The financial industry is rapidly evolving with the increasing adoption of cloud computing and artificial intelligence (AI), fundamentally transforming operations and customer interactions. Cloud computing offers flexibility, efficiency, and cost savings, while AI democratizes data access, making technology more intuitive and improving decision-making. Smaller banks, with their agility, can swiftly implement these innovations, gaining a competitive edge over larger institutions. Mike Stawchansky of Finastra discussed how they exemplify a balanced approach to regulatory compliance and technological agility, leveraging open finance and cloud-first strategies. Embracing these advancements is crucial for financial institutions to enhance operations, improve customer experiences, and stay competitive in the evolving landscape.
Macro Technology Trends And Their Adoption In The Financial Sector With Mike Stawchansky of Finastra
[David] Listeners, I would like to welcome Mike Stawchansky the podcast, he is from the Office of the CEO at Finastra as Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Mike is responsible for Finastra’s customer technology and innovation initiatives. He oversees the customer technology senior leadership team, championing operational excellence in this space. He also drives the company’s customer technology and generative AI innovation initiatives. Mike. So good to have you joining the podcast. Really appreciate you being here. And again, Welcome to Finastra. Exciting to have you join the team. Yeah. Let’s get a little bit of your background. Some of the things that you’ve done in the past, you have such a celebrated past and background and they’re so fortunate to pick you up. So on your background, how did you end up at Finastra?
[Mike] Oh boy, I’ve taken the long and curvy road to make it back into finance. I think every hero and every villain has a good origin story. I don’t know whether mine’s the hero or the villain side, but it was very early on. Like I was in college. I was actually working nights at a Casino in Central Florida, which is, it’s been renamed. I think it was the Seminole Indian casino back in the day when I worked there. It’s now a Hard Rock Casino. But I was working as a poker brush. Money everywhere. So I’m walking a gentleman to his table and he asked me, what do you do for a living? What are you going to do, kid? I’m like, I’m in college for computers. He goes, Oh wow, funny enough. I work in computers. I run it at one of those large unnamed credit bureaus in Central Florida that you can probably pick out which one. He said, why don’t you come work for me instead of working here. I’ll show you computers. This sounds great. This is awesome. I’m a freshman in college, mid-nineties. I think this is an awesome thing to do. By computer room, he means I’m going to be in a tape room from seven at night to seven in the morning, swapping those 200 Meg Nintendo cartridges. We call backups back in the day. It was a room of 80,000 of them. And I’m like, This is not computers. What are we talking about here? But I did that for a year decided I wasn’t going to finish my college degree went right into the into the market did all the different things of infrastructure ran through all different ways to do it, dumped into retail went into web design doing all those little different bits and ended up with a pretty long stint at Salesforce after that, like after about 10 or 15 years, somewhere along the lines, somebody made me the idea said, Hey, you should go into management. And I go, I like making decisions. I hate seeing people make wrong decisions management’s where it’s at, right? Yeah, that was a terrible idea because management should never make decisions. It should always be the technical people I had a very hard time making that transition, didn’t do it. Learn from some Really good people on how to do it, and then worked through it and so did a little spin at WebMD and went over to Salesforce and then did a hop about and then Simon Paris approached me around finance and I was like, man, coming back to where I started all the way back 25 years later and Simon really sold me on the open finance and then where he wants to go and his doing well by doing good.And like that.[David] I love that expression. Doing well by doing good. That is a phrase that so much is about the money and let’s do that. I said, I want to do well by making a lot of money. I don’t know. You get to the money. Money is a result, not the goal. and that’s a great statement. I want to highlight that. I love the fact that you’re a Trekkie too. you’re into the sci-fi. I love that part of your personality. I’m drawn to Trekkies. I don’t know what it is about y’all. But I really enjoy that community and they are committed to it.
[Mike] As long as you don’t hop in your X wing and then start comparing Star Wars to Star Trek with me, we’ll be all right. I am definitely one of those that I’m an equal opportunity offender on sci fi though. Star Trek was probably my first and only love when my father made me watch the original series, the 60 series. As I was growing up and I still have a soft spot in my heart for that and then jumping into next generation with him as I was in my high school years and I gotta drag him to that. He’s oh no, I ain’t watching that crap and now that’s one of his favorites.[David] It’s fascinating. I wonder if that’s why you got a Magna Cum Laude at Southern Polytech State University there, there’s some of the smartest people that run in that community. And I think they, draw a real Smart, intellectually open minded, willing to consider different things. And I love how they consider possibilities when you look at the various programs. But anyway, it’s great to have you here. I really want to get into it. First of all, again, welcome to Finastra. So blessed to be a part of that family for so many years on the advertising side, on the podcasting side of the business, but I’m really interested in getting into the rapid evolution of technology. You saw that certainly when you were at Salesforce, that is talk about an explosive growth and the significance that has had already, but I’m looking for key trends and transforming industries. When you see that happening globally, what comes to mind and how do you think we need to redefine the way we interact? In this ever more increasing digital world.
[Mike] I think the only thing that we can count on staying static is change in this world, how things are going, how it’s going to come at us from different directions. I’ve been doing this for 25 years, not quite as long as some of the folks that I’m sure are listening , there’s folks that have been out there doing it longer, but the only thing I’ve noticed is just as I’m starting to get comfortable with something, just I feel like I’ve got it down. Oh, here’s the next new thing. And that’s the interesting bit in finance and where we’re at right now, I’m seeing the trends that I saw seven, eight years ago, working for technology companies that were always on the bleeding edge, obviously finance and health are the two areas where people play it safe. Like you want to be 100 percent solid on something before it goes in your body and before it messes with your bank book, you got to make sure that technology is rock solid. A little conservative on that edge. But the containerization stuff that we’re doing now the virtualization stuff that was going on 15, 20 years ago that’s starting to peak in the finance world. It’s starting to come along We’re starting to see cloud computing picking up like that journey from where we virtualize these machines that we had, and then we took them, we broke them up into containers and then we decided we were going to stick them in somebody else’s computers, which is what the cloud is to somebody else’s space. And then we’re going to let AI do its business on all of this stuff. Like that journey has been happening and we’re seeing it in different phases across different retail markets and in various spaces. And it’s just right now it’s super exciting for me because AI coming in on the backside, like it’s overtaking all these other things are in flight, but AI sitting on top of it and it’s going to make use of all the other ones and it’s going to disrupt us like much like we saw cloud computing when Amazon came in, when Google came in 15,20 years ago and said, Hey, give us all your bits. Let’s run all your data up here. That was a huge change and people are just now starting to get super comfortable with it. I think we’re at that stage with AI right now.[David] Yeah, I think that we are. And it’s so exciting. What’s really interesting. We were talking and getting ready for our podcast. I had a chance to visit with you. So you gave a great story that I think is probably fitting. you were working with banks and you were explaining the concept of putting things in the cloud. And what did they say? Tell that story because I think it’s indicative how safe health care and finances are, and we’re not fast. This industry isn’t the fastest adopter, but we better not miss this next one. So share that story. If you would, I thought it was so poignant.
[Mike] Yeah, So I was working at Salesforce at the time and we were struggling. This was in the 2016, 2017 phase. This was a massive ramp up. When I joined, we were, I think, 13 or 14, 000 people. And when I exited just under eight years later, we were 80,000 plus people. So like rapid growth a couple of years into that, we had decided we’re not great at building data centers. We’re not funding it well enough, driving enough money into it. We just don’t have the expertise to build these data centers the way the Amazons, the Facebooks, the Googles of the world that are just rapidly scaling it and doing massive. But we’re a massive business. Everybody in the retail world is using Salesforce for the marketing and for their CRM. And so, we need to figure out how do we do this? At the time I was at the most rapidly growing marketing segment inside of Salesforce And they couldn’t keep up with how fast I wanted hardware coming in I was talking to the CTO and I said i’m going to take my portion of the business to the cloud and he looked at me. He said, I just came out of a meeting with a couple of big banks that you would recognize if you do banking in the US and you’re not using a local and if using a national rich, you would recognize these names. And he said, I think you’re right. We’re good. We’re gonna move 90 percent of the salesforce business up into the cloud. It’s gonna take us 10 years. It’s gonna be a long journey. But we’ll do it. And I said, okay. And he said, yeah, we’re gonna keep like 10 percent of Salesforce. We’re gonna keep it running here on premise. We’ll have a couple of data centers. We’ll do really well. But that’s where banking wants us to say they absolutely will not allow us to move their marketing and CRM data up into the cloud. Okay, cool. I go away for a couple of years. I’m working on that almost two years to the day. Training catches me in the hallway. He looks at me and he goes, Hey, I just got out of our yearly update. You’re not going to believe it. Cause the dude has a phenomenal memory. Like he probably remembered to the minute that we had this discussion and it made him chuckle inside.He comes to me and says, guess who I was talking to? I said, the bank. Sure. He goes yeah. Those two banks because guess what they said. They yelled at me for not having our stuff up in the cloud. . He finally goes, he said they’ve moved everything else to the cloud. They’re tired of paying the data egress, because that’s a huge cost. The hyperscalers are good. Once you get your stuff in there, that’s great, but if you wanna take it out, it cost a little bit of money. That’s a little more, yeah. Yeah. The banks were super upset that we weren’t already there, and I’m like, are you kidding me? He goes, yep. Yep. Start planning for them. But you know what? This is their marketing data. This is their CRM data. And he looked at me, he’s they’re never going to move the crown jewels. You’re not going to move the finance stuff. This was three or four years ago. I think we’re at that stage right now where banks are starting to realize, Why I’m getting all this value from running in somebody else’s space. I’m getting all this flexibility, I’m getting all this this hyper agility. Why would I not go this route? Why would I not? Yeah, exactly right. It’s amazing how quickly they call it the slingshot effect. They resist, resist, and then if they pull back on it and then one day they go why and let go in that now they want to be at the head of the line and it doesn’t always happen that quickly in the realm of cloud computing. How are financial institutions leveraging this technology to enhance their operations? Probably the biggest way they’re doing it is getting the expertise that the cloud can, that the hyperscalers have, any single one of the hyperscales.[David] actually explain hyperscalers for those that don’t know what that means. If you could expand just a little bit when you talk about hyperscalers and probably just bring a few of the non tech folks up on that.
[Mike] So the hyperscalers are the AWSs of the world. The Googles, the Azure. If you’re in China, the Alibabas, like all of those big cloud computing products that they run, they don’t run hundreds of people. They run thousands to tens of thousands of customers on them.[David] Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Good. So I wanted to get that clarification. Okay. Good. Go ahead. Finish your, are you making a point that on the question? I’m sorry. I wanted to get that.
[Mike] No, it’s no. Thank you. Again, please call me on all those. I use these, I use TLAs all the time and we have a T the three letter acronyms. We actually had at Salesforce, we had a bank of seven or 8,000 of them that we would point people to. It’s Hey, go, you can define your TLA over here. Yeah. But when you think about running a data center, it is a very bespoke, a very specialized set of skills, and it is very difficult to do. And you can have a team that does it for you and I would liken that to, if you have a person who is a car collector, a classic car collector. I own a 57 Chevy. I can maintain that thing better than anybody in the world. I can take you to the car shows. I can polish it up. I will keep it humming perfectly well. But are you going to come to me to fix 10, 15, 20 cars? I can do that one car way better than you.[David] Great point.
[Mike] But I can’t do I’m going to take it to the Ford shop to do this at scale. And that’s what you have to do with the hyperscalers and with computing. They have the experts that they have stubbed their toe, smashed their finger with a hammer, done it a thousand times before I wake up for breakfast. And they don’t run into those problems. Now, granted the scale problem like that means they’re also not going to be, the best fit for everyone. But they do many things better than I could at a better scale at a higher availability. So the big thing that they do for me is scale, agility, and DR. Like they’re really good at running two sites hot, always on. There’s always a backup and they have a hundred customers using that backup. So it’s not just me if it’s me, I’m going to build everