Session Information:

Moving from Operational Excellence to Operational Agility

Financial Services firms are in a period of extraordinary flux and their Operations are at the crossroads of all the change.  If managing the delicate balance of cost, risk, regulations, client satisfaction and revenue enablement weren’t challenging enough, Operations now has to ensure safe passage for the firm’s very many transformation efforts:  Digitization, Client Experience Innovation and Fintech integration to name a few. 

Most recently, Operations has played a key role in the pandemic response by quickly pivoting to fully virtualized work and shifting work rapidly between locations to ensure that businesses are able to continue operating despite incredible market volatility.  And, there’s no end in sight - the pace of change from an exponential world only promises increase. 

As such, Operation Excellence in Financial Services is becoming synonymous with Operational Agility.  It’s clear that firms that react, respond, adapt quickly and are able to nimbly manage continuous transformation will be winners in this new environment.  So the key question for Operations Excellence becomes:  how to create Operation Agility?

Key learning:

Session Transcript:

Actually, come. Sanjeev, not and Sanjiv, I grow to be here with us. Sanjeev not the one. He is a transformational leader in banking and capital markets with prior senior roles at Deloitte, Goldman Sachs and Freddie Mac. He's a strategic advisor to fintech's, focused on process transformation, low code, no code development and artificial intelligence.

With him. We have the Executive Director of Change Mobilization at JP Morgan Sanjeev Agarwal.

Sanjeev has driven strategic change across Investment Banking, Cassady, Asset and wealth management, and insurance businesses.

At JP Morgan, Sanjiv leads a business process in the Decision Management Center of Excellence and Product on Task and Workflow Management Systems.

Prior to his current role, Sanjeev led the Business Architecture and Technology Strategy Group at Goldman Sachs and was a principal in the Financial Services Industry Practice at Diamond Management and Technology Consultants, which is now PWC.

They are going to have a discussion about how operational excellence and operational agility are evolving in these times of rapid change and uncertainty in financial services. I am very much looking forward to that discussion. I asked the audience why they're having the discussion to pose your questions, because, in the last 10 minutes, I'm going to bring your questions to both of them.

And, ladies and gentlemen, this is as good as it gets when it comes to financial services leadership. And, I'm very honored and happy to have Sanjiv not wanting Sanjeev Arora with us. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with our global audience today.

Just say thank you so much for the introduction. Thank you, Vetos, and thank you ... for sponsoring this particular presentation.

Just as you've said, we live in interesting times to say the least and in banking we live I think in especially interesting times.

If it wasn't enough to be contending with digitizing everything and fundamentally redesigning client experience, try to keep up with fintech and industrializing our operations.

We now have to fundamentally rethink our organizations and operating models in light of the pandemic with all the insanity and relentless change.

It sure seems like agility has become a very large part of operational excellence.

So, it gives me great pleasure today to be interviewing Sanjeev Agarwal who is at the very forefront of that at JPL in asset and wealth management.

He's helping them rethink operational excellence in the face of almost continuous transformation.

So here's how we're going to play the game today. I get to ask Sanjiv for questions with the occasional debate breaking out because we can't help it.

And then we will hand back to GSA to field some questions from you in the audience. Hopefully that makes sense. We'll leave about 10 minutes for that.

So, Sandy, thank you for joining us today.

I'm going to turn it over to you for some hope opening remarks.

Sure. Thanks. So, first of all, thanks, Jose Josey, for the introductions, and thanks, ... for inviting me to participate in this chat today. I'm really excited to be here so I'm sorry if I go off and JP. Morgan, I do need to do a quick disclaimer before we move on.

Any personal views or opinions that I share today are my own and not from my employer.

Just building on GSA's introduction. I've spent the last 20 years in transformation and change roles in financial services. And over that time, I've seen operating environment evolved significantly as well as the notion of operational excellence. And it's really because of that much in my focus over the past decade, has been developing organizational capabilities that help improve operating, leverage, and accelerate change. And so I'm really looking forward to this discussion today. I'm moving from operational excellence, operational agility. So with that, I'll hand it to you, Cindy. Yes, the other Sanjiv, let's get started.

Hi.

I'm not able to hear the audio, folks Sorry. It does that. Hopefully that works OK. Thank you.

So you know, I was I was saying, you're the far more erudite one and the and so, you know, that's how you tell the difference between us.

Um, Well, let's get going. So, question number one.

How do you think the notion of operational excellence has evolved over the last few years, in your experience?

How do you think risk and control now balance with cost efficiency and client satisfaction?

revenue enablement today?

I'd say, kind of on how apps excellence has evolved.

It used to be that if you execute consistently and reliably, all the rest of it would kind of work itself out.

Your clients would be happy, your revenues would reflect that. But that's changing. I think. I think the first thing I'd say is just executing consistently and reliably is more challenging today.

The operating environments had large banks have grown, more complex, we globalize our footprints. We've scaled business volumes with diversified the products and services that we need to support.

And so from an operational perspective, the new normal for large banks is managing processing across many lines of businesses. Many specialized functions, locations, and time zones.

You add on top of that that clients are becoming more demanding, because they know what's possible.

They experience it in other industries, like when they order something from Amazon or when they drive their Teslas. And they want that same type of stuff. Those experiences, when they bank.

So, you know, what I think we're starting to see is really operations, folks are really becoming the voice of feasibility.

And that's because they know how to navigate complexity at scale. They're the people that are at the coal face when implementing change. Ops people speak business ops, people speak tech, and they're in the details.

And because of that, we're seeing greater ops involvement being demanded by the business, and supportive it, either in support of or to outright drive front front Tabak transformation, and I think the definition of operations excellence, is now more inclusive of the ability to transform.

Kind of hitting your point around no, balancing risk, like risk cost, and client satisfaction.

It's it's something that we used to refer to as a triple constraint triangle, right? You can tradeoff risk versus cost, versus client satisfaction when optimizing your processes.

But that was really, it was really more true when the work had to be performed manually.

You don't really have to do that anymore. With automation, we can optimize on multiple dimensions. It takes work and good design, but it can definitely be done.

Sanjiv, you're you're so right. Thank you for that.

But let's add on, right? So, how do you think the pandemic is influencing these priorities. Is that shifting at one more time?

How strongly does digitization the virtualization of work?

And as we've been talking about today, operational agility feature into your priorities.

I think, I mean, I think most people, or at least many people on this call today would probably agree that the pandemic has been the single largest accelerant to the Ops digitization agenda in years.

It's essentially forced people into digital literacy, whether you're a client, a counterparty, or a person delivering, a product or service, historical adoption frictions to a virtualized operating model kind of fell away to necessity. And what we saw was almost overnight firms.

It needed to enable a nearly fully remote working environment. They had to create instrumentation to monitor the plant so that we knew how it was running and they had to digitize, all of there are many of their paper based processes. So, I think what we've seen is that covert has really highlighted the importance of operational agility, and, you know, and, and, again, the spirit of never letting a crisis go to waste. I think we need to build on that momentum to continue to drive the overall digitization agenda.

Thank you. So, David, and you're so right, it. I'd never let a crisis go to waste. Those are the pivot points.

So, stay with that.

How do you think the approach to process transformation? As you said, that operations is now, you know, the identity has changed, increasingly transformation?

How do you think that's evolved over the last few years?

And how do you think traditional capabilities like Lean six Sigma Chi?

Then BPM, workflow automation, come together with the newer capabilities like model driven development, low code, no code robotics, AI, there's an alphabet soup out there, How does that all come together?

It's, it's certainly, it's certainly a big landscape of stuff that's coming at it, right? Like, I do think, I do think the biggest thing, that, I think is evolving lately, is there's just been a ton of activity and tools. The palliative powerful tools are evolving quickly, and they're really broadening what they can do to support the whole life cycle of process transformation. All the way from discovery through implementation.

And I think the challenge is becoming more how to figure out how to use all these things in concert, and in an effective way. It takes a lot of time in focus to leverage them to max effect. I'll just describe a few of the areas that I think are really, you know, have some compelling potential to really transform.

How we transform processes. And there's a few categories, and I'll just kind of unpack them a bit.

Process, discovery tools, model driven development, the evolution of citizen development of business.

People, developing solutions, and then advances in machine learning and AI, fisher, kind of four areas that I think are really kind of accelerating changing and enhancing our capabilities to transform. So, you know, with process discovery, we see tools that are helping us generate process insights, at scale, through automated task and process mining capabilities. These are things that we know, that we would've tried to measure the hard way.

