiences for our clients and our employees. Delightful. Another Jeff Bezos, another favorite word of his. Obviously Putnam is a real innovator and really on the vanguard of this new technology. What are you seeing in the greater financial services landscape? I mean, what is the corporate mindset when it comes to this kind of change? Yeah. So when we look across our financial services, customer base, across banking, capital markets, insurance, pretty much every customer today. I mean, the question is not, if we should move to the cloud or when should we move to the cloud? But I think every CEO and CIO is asking the question, how do I move to the cloud? And what applications do I move over? How do I start on this journey of transformation, whether it's digital or it's reducing cost or improving my risk posture, whatever that end goal is. And when we look at use cases across the industry, risk and data is one of the easiest use cases to get started with. So Aon Benfield, they were looking at solvency to calculations for 5 million of their policy holders. And they reduced that time from 10 days to 10 minutes. So that is a really good use case of moving to the cloud. Findra is a great example. They're a very public customer, analyzing 38 billion over market records in the stock market and looking and analyzing all of that data on AWS. So data and risk is one of the core use cases that companies start with. But then as they get more, as they learn more about the cloud, as they get a deeper understanding, they start looking at other things, like transforming core applications. So today we have core trading applications, core insurance applications, core banking applications that are running on the cloud. And then they start looking at innovation. How do we look at artificial intelligence? How do we look at machine learning? How do we look at the new technologies to really transform our business? And one of the great use cases, we saw obviously a lot of insurance companies, Liberty Mutual, they're using Lex as part of their conversational agent for their customers. But one of the interesting examples I have is it's a reinsurer in Denmark. It's a reinsurer in Denmark. And what they're doing is they're using image recognition from Amazon to look at an accident in the field and then analyzing that using our recognition service to see what that actual damage is and what the cost is and feeding that information to the underwriter. So really compressing that time that it takes from a claim filing to processing and payment to a matter of a few hours and getting that payment to the customer. So really creating a very positive customer experience. So speaking of customer experiences, what have, I know you said you were in service to your shareholders. What have been some of the results that you've seen? Right, so you have to look across the organization, right? So our advisors serve the need on the retail side. So we're like a B2B business, right? So we have to be cognizant of what's going on in their world. They're sitting down with clients and talking through the choices. And they have certain needs, what they need to fulfill, their obligations, they need to explain why they're doing what they're doing. If Putnam knows where each of the advisors are at in their journey with their clients, we can be more helpful to them in explaining why our funds are behaving the way they are. Right, that information can be had at the right time, at the right moment, when they need it. And that brings advisors closer to our teams, our retail distribution teams, our marketing teams, our investment teams, our investment professionals are using data and analytics to get information to, we're using technology to get information to them faster. So companies are doing releases. There's a ton of information out there these days. We are using technology to dig deeper into the press releases as well as the ACC filings, looking at the footnotes, really trying to understand what they're trying to say, what they said before, and what our analysts should be focused on. And we can take a 70-page document, condense it to seven pages, and pinpoint what the technology tool says are real insights. And the analysts, they'll take the time and read the whole thing, but they'll also look at the insights and they'll add it into their process. So technology is additive to the investment process and really making a change. And then that's helping drive performance. So at the end of the day, we're delivering good performance on our funds through data, analytics, technology. You know, I'll give you another example. Some of the, we're very strong in the mortgage analytics business. And on the fixed income side, our team's very well-known. They've been together for many, many years. Now they're starting to use data at scale. And we found that being able to go to the cloud to do these analytics in hours instead of days has really made a material difference in the number of iterations we can run. So now the questions are, when we do risk management, can we do that little differently and run more iterations and get more accuracy? So we're seeing all of that benefit. That's direct user experience that and people are seeing, people are seeing how technology is helping them do a better job with their thesis. Excellent. Well, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Sumed, Nitin and Shail, a pleasure having you on. Thank you for having us. I'm here. Rebecca Knight, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit.