 Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage here, live in New York City for AWS Summit 2022. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Got a great conversation here as the day winds down. First of all, 10,000 plus people. This is a big event, just New York City. So, sign the times that some headwinds are happening. I don't think so. Not in the cloud enterprise innovation game. A lot going on. This innovation conversation we're going to have now is about kind of the confluence of cloud scale, integration data and the future of how FinTech and other markets are going to change with technology. We've got Chris Thomas, the CTO of Slalom and Rob Krugman, chief digital officer at Broadridge. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having us. So we're going to talk before we came on camera about your firm, what you guys do. Take a quick minute to just give the scope and size of your firm and what you guys work on. Yeah, so Broadridge is a global financial FinTech company. We work on, part of our business is capital markets and wealth and that's about a third of our business. About seven trillion dollars a day clearing through our platforms. And then the other side of our business is communications where we help all different types of organizations communicate with their shareholders, communicate with their customers, across a variety of different digital channels and capabilities, yeah. And Slalom, give us one minute on Slalom. I know you guys, but for the folks that don't know you. Yeah, no problem. So Slalom is a modern consulting firm focused on strategy, technology and business transformation. And me personally, I'm part of the element lab which is focused on forward thinking, technology and sort of disruptive technology in the next five to 10 years. Awesome, and that's the scope of this conversation, the next five to 10 years. You guys are working on a project together. You're kind of customer partners. You're building something. Yep. What are you guys working on? I can't wait to jump into it. Explain. Sure, so similar to Chris, at Broadridge, we've created an innovation capability, innovation incubation capability. And one of the first areas we're kind of experimenting in is digital assets. So what we're looking to do is we're looking at a variety of different areas where we think consolidation, network effects that we can bring can add a significant amount of value. And so the area we're working on is this concept of a wallet of wallets. How do we actually consolidate assets that are held across a variety of different wallets? Maybe traditional locations. Digital wallets. Digital wallets. But maybe even traditional accounts. Bring that together and then give control back to the consumer of who they want to share that information with. How they want their transactions to be able to control. So the idea of people talk about web three being the internet of value. I often think about it as the internet of control. How do you return control back to the individual so that they can make decisions about how and who has access to their information and assets? It's interesting. I totally like the value angle, but your point is what's the chicken in the egg? You're the carp before the horse. You can look at it both ways and saying, okay, control is going to drive the value. This is an interesting nuance. Yes, absolutely. So, you know, in this architectural world, they talk about the data plane and the control plane. Everyone's trying to go old school like middleware thinking, let's own the data plane and we'll win everything. Not going to happen if it goes decentralized, right Chris? Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're building a decentralized application, but it really is built on top of AWS. We have a serverless architecture that scales as our business scales, built on top of things like S3, Lambda, DynamoDB, and of course using those security principles like Cognito and AWS Gateway, API Gateway. So we're really building an architecture of web three on top of the web two basics in the cloud. I mean, all evolutions are abstractions on top of each other, IP, DNS, key, where all goes the whole nine yards. In digital, at least that's the way. Question about serverless real quick. I saw that Redshift just launched general availability of serverless in Redshift. You start to see the serverless now part of almost all the services in AWS. Is that enabling that abstraction? Because most people don't see it that way. They go, oh, well, Amazon's not web three. They got databases, I mean, you could use that. So how do you connect the dots and cross the bridge to the future with the idea that I might not think web two or cloud is web three? I'll jump in quick. I mean, I think it's the decentralize, if you think about decentralization, right? Serverless and decentralization, you could argue are the same way of, they're saying the same thing in different ways, right? One is thinking about it from a technology perspective. One to think about it from an ecosystem perspective and how things come together. You need serverless components that can talk to each other and communicate with each other to actually really reach the promise of what web three is supposed to be. So digital bits or digital assets, I call it digital bits because, you know, things zero, ones, if you digitize everything and everything has value or now control drives the value, I could be a soccer team. I have apparel, I have value in my logos. I have photos, I have cube videos. I mean, some say that this should be an NFT, right? Maybe, but digital assets have to be protected but owned. So ownership drives it too, right? So how does that fit in? How do you explain that? Because trying to tie the dots here, connect the dots and tie it together. What do I get if I go down this road that you guys are building? So I think one of the challenges digital assets right now is that it's just closed community and I think the people that play in it, they're really into it, right? And so you look at things like NFTs and you look at some of the other activities that are happening and there are certain naysayers that look at it and say this stuff is not based upon value, it's a bunch of artwork that can't be worth this. Well, how about we do a time out there and we actually look at the underlying technology that's supporting this, the blockchain, right? And the potential ramifications of that across the entire financial ecosystem and frankly all different types of ecosystems of having this immutable record where information gets stored and gets sent and the ability to go back to it at all times, that's where the real power is. So I think we're starting to see, right? We've hit a bit of a hiccup if you will in the cryptocurrencies. They're going to continue to be there. They won't all be there. A lot of them will probably disappear but they'll be a finite number. What percentage of stuff do you think is vapor BS? If you had to put a pegging order of magnitude number. I would say at least 75% of it. I mean there's quite a few projects that are sort of failing right now but it's interesting in that in the crypto markets they're failing gracefully because it's on the blockchain and it's all very transparent. Things are a check, you sort of know immediately which companies are insolving and which opportunities are still working so it's very, very interesting in my opinion. And I think the ones that don't have valid premises are the ones that are failing. Like Tara and some of these other ones, if you actually really looked at it the entire industry knew these things were no good but then you look at stable coins and you look at what's going on with CBDCs. These are backed by real underlying assets that people can be comfortable with and there's not a question of is this going to happen? The question is how quickly is it going to happen and how quickly are you going to be using digital currencies? It's interesting, we always talk about software. Software has money now, money is software and gold and oil is moving over to that crypto. How do you guys see software? We were just arguing in the queue, Dave Vellante and I, before you guys came on that the software industry pretty much does not exist anymore. It's open source, right? So everything's open source as an industry but the value is integration, innovation so it's not just software, it's the free. So you got it, it's integration. So how do you guys see the software driving crypto because it is software defined money at the end of the day, it's open. I think that's absolutely one of the strengths of the crypto markets and the Web3 market is it's governed by software and because of that you can build a trust framework. Everybody knows it's on the public blockchain, everybody's aware of the software that's driving the rules and the rules of engagement in this blockchain and it creates that trust network that says hey I can transact with you even though I don't know anything about you and I don't need a middleman to tell me like I can trust you because this software draws that trust framework. Live disruption, a lot of companies go out of business as a middleman in these markets. Listen, intermediaries either have to disrupt themselves or they will be disrupted. I think that's what we're going to learn here and it's going to start in financial services but it's going to go to a lot of different places. I think the interesting thing that's happening now is you for the first time you're starting to see the regulators start to get involved which is actually a really good thing for the market because to Chris's point, transparency is here. How do you actually present that transparency and that trust back to consumers so they feel comfortable? Once that problem is solved and I think everyone in the industry welcomes it all of a sudden you have this ecosystem that people can play in, they can build and they can start to actually create real value. Every structural change that I've been involved in my 30 year plus career career has been around inflection points. There's always some sort of underbelly, right? So I'm not going to judge a crypto up been in the market for a while but it's a good sign there's innovation happening. So as now clarity comes into what's real I think you guys are talking in a conversation I think is refreshing because you're saying, okay, cloud is real, Lambda server lists all these tools. So web three is certainly real because it's a future architecture but it's attracting the young. It's a cultural shift, okay? It's also cooler than kind of boring web two and cloud. So I think the cultural shift, the fact that it's got data involved there's some disruption around middleman intermediaries makes it very attractive to tech geeks. You look at I read a stat and heard a stat from a friend in the Bay Area that 30% of Cal computer science students are dropping out and jumping into crypto. So it's attracting the technical nerds, alpha geeks. It's a cultural revolution and there's some cool stuff going on from a business model standpoint. There's one thing missing, right? The thing that's missing it's what we're trying to work on I think is experience. I think if you're being honest about the entire marketplace what you would agree is that this stuff is not easy to use today and that's got to be satisfied. You need this something that if it's the 85 year old grandma that wants to actually participate in these markets that not only can they feel comfortable but they actually know how to do it, right? You can't use these crazy tools where you use these terms and I think the industry as it grows up will satisfy a lot of those issues. I think this is why I want to tie back and get your reaction to this. I think that's why you guys talking about building on top of AWS is refreshing is it's not dogmatic. Well we can't use Amazon, it's not really web three. Well, I mean a database could be used when you need it. You don't need to write everything into the blockchain. Your database is a very valuable capability. You got serverless. So all these things now can work together. So what do you guys see for companies that want to be web three for all the good reasons and how do they leverage cloud specifically to get there? What are some things that you guys have learned that you can point to and share? You want to start? Well, I think not everything has to be open and public to everybody. You're going to want to have some things that are secret. You're going to want to encrypt some things. You're going to want to put some things within your own walls. And that's where AWS really excels. I think you can have the best of both worlds. So that's the mind perspective on it. The thing I would add to it, so my view is it's 2022. I actually was joking earlier. I think I was at the first reinvent, right? And I remember walking in and this was a new industry. It's tiny. This is foundational. Like cloud is not a, I don't view like, we shouldn't be having that conversation anymore. Of course you should build the stuff on top of the cloud. Of course you should build it on top of AWS. It just makes sense, right? And we should, instead of worrying about those challenges, what we should be worrying about, or how do we make these applications easier to use? How do we actually... Energy efficient. How do we enable the promise of what these things are going to bring and actually make it real? Because if it happens, think about traditional assets, right? There's projects going on globally that are looking at, how do you take equity securities and actually move them to the blockchain? When that stuff happens, boom. And I like what you guys do. And I saw the news also this crypto winter, some major wall exchange that have been advertising are kind of hurting. Take me through what you guys are thinking what the vision is around the wallet of Wallis. Is it to provide an experience for the user or the market industry itself? What's the target? Is it both share the design goals for the wallet of Wallis? My favorite thing about innovation and innovation labs is we can experiment, right? So I'll go in saying, we don't know what the final answer is going to be, but this is the premise that we have. In this disparate decentralized ecosystem, you need some mechanism to be able to control what's actually happening at the consumer level. So I think the key target is how do you create an experience where the consumer feels like they're in control of that value? How do they actually control the underlying assets? And then, how does it actually get delivered to them? Is it something that comes from their bank, from their broker? Is it coming from an independent organization? How do they manage all that information? And I think the last part of it are the assets. Like it's easy to think about cryptos and NFTs, but thinking about traditional assets, thinking about identity information and healthcare records. All of that stuff is going to become part of this ecosystem. And imagine being able to go someplace and saying, oh, you need my information. Well, I'm going to give it to you off my phone and I'm going to give it to you for the next 24 hours so you can use it. But after that, you have no access to it. Or you're my financial advisor. Here is a view of what I actually have my underlying assets. What do you recommend I do? So I think we're going to see an evolution in the market. I think a day in the clean room. Yeah, yeah. But that you control. I think it really is. I think about it very similarly as well. Like as my journey into the crypto market has sort of gone through different, you know, pathways, different avenues. And I've come to a place where like, I'm really sort of managing eight different wallets. And it's difficult to sort of figure exactly where all my assets are. And having a tool like this will allow me to sort of visualize and aggregate those assets and maybe even recombine them in unique ways. I think it's hugely valuable. My biggest fear is losing my key. Yeah. Well, that's an experience problem that's to be solved. But let me give you like my favorite use case in this space is because it'd be NFTs, right? People are like, what does NFTs really mean? Title insurance, right? Anyone buy a house, you know, refinance your mortgage. You go through this crazy process that costs seven or $8,000 every single time you close on something to get title insurance so they can validate. What if that title was actually sitting on the chain? You've got an NFT that you put in your wallet and when it goes time to sell your house or to refinance, everything's there. Okay, I'm the owner of the house. I don't know, JP Morgan Chase has the actual mortgage. There's another lien, there's some taxes. It's like a link tree in the wallet. Yeah, there you go. I think about it, you got a smart contract, boom, closing half is immediately. I think that's one of the most important things. I think people look at NFTs and they think, oh, this is like, you know, art. And that's sort of how it started in the art and collectible space, but it's actually quickly moving towards utilities and tokenization and passes, and that's where I think the value is. And ownership. And the token and ownership. Identity and ownership, especially. And the digital rights ownership and the economics behind it really have a lot of scale because I appreciate the fintech angle you're coming from because I can see, I can now see what's going on here with you. It's like, okay, we got to start somewhere. Yeah, right. Let's start with the experience. The wallets are tough enough to crack because that requires de facto participation in the industry and as a de facto standard. So how are you guys doing there? Can you give an update? And then how can people get, what's the project called and how do people get involved? Yeah, so we're still kind of in the innovation incubation stages. So we're not launching it yet, but what I will tell you is what a lot of our focus is, how do we make these transactional things that you do? How do we make it easy to pull all your assets together? How do we make it easy to move things from one location to the other location in ways that you're not using a weird, cryptographic, numeric value for your wallet, but you actually can use real nomenclature that you can renumber and it's easy to understand. Our expectation is that sometime in the fall we'll actually be in a position to launch this. What we're going to do over the summer is we're going to start allowing people to play with it, get their feedback and we're going to iterate. So sandbox and when? November? I think launch in like the fall, sometime in the fall. Oh, this fall. But over the summer what we're expecting is some type of friends and family type release where we can start to realize what people are doing, fix the challenges, see if we're on the right track and make the appropriate progress. So right now you guys are just together on this. The opening up of the friends and family or community is going to be controlled. It is, yeah. Yeah, I mean, as a group, I think one thing that's really important to highlight is that we're an innovation lab, we're working with Rodridge's innovation lab. That sort of partnership across innovation labs and sort of allowed us to move very, very quickly to build this. You know, actually if you think about it, we were talking about this not too long ago and we're almost close to having an internal launch. So I think it's very rapid development. We follow a lot of the- It's buying across the board. Exactly. Exactly. And we followed a lot of the very- Who's going to run this? A DAO or your companies? It's going to be a separate company? So to be honest, we're not entirely sure yet. It's a new product that we're going to be creating. What we actually do with it, our thought is within an innovation environment, there's three things you could do with something. You could make it a product within the existing infrastructure. You can create a new business unit or you could spin it off as something new. Right? Got it here. It's a product within the organization based upon it's so aligned to what we do today. But we'll see. But you guys are financing it. Yes. As collective companies. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Got it, okay, cool. Well, I mean, let us know how we can help. Absolutely. If you guys want to do a remote area in the Cube because I would love the mission you guys are on. I think this is the kind of work that every company should be doing in the new R&D. You got to jump in the deep end and swim as fast as possible. But I think you can do with the Cloud. I think that is refreshing and that's smart. And you have to do it quick. Because this market, I think the one thing we would probably agree on is that it's moving faster than we could. Every week there's something else that happens. Okay. So now you guys were at consensus down in Austin when the winter hit. And you've been in the business for a long time. You got to know the industries. You see where it's going. What was the big thing you guys learned? Any scar tissue from the early data coming in from the collaboration? Was there some aha moments? Was there some oh shoot moments? Oh wow, I didn't think that was going to happen. Share some anecdotal stories from the experience. Good bed and if you want to be bold, say I'll be too. I think the first thing I want to say about the timing. It is the crypto winter, but I actually think now's a really great time to sort of build something because everybody's continuing to build. I mean, folks are focused on the future and that's what we are as well. In terms of some of the challenges, well I mean the WET3 space is so new. And there's not like a way to just go online and sort of copy somebody else's work and sort of rinse and repeat. We had to figure a lot of things on our own. We had to try different technologies, see which worked better and sort of make sure that it was functioning the way we wanted it to function really. So it was not easy. They oversold that product out. That's good, like this team. But think about it, so the joke is that when winter is when real work happens, if you look at the companies have not been affected by this, it's the infrastructure companies. And what it reminds me of, it's a little bit different, but 2001, right? We had the dot-com bust, the entire industry blew up. But what came out of that? Amazon, right? I mean, like lots of companies kind of grew up out of that environment. Everything that was promoted actually happened. Yes, but you know what didn't happen? Food delivery. But you know what's interesting that didn't happen? Is the soccer happened. The soccer happened. Yes, in financial services, we built on top of legacy. I think what WET3 is doing, it's getting rid of that legacy infrastructure. And the banks are going to be involved. There's going to be new players and stuff. But what I'm seeing now is a doubling down of the infrastructure investment of saying, okay, how do we actually make this stuff real so we can actually show the promise? You know, one of the things I've just shared, Rob, you appreciate this, is that the digital advertising market's changing because now banner ads and the old techniques are based on Web2 infrastructure, basically DNS as we know it, and token problems are everywhere. Sites and silos of build to get linked and doesn't share information. And the sites want first party data. It's a hoarding kind of exercise. And so like those practices are going to get decimated. So incomes, token economics, that's going to get decimated. So you're already seeing the decline of media and advertising, cookies are going away. Like, I think it's going to change. It's going to be a flip because I think right now you're not in control. Other people are in control. And I think with tokenomics and some of the other things that are going to happen, it gives back control to the individual. Think about it. Right now, you get advertising. Now you didn't say I wanted this advertising. Imagine the value of advertising when you say, you know what, I am interested in getting information about this particular type of product. The lead generation, the value of that advertising is significantly higher. Organic notifications. Yeah. Well gentlemen, I'd love to follow up with you. I'm definitely going to ping in now. I'm going to put Cubecoin back on the table for our audience. Cubecoin's coming. We appreciate it. Thanks for sharing your insights. Great conversation. Excellent. Thank you for having us. Cubecovers here in New York City. I'm John Furrier. More live coverage to close out the day. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Excellent.