We want to be data driven and our change, and we want to be able to heat map our world so that we can find the areas that we want to focus on in order to transform. And that's why I think these discovery tools really come into play, and can add a lot of value.

Model driven development.

This is something that's been pretty established.

It's a capability that allows you to model a process or a decision.

Then directly run what you model on compatible workflow and decision engines.

I think the innovation in this space over the last few years has really been in shifting, really enhancing and creating constructs and tools with really, really easy to use interfaces such that these tools are more accessible to business people. So, you know, model driven development used to kind of live in tech.

Now, the new tools make it so that a business person can monitor their process, model their decisions, and then just export it as executable code and run them on compatible infrastructure. And that's really powerful.

We said, we see that really kind of improving the handshake between the business and technology and really accelerating cycle times.

Citizen development is another areas that's changing, that used to mean creating Excel macros and using Access databases, but it's really starting to evolve to include kinda figuring robotic process automations, doing large-scale, data, blending and analytics tools with some general purpose, tooling, all the way to configuring apps themselves, in no code and low code tools.

And then on the machine learning and AI front, we're just seeing those advances further push out the automation frontier and opening up creative solutions and opportunities. You know, you can only get so far with declarative rules that you're trying to automate, but machine learning and AI start to really kind of open up what you can automate and creating experiences for your clients.

On the kind of alphabet soup point around, you know, around how these things come together, I'd say that no.

Things like Lean six Sigma, as in traditional BPM, they all remain as relevant as ever. However, the things that are closer to implementation, really get that kind of help you actually build a solution, model.

Driven development, low code, bots, and AI, I think that those things help unconstrained the possibilities when your solution, and can help you deliver faster.

So many, many on this call will have seen bots get developed and released in production within days. I've got my personal experiences, model driven development approaches, get us 40% cycle time improvements, you know, for the areas that it's focused on. And, you know, I believe, you know, that the potential low code, no code tooling can go well beyond that.

In terms of acceleration, I think, in order for all of this stuff to come together, um, your traditional process engineers rates to the people that are doing Lean six Sigma case and traditional BPM need to become really savvy with these new capabilities, and they need to take more direct ownership of implementing their own change.

I really do think that there's going to be some blurring of ops and tech roles in this space and if people need to get used to it or get for what they'll get left behind.

I, that is, that's very insightful.

Sergio and I couldn't agree more, um, and you're touching on it but could you expand a little bit on how does the rate of change and the speed of transformation or required modify the way you think about process transformation. How do you think it changes the way we think about resiliency?

Because it's all about speed and shortening the cycle as you've been saying.

Yeah, I think it's a good question, Steve.

I think, know, it from a, from a rate of change perspective, I think, I think it is going to be difficult for people to keep up, right? We no longer have a tools bottleneck, right? We're in a way where almost spoilt for choice. With other stuff that's emerging, albeit some of it is, that early stages of maturity, to be fair. But what what I feel like we're running into is a bit more of a human capability bottleneck.

I think we need more people that, know how to put it all together. A, solution that stuff, and then have the specialized skills, and spend the time, you know, learning some of these some of these techniques and capabilities deeply.

And that's why I think it's important to focus on, really, to focus on capability development within your organization.

I think that if you have the right people with the right skills, tools, methods, and governance, you can deploy them quickly, responsibly, and safely.

And I mentioned governance, in particular, because we are seeing it blurring, ops and tech roles, and we are empowering business people to drive some of their own technical change. And I think governance is a key part of that, just to make sure that we're doing it safely, and that the solutions are going to be resilient.

I'm just projecting forward and thinking, how does this all change when.

1, one level further, as you introduce, things like the Internet of Things, And you're really designing for machines, talking to machines, as much as you're talking to human to machine interface. And, you know, that brings me to the next question.

So, clearly, The transformation game itself is changing, are the implications for all of us, and why we should participate and what our opportunities are.

How do you think the game changes in the next 5 to 10 years?

Can you appear into the future and sort of project that and kind of specifically, what happens is the banks become increasingly digitized, the AI matures and the pace of innovation accelerates even further.

Yeah, I think, I think what we're going to see is that the problems, the problems that we try to solve are just going to get more interesting.

I like as as digitization and automation efforts mature in organizations, and some of the new capabilities that we described help accelerate implementations to the point that we'll be able to transform faster.

I think we're just going to be less constrained in our ambition in what we're trying to do from from an end goal.

Transformation respect, we're definitely going to see more front to back emphasis in an optimization versus optimizing in silos, which there's a lot of today. Right?

And then we're going to see less focus on mundane automation and more focused on new and re-imagined products and services.

Thanks. And I just want to push a little bit further because you're touching on it.

And I think for the audience, especially that says, and I'm sure it's near and dear to their hearts. And so what is the impact of all of this?

On our operating models, our organizational models and even talent? You touched on it earlier. Could you expand on that?

Sure, I think, you know, as as things get increasingly digitized or automated, we're going to have less operational people serving as actors in a business process.

And their roles are going to shift from running the plant to redesigning the plant and implementing the change.

And I think kinda the upshot of that is that run the bank, change your bank ratio and the organization shifts in the opposite direction.

Transformation becomes the core of what operations does.

And I think from a, from people like an talent perspective, it's funny.

In, in financial services, the rocket scientists used to be the people that valued the deals where the price to trade. Now we're finding the need for them in ops. And I think from a talent perspective, ops needs to learn how to recruit, grow and retain them.

I'm just going to refer to you a little bit esoteric and I remember distinctly and And what are my experiences, how we fundamentally changed the recruiting model and the training model.

So we went from having sort of a one category, one profile for the, the, the, you know, the analysts' class, that we were recruiting. But we actually turn it into four categories.

And, you know, and that included data scientists, engineers, financial analysts, and then, you know, we fundamentally changed the training as well.

We sort of insisted on transformation to change training, right?

At the get go with an emphasis on, you know, to your point, more democratized, accountability for change. So you know, it's, it's, and so as you look progress that for 5 to 10 years out.

You've got a class of, you know, operations professionals, who are, in a really the profile is completely different.

So, you know, it's, it's going to be fascinating to see how they evolve and what they bring to the table.

Anyway, that's, you know, I think the the thing to watch moving forward.

Um, no and maybe the final question, Sanjeev. And please, let's expand on this.

Some, I'm, you know, I'm empowered to give you a magic wand today, might be Towse Measures.

And given the magic, what would you wish for that help you achieve your transformation goals moving forward forward?

I look, if you gave me a magic wand today, I'd say, I'd wait. Everyone's 100% backstop covet is gone, and we're back to normal, right? That'd be my wish.

I think, you know, to answer it a bit more in the spirit of what you're probably looking for and probably at the risk of broadening the tools palate discussion further out.

one of the things I would like to be able to do is wave that wind and get self-service access to all the data that I need of high quality and described in business language.

I think that if we had that, we could dramatically accelerate transformation further and be able to better monitor the plant, I'd be better able to discover new opportunities to better serve the client or just streamline the operation and would definitely eliminated key bottleneck and automation initiatives.

So it winds up being about data and to sort of jump into that conversation.

With you, it struck me during the pandemic as I was working with different clients. that it would have been incredibly valuable.

to have the ability to gather all the data in whatever shape or form it was into a common palette, a common environment where everyone could view it, you know, together, collaborate and make sense of it to make something or drive some of the rapid decisions.

So, this is a, becomes a game.

And, as we speak about operational agility, of really being able to take, you know, snapshots in time, and taking the best information you have, but bringing it together and assembling it, to drive what is still the Human Domain, which is, in our ability to, use our judgement, to make decisions on how things need to operate in the face of, sort of crisis or dramatic change, and, and, you know?

And if I look at the resiliency challenges, a lot of the resiliency challenges are actually getting at the right data in a time the wave.

But then, also, being able to ensure that everyone had the same view of the data, they were speaking, the same language, right?

So, if you needed to make an decision on, you know, shutting down a region and moving work to another region.

You need to make sure that your description of the process systems, organizations, all of that, had a common view, and then a lot of the benefit of having that kind of data assembled in the right way.

Having a magic wand of course, is being able to do what if analysis, Right? So really being able to ask the tough questions, say, What if we did this?

And what we did as I agree with the data is, is the final frontier.

And so, maybe, your thoughts on is, you know, if you had all the right data, what's the?

No, what would you do with it?

And how would you, how would that, no experience, changed and operations in day-to-day flow, and in an urgent situations?

I mean, I think, for me, that's really, and it's not just data. It's, it's, it's understanding that data in context, right?

Having the information and knowledge, right, that, that the data supports, I think, will make, you know, what will allow us to have data driven decision making. You, know, for me, a big part of my focus is automation.

And, you know, I need two things, in order to automate.

I need, I need to be able to codify the algorithm that lives in someone's head, or in a procedure that, you know, that does the thing that I'm trying to automate.

And I can do that with no decision modeling, something that we referenced earlier, you know, or I can do that with no more advanced things like machine learning or AI, but I also need the data to input into the algorithm, right? So, I need both pieces of that equation in order to really solve the problems that I want to solve.

That's, thank you for that inner Sanjeev with that I have a feeling, you know, we probably have questions that we might take and, so, and as I wrap up, and, I want to just, you know, I want to repeat something that someone pointed out to me. It's, it's obvious, it's staring us all in the face.

But, it is nonetheless, insightful, which is, as we automate, more as we digitize more as we employ more and more tools, or inadvertently doing is actually no obfuscating.

Our understanding of how things work and especially the data that is, you know, invisible river flowing underneath us.

And so, and then in coming back to the theme of operational excellence and operational agility becomes a game, I think, also making sure that you're instrumenting everything that you do, so that you get that telemetry to manage better and better.

And that's often, you know, is missed in the spirit of getting something automated. But you know, we could go on for a long time, sanjaya, viola and I welcome that opportunity of offline.

I think I'm going to pass Josie to see if he's got audience participation here. We look forward to answering your questions. Thank you very much, Angie, for being here today and sharing your insights.

What a great discussion. What a great discussion I, everybody's listening attentively, The incredible insights both of you are sharing. and the questions have been coming in. And I ask the audience to keep, we have time. So, keep submitting your questions, we're gonna get to as many of them as possible in those specific order. Both of you are experts in financial services and tremendous leadership track record in the industry, and we'd benefit from both of your insights. So the first one comes from Anna Martinis in New Jersey. So, Anna, ask is still that there is. First of all, she says, What a great presentation. What a great discussion. and, and the her commentary let me expand the box here, just momentarily. Her comment is that.

Why do you think, there's still a lot of companies in North America, specifically, would you still have not taken advantage of basic technology, like in BPM, and process mining, and even some RPA that has been around for decades? And people still think that not decades.

But certainly, we think the decade, it has been readily available. But quite a few financial organizations have not taken advantage of those technologies. And any thoughts about why? You know, I joke with some people, I go to some insurance companies that someone is in the background, is still printing something on a dot matrix, but plotter So, it's like not everybody has kind of advanced to the digital age. So, any thoughts about why, a couple of questions you're really, why is that? is it takes so long for certain organizations to adopt certain technologies.

And maybe part of the corollary to that is that is that maybe because, no, they don't see the value, the value is not there yet for them or they are just not aware of the value capabilities of these technologies.

I can I can take a first shot at it, and Sanjiv, I'll hand it to you to kind of add to it, I think.

I think what we see is a lot, you know, the the organizational complexity can make it feel daunting to try to try to drive some of this change. Where long from the old mainframe days, where there was like one machine when in your plant, you know, in services industries, we've seen an explosion, right? Of apps and services, it's not uncommon for an operations organization to have, you know, 500 to a thousand applications that they're performing the workaround. And so, when it comes to, You know, So, I run into kind of, I'll see it either way, right? I'll either say, hey, what do I have, five different workload platforms, or why don't I have anything at, All right. So, a little bit of it is, you know, people are challenged by a lot of legacy technology.

The need to maintain Karen feedback, a lot of strategic change that they're undergoing at the same time, and it just becomes a relative prioritization problem.

I also think that, you know, when you start to When you start to look at some of these technologies that are shifting the traditional roles and responsibility in the organization, you run into some Impedance. And it can be somewhat political, right?

So if I'm, if I'm introducing bots into my infrastructure, you know, I may run into, you know, technologists who are hesitant to have that bot interact with their system, whether it will organizationally we may be hesitant to have a business person construct that bot. Because, well, you know, they didn't go to MIT and they weren't trained in, you know, software engineering, and what about the governance, and all of those things.

So I think there's a lot of, you know, in some, in some places, cultural change, around roles, responsibilities, and the overall end to end value change. And then, I think it's just people dealing with the complex scenarios that they have in their operating environments and trying to make those tradeoffs decisions.

Sanjiv, actually, any thoughts to add on that?

Yeah, I think just building on that.

You know, what I've found in transformation work as it is fundamentally an organizational behavior challenge.

You really have to recondition the organization to think differently, articulate themselves differently, to ask different questions and demand different things in their environment. That's how you drive transformation.

And innocentive, you referred to this earlier, but there is literally no, we're not. We're spoiled for tools at this point.

And so, the ability to get the organization, to transform the way it behaves, is rate limiting. Right.

It's, it's, it's, you know, you've sort of take on one set of new tools, and now they've got another, and another, and another, and it's, it's, you know, you're pivoting Battleships, especially in the larger organizations.

and, And each new edition creates both a benefit, but it also creates some risk.

I mean, let's face it, you know, operations still is demanded to first and foremost.

Make sure nothing goes bump in the night and, you know that, you know, trying to create that stability, fights with the need to know morphin change.

And so, you know, it's really about how can you pivot the behavior of the organization.

And, as I was speaking earlier, going to change things right of the intake, hire the right kind of people, train them the right way, give them different incentives, performance ratings, you know, rewards and recognition, all of that plays heavily into your ability to absorb change.

The second is, let's face it, as much as we all know, there's an incredible need to transform.

The reality is that the transformation as a percentage of budget, overall, budget for, for technology, budget or for change budget in an organization is still small.

It is still, know, something.

If you're lucky, you're in the 20, 25% range is probably less than that of most firms.

And so overwhelmingly the change agenda is being driven by, you know, the business as usual call.

It needs the expanding into new markets, changing the client experience, innovating new businesses morning a fintech, as I said and so on.

So, um, you know, what I've found it really works well is pivoting off of the BYU. So, what an area of transformation that seems?

No, maybe not intuitive, is risk transformation.

How controls and risk work itself has been done being able to overlay transformation on top of that and introducing new capabilities, tooling on top of that.

Now you're marrying the, you know, the day-to-day with the need to transform it, it doesn't feel like overhead.

You can pivot, you know, that the you know, with the: with the urgency of that particular agenda.

And so, you know, it's, it's, again, rate limiting by organizational behavior change.

You both have mentioned several, very important points there. You talked about the Constant Flux of changing organizations, especially the larger ones. There's only so many competing priorities, right? And different visions about what the future will look like. If not officially, there's certainly kind of this organic visions that happen. You know, you talk to somebody in IT that will have a vision. There'll be different, Maybe something from someone who's an operations and someone who's in the leadership team. So it's hard sometimes to align those, which brings, and then the other components that there are so many technologies.

And again, the right technology is amazing, because it can make things go faster, cheaper, better, But the wrong technology can also make stupid happen at the speed of light. So, it's like, so how do you decide among those things, which brings me to the thought of the less talked about items, often, are not as exciting. And there are things like structure, roles, and responsibilities, in governance.

I'm curious on your perspectives about, what does good look like when the organizations have a good governance in place for not fixing all of these issues, but certainly kind of aligning priorities, selecting what should be focused on, curious about just your perspectives and, and what you've seen out there? That looks like good practices when it comes to governance.

Sanjiv, you want to take that one first?

Sure. Why not?

It's a great question, and it's, it's, it may be at the heart of, the success of transformation as well, which is getting that balance, right?

So, what I mean by that is, you know, good change governance is about striking the balance bit in between the central teams and the line teams, right?

So, it's, it's, if you get, once you add the at the, at the end of the rainbow is this wonderful place where everyone's doing all the right things with all the right tools.

But the migration to that is, is difficult, right? It. And it, and if you, and you know, we're humans and human dynamics come into play. If you drive things to central teams, then it's viewed as an outsider coming in. That's just telling you what to do.

and disrupting your work.

And as a skepticism, transformation is difficult.

If you do it, right, at the leaf level, which, you know, there's a wonderful bottom-up transformation opportunity, but it can be disjointed, disconnected, not re-usable.

You end up with this quilt of, you know, well intended things that don't come together.

If you get the governance right?

You have the ability to know, really drive and stealer centrally as you introduce new capabilities.

But with the goal of federating it out so that when you're done, it's actually the capabilities are democratized broadly used but consistently used controlled way. So that's a thank you for that question, Joseph. But certainly, if you've got more to say on that, I'm sure. Yeah. Look, I mean, I think, you know, I'd echo many of the points that you made. Like, I think when you hear governance, you must think of the opposite of Agile. But it doesn't, It doesn't have to be that way, right? Like, it isn't the opposite of agility. I do think you are agile, if your capabilities are sitting at the coalface spread across the various apps, functions in your organization, because that's where people are sensing and responding to their environment, they can recognize patterns, and they can self solve.

But, you know, I think what we're seeing with the tools and the capabilities is that they're really wide, and they're really deep. And it does require deep specialization.

And, you know, people need support structures with, with teams of, you know, Ninja, who's your green berets that can support them out in the organization?

And so, I do think, and I think since this is where you're going like a hybrid model, with specialized centers of excellence that can support decentralized practitioners, is the way to make something like this work and then you can put in the right guardrails. I think since you mentioned re-use, you know, like, this is how, again, you can drive scale through governance, governance, and you just about slowing things down and making it safer. It's also about design governance. And it's about designing things for re-use, so that you can kind of amplify the benefits across your organization. So I think, I think that was a really good color on coffee.

Does a great insights. Thank you. Thank you so much for that. William Fuller is asking about this, that he has a number of different questions.

And I'm gonna get some of the themes, here, But one of the He's talking he talks about someone: it's one thing for someone to implement his or her own change, and quite another, to implement a change that crosses organized organizational boundaries and disciplines. And and you have talked about that, as you discuss the complexities of even governance.

But his question is, how do you see the improvement of such changes evolving and specifically craw, organization wide? No changes and the and the discipline behind that? Again, a bit related to the question of governance again. And the But when organizations are, very few things are done. Well.

Companywide, in any company, that's the reality, but, But if there are feel Diamonds to be collected, what do you think are some of the sites and things or practices to keep in mind? When you're doing company wide organizational change? What are some of the tips that you would have?

I'll start to give them this one then I'll hand it to you.

I think it when you start to talk about running change at that kind of aperture at a company wide scale, I think absolutely critical to have the right senior sponsorship. So, that the, the effort, the mission, you know, like the kind of the energy behind it needs to be underwritten by someone. Very, very senior.

I think, you know, and I'm gonna borrow, borrow something that I've heard from, from a previous, You know, think, you know, you've got to think big, but you need to start small.

You need to, you know, you need to demonstrate proof of value with whatever it is. you're pitching, and then you need to scale fast. And, you know, in the experimental phase, right, where we're exploring this new emerging landscape, you also have to fail early and takes you step off the table, you know, until you find the right solutions that you want to bring in scale within your organization.

So I think sponsorship, starting small proof of value, and then just kind of building that traction over time.

I do believe that this combination of central, kind of centers of excellence, but with a heavy emphasis on differentially equipping people in the various business areas with the capability is there's some, there's some balance there that if you strike the right balance, you'll be able to kind of scale it over time.

Certainly, maybe, maybe just to build on that, right?

So I agree with everything you've said, but what's interesting is, is the culture of organizations, it's, it is important to understand the culture of your organization.

And, you know, if you look at the two extremes, the organizations that are very command and control, they're very centrally driven.

And there are organizations that are very entrepreneurial driven, you know, if you tried to control them from the top you couldn't.

Right, And so, and there's a spectrum in the middle end, understanding your culture and then creating incentives for change in line with the culture also becomes important, you know?

And so without a doubt, you know think big starts small.

The question becomes how do you start small and how do you get that momentum, how do you break that, know that inertia, if you will, the inertia of friction. And in some cases, you have to do it by fear. So the cell, you know absolutely in all cases.

Having a strong, central unsteady sponsorship is absolutely vital.

But in some cases, you have, you know, you find yourself because the culture of the organization doing things by Fiat, Just to get the ball rolling.

In some cases, it's, it's the exact opposite if you do things I fear the risk tissue rejection.

You have to go down and really find the change agents and sort of equip them and, you know, and really strive for the viral effect.

Probably, maybe, the last one.

This point, because you can go on for awhile on this point, is, is, you know, there's a demographic shift. Right?

And so, you know, we are in, you know, especially the younger generation that's coming in, is very differently equipped than, know, I certainly I am, I've been around awhile with all the gray hair, You know, And they are more willing to try things.

They're more willing to stumbled and fail, and, you know, and really enjoy getting their hands dirty and in, and being involved in the process of transformation.

And so, you know, really tapping into that becomes absolutely vital.

Know, and came, The most successful transformations I've seen are ones that not only get dreads of transformation, whatever, the, know, that the tooling or the capabilities that you're bringing in, but it's sustainable into it to the point where people look back and said, well, that's just how we always did things.

What's the big deal?

To me, that's success, Right? Sanctuary. If people look back and say, hey, no, this is the way it was was, and always will be, you actually successfully transform.

So it's a matter of, in a finding what the right wedge in is.

Great insights. We have a very interesting question here, with, as you look forward to, there's, there is this perception that there's no back going back to normal. We have not had just had a disruption, we have had a dislocation, and then the dislocation you don't ever go back to normal. You're just kind of in the in the continent has drifted a little bit. So with that.

What do you see as the biggest threat to financial services in the next, in the return to this, new normal? Is it is a fintech, is it, Is it, you know, blockchain technology with bitcoins is it what do you see in the landscape that is keeping perhaps leadership teams, you know, on their toes? As they think about the future and viability of financial services, you know, across different organizations.

Do you want me to take a crack Sanjiv and then pass it back to do?

So, um, so I'm going to sort of step back and say make make a statement again from a colleague I really admire, um, who's who posited that no traditional strategy work is kind of dead. because the world is moving so fast.

The ability to do 3 to 5 year strategy, to establish modes, and that, you know, give you a protected space where you can pick up or ends on the asset you create for an extended period of time. That's gone.

It becomes the world is moving so fast. It's a game of exploiting.

you know, it's a game of exploiting trends, and so the financial services firms that are able to exploit trends extraordinarily fast and maximize the return from them are the ones that I think are going to succeed. And that ties to operational agility.

Because, if you think about a world that moves that fast, it becomes much more a game of capabilities in the firms that have the capabilities.

Not only to, you know, address a particular market trend, but to reassemble themselves rapidly, to explain the market trend, are going to be the winners, in that, in a particular game. So, again, I would tie it back to how do you construct yourself? How do you design yourself?

How do you give yourself capabilities that are easy to reassemble and and allow you to more of our firms like Amazon does Brilliantly absolutely brilliant.

How do you the risk of coining a phrase, you know, Amazon a phi financial services I think that therein lies the success.

But certainly I'm sure you've got always say. Yeah. I mean, Look. I think, you know, I think, I agree with some of the things that you said.

For me, I think, no, Ensuring, ensuring that we're focused on the customer, right?

We see sort of, with digital disruption, know, the firms that are the most, you know, that have the most understanding of their clients' journeys, those firms that are gearing and aligning their transformation efforts to support those client outcomes, I think you are going to succeed, because no matter how long you know, it may take you a little bit longer to get there. You may make a wrong turn along the way. But you've got your North Star, which is my customer. Their journey, their outcomes.

And if you're very focused on that, I think you're at least going in the right direction. And then, I think beyond that, what I'd like to see in financial services firms is just, you know, more moonshot projects, right? So, like, let's be a little less constrained in our ambition.

We know we have to deal with lots of daily demands, lots of regulatory demands, lots of other competing demands. But, you know, more moonshots that are directed at sort of improving those client outcomes, I think, is the way.

What a great message, directional guidance and organizational agility, which is really the heart of what you discuss with us today. Sanjiv, another one. In Sanjeev Agra, Wow. What a pleasure and what a gift to all of us to have leaders in. financial services with your track record and expertise. Share that, expertise with us. Thank you so much for sharing those insights and practical perspectives with our global audience today.

Thank you. Thank you. Just say it was a pleasure.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, want to great leaders in financial services, transformation leaders, innovation leaders, who understand the strategy, operations, and the theory, and the practices of transforming financial services at scale. So what A Gift for All of Us?

A wonderful way for kicking off our Beatles Financial Services Live conference, and I'm gonna wrap up this session, and at the top of the hour, I'm going to welcome another fantastic transformation leader. The director of transformation from Phi Serve, ..., ..., Bahri, is going to be with us. And the loop is nice to talk about, orchestrating change, key, insights on, driving successful, global, multi, cultural transformation initiatives. This is the whole enchilada, OK?

We're gonna see change as greatest level take into account a global audience take into account a multicultural perspective on implementing change, so you do not want to miss that. I'll see you all back at the top of the hour. Thank you.