 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit here at AWS re-invent. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have two guests for this segment. We have Satya Adragala, sorry, he is the VP Single Family Technology at Fannie Mae. Thanks so much for coming on the show Satya. Glad to be here. And we have Dave Baldwin, VP Architecture Cloud Engineering at Fannie Mae. Thank you so much for coming on the show Dave. Thanks for having us. So we're talking today about transforming the mortgage industry through the cloud. Fannie Mae is obviously a foundational part of the U.S. home mortgage industry and it's been around for a long time, but at a time right now where there is just so much tremendous change going on in the industry, particularly with the emergence of FinTech and other push button mortgage providers, talk a little bit about the last three to five years in terms of the changes you've seen to the business. Do you want to start Satya? Yeah, I will. So when we look at the industry changes, what Fannie Mae does is mostly in the secondary market. So our core business hasn't changed from the point of taking the loan, securitizing and selling. However, in the mortgage industry, when we talk about the borrower experience and then the lenders, how they have improved the experience across the board, I think he's been a huge shift, right? Three years ago, the discussion has been always about, hey, can we do it more reliably? Can we do it more faster? Those were the conversations, but now the expectations of our lenders and borrowers have significantly increased, right? Now they are talking about user experience. How can we meet our borrower where they are, right? So the lenders have got a lot of expectations on us in terms of how do you fulfill that, right? So that is the first biggest change in the realm of several of these, right? The second one is that data has become the currency now, right? It has significantly improved our posture around finding about their assets, their income, their employment, right? So you guys may have seen a lot of a day one certainty is a product that we have launched in that realm. So data revolution has been a big change and then how we are utilizing that to serve mortgage industry, our lenders and the borrowers, thereby we also reduce the risk within the industry, right? So those two have been huge changes. Then there is a technology revolution in terms of APIs, microservices, how do I plug and play? How do I reduce my cost when I'm locking a borrower to a loan, right? I think these are the things that our lenders have been pushing us on, right? Reduce the cycle from somebody coming to the application to taking a loan, closing the loan and delivering to Fannie Mae. Shrink the timeline and in doing it, reduce our cost, right? So these have been like more and more expectations have been really set from the borrower point of view, from the lender point of view on Fannie Mae and all our innovation, our transformation is all about meeting them and also setting standard for them what is great in this industry. And that's what has been going on in the last three to five years. Yes, and you've just laid out a tremendous number of trends and all this disruptive change. When you were trying to meet these new expectations from your lenders and your borrowers, Dave, what are the, in making this journey to, from, to, so I'm sorry, from, to the cloud, how are you thinking about these challenges ahead? At a time where user experience is so important, data is currency and this technology revolution? Well, it's a big change and it's a change across sort of people, process and technology. So if you think about it, what we've done is we've started to create a new operating model, which really is a lot more engaging and it requires an uptake of scale and really a new way of working, right? We've even gone as far as to introduce lean management, you know, tools and processes. But if you think about it, the people definitely have to change. If you think about it from a process point of view, you're really looking at reimagining the way sort of the mortgage industry works, right? Because there's a lot of demand for it. At the end of the day, the customer expectations and especially if you go all the way to the borrower, the customer expectations are just very different. You know, they're very, they don't understand and necessarily why they would have to fill out all this paperwork, right? When don't you already have the information? And to Satya's point about data, that's why it's so important to get that data together because if we can harness it, right, then we can truly start to reimagine these processes and make it so much easier for a borrower and a lender to work together and eventually work with us. So, and then finally, from a tech point of view, with the introduction of the cloud, that new foundational sort of technology that really gives you something to pivot off of, you can really start to take advantage of the microservice architectures and the new technical capabilities that can help make this real, right? And so that's generally how we look at our digital transformation. And as you start to think about prioritization of how do I move those, or how do I think about the applications that are going to change and how they're going to either transform or move to the cloud, you really start to think of, you know, what business value am I trying to achieve? First, second, third, right? And then what applications won't make it, you know? They're going to be completely redone and what applications, frankly, we're going to have to move along with it to manage some of the dependencies we're going to have. So I think one more point I want to add, Rebecca, is that when we look at this B2B businesses, right, they are very tightly integrated, right? Our companies have been integrated when we are exchanging our information, exchanging the responses. In the past, anybody talks about experience, right? It is about, hey, there will be, there are technological glitches, but you don't want to impact big. That used to be the norm, not anymore. I think when we look at now one of the top customers, right? If you blink from the infrastructure layer point of view, there is business loss. People are not just looking for resiliency anymore. People are looking for fault tolerance, especially when it comes to the top tier customers, right? So I think we kind of see the underpinning of cloud and also how we architect our applications to meet that kind of need. It's not just about being resilient anymore. It's got to be, you cannot lose a transaction, right? I think those things have been more and more that we are hearing from our customer base and we feel like the cloud journey is going to be underpinning for these types of expectations from our customers. So how do you work with partners like Accenture and AWS when you embark on this journey and think through your business imperatives and think through your strategy? Yeah, I think when we think about our partnerships, first of all, there are a lot of partners that we have and that we've had for years as we really, not only do digital transformation, but you got to run the business too while you're doing this transformation. And so when you think about it, the way Accenture's worked with us is, they number one have helped us with a cloud strategy. So that's a very hard thing to do because we think about all the different personalities in your organization and all the people that you have to bring together. You know, what Accenture helped us with is to really level set everyone and get everybody on the same page in terms of where we want to go and how we want to head on this journey. I think the second thing that they helped us with was really the program management. So that's a huge undertaking too, right? And given the fact that it's very different and these are new things that we're doing in our firm, it's good to have that external expertise that's sort of done it with other companies and they can bring that to bear. With AWS, you know, AWS is one of the major providers that we're using to host a lot of our business applications. And if you think about that, we're taking advantage of their technology. We're leveraging some of their pro-serve, professional services to help us get it right and help us sort of not only with the implementation but in some cases the governance and the control frameworks that a highly regulated organization like ours needs. So. Yeah, and I think if you think about this from the scale point of view, right? Everybody knows there is war for talent, right? We use our partners in terms of how can we scale these things that are new operating models, new technologicals? Because there is a change curve in bringing up the entire employee base to that extent. These guys can be catalysts. In addition to that, they can be scale providers, right? I think that's how we kind of use this, whether it is Accenture or AWS. This morning during Andy Jassy's fireside chat, he talked a lot about the importance of innovation and experimentation and trying different things. What's the experience of innovation at Fannie Mae? How do you innovate with partners or just thinking about all of the changed expectations? How do you make sure you are trying to solve the right problems? Describe your process, your creative process. So again, I think when we think about this innovation process and how we evolved in Fannie Mae, right? Three years ago, it is about, hey, how do we get our employee base to think about the possibilities, right? And we ran bunch of hackathons, innovation days so that you get excitement from the teams. But in the last one and a half year, it's more about innovation that can reap benefits, right? So we call it as focused innovation, right? We have a clear-cut enterprise innovation team and they run some of these innovation days and whatever have you within the firm so that you get the ideas, right? And we have a process called Pitch. So all these ideas feed into, lack of a better term, a funnel, where we have this enterprise innovation groups actually scan through the ideas and then kind of identify what things we can use and where we want to put our innovation investments, right? So there is a set of funnel requirements and gates we go through to identify, hey, this is where we want to do. And how we do is that Fannie Mae is a lot more design thinking shop, right? So customer is at the center of everything. So anything we do, we will have some sort of research first, right, with the customers and then how that might push the needle such that it can reach different boundaries through innovation, right? So our process is cultivate the ideas from inside, also look at what is happening with the trends. We have a strong strategy group, they kind of look at this and our innovation team is always on the hunt for, hey, what is happening in the industry and the cutting edge? How do you bring these three dimensions and then come up with a bunch of ideas and then we have a funnel process where we identify what moves versus what stays because there are other things that are at play. Is this innovation ready for the market now? Does it have to wait? So there are so many dimensions that go into that but we have a structured process and we have a dedicated team who kind of manages that yet uses the creativity of the employees to be able to participate in the innovation. I mean, that's how we have evolved this process from think of the possibilities to focus the innovation. I think there's one extra point as well, like when it comes to the technology side of that, it's creating a safe place for people to experiment, right? So we have a sandbox environment that we've created in Amazon or in AWS and what we're doing is we're actually releasing some of the controls. I mean, obviously there's security and compliance but release some of the controls and just put a few guardrails in place so that people can experiment safely and not impact our firm in a very negative way, so. Talk about your employees and how they've received this major transformation and how are you receiving feedback in terms of their productivity and their engagement with the process? Dave? Sure, so I would say this, there are lots of different types of employees, right? And like I said earlier, we also have, as we're building the new, we also have to continue to support what we're running. So what we've done is we've actually rolled out and Satya'll talk about it in more detail because his team rolled it out, but we have rolled out some training. We've created a change management process and organization, right? Working with our human resources so that we can uplift the skills and that sort of thing. I think what's important is you're not going to be able to find the people out there to do everything that you need to do, right? What's really important is creating those opportunities to carry the people that you have in your organization along with you for the journey. As they learn, you benefit, right, as an organization. So, but Satya should talk about some of the training. Yeah, so I take your question in two parts, right? One is that how the employee base is taking the message of this digital transformation, whatever have you, right? Again, we have a compelling vision and mission, right? People at Fannie Mae, they take pride in fulfilling the mission, right? That's the first one. Along the way, when we crafted our message around why we are doing this, that is a lot more compelling. It is meaningful for our customers, our employees, right? So I think the messaging has been very important, right? Then when you look at the things that we are trying to do are cutting edge, right? From the employee point of view, there is a lot of excitement because that keeps them at the cutting edge of what is happening in the world that makes them more marketable, right? Naturally, people are excited about it, but like any transformation, right? There will be camps of who will come across the change curve upfront, like they are catalysts, right? And then there are some in the middle and some are kind of lagging, right? But when we look at the entire gamut of the employee base, majority of them are, hey, we are on board with this, we want to do it, we want to learn, how do we get there, right? And the company has done several different things to help the employees through this kind of knowledge curve, I would call rather than the change curve here. We have a whole bunch of training plans that we have laid out. People have been voluntarily taking, I mean, may it be a classroom training, may it be a self-serve type of download this particular module and then kind of read upon it and then also provide them to practice them with a sandbox, right? So all these things have been done. I think one challenge we are actually facing now is that we can train them up pretty easily. If we haven't put them in a place to practice it, right? Then it kind of fades away. So we are now kind of trying to see, okay, let's identify groups of people, give them a tool where they can assess for them their own self what I wanted to learn such that I can become that and then be eligible for doing that, right? So that now they learn and then they are put in a role or a project that they can actually practice on. So we are in that posture of that right now. So I think, but an employee base is very excited about this. So I want to end where we started where Satya described the myriad changes that are taking place in your industry and getting back to your cause, which is helping the customer buy a home, get it more easily qualified for a loan. Can you think about the customer experience of the home buying process three to five, 10 years from now and how it will be different as Fannie Mae embarks on this cloud journey. Do you want to start, Dave, and just look into your crystal ball for us? Yeah, and it's great. I wish I had a crystal ball. That would be great. But you know, look, we're making significant advancements, you know, working with our customers, taking that customer first mentality and you know, the mortgage industry itself is ripe for change. I mean, you know, and we're in a good position to really help and drive a lot of that. So my expectation, if I were to look out, I would expect to see a world where, you know, that borrower experience gets a lot better. I mean, one of the things we've learned through our research is that, you know, what is it? 40% of people actually cry as they're going through the mortgage experience. And they're not tears of joy. No, and it's actually, you know, tougher to get into a, tougher to think through the mortgage process, you know, and really take that big leap than it is to, you know, our COO tells us all the time, than it is to actually apply for a college. It's often a bigger life event. Our goal, how do we make that simpler? How do we make people have a much more pleasant experience? Right? We can do that with our data. We can make sure that they don't have to fill out those amazing forms. Heck, find the information. Sometimes they don't have it. You know, we're in a better position, right? You know, really get to a, you know, I can't promise a single click experience, but we're all going to try to aspire to that because that's what the customers out there with their cell phones and their technology are used to. Right? So we've got to get at least somewhere close to being there. So in the borrower experience side, I think we can even now see one tap mortgage. How do we get them, right? I think that's probably not too far, right? It's probably within two to three years. That's, if I were to think about that, right? But if you were to think about five to six years, or 10 years, if I am an individual driving by a home and then take your phone and say, hey, can I buy this home? That should be able to tell you this is your lender and then go and do this, right? And again, from Fannie Mae point of view, we help the lenders. And they help the borrowers. So through this transformation, what we are doing is that set up an engine that can be nimble, that can move fast, that runs with low investment, so that if you were to pivot, do things, test and learn, and then change our game, we are fully in that position to be able to do that, right? And however fast you can experiment, those many different ideas will come out and then some of them will reap fruits. And all of these are for two things, right? For our customers, how do we benefit our company, Fannie Mae? And how do we move the needle in the industry? I think these are the three things that we want to achieve through this transformation and we are building an engine to be able to do those types of things, right? I wish I could say this is one thing we would do, but that's not what we are trying to do. Be in a position where we can move quickly, we can lead the industry, we can set the standard, and then make good for the American housing. So, that's all our story is about. Exciting times, thank you so much both for coming on theCUBE, Satya and Dave. Thank you. You're welcome. I'm Rebecca Knight, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit coming up in just a little bit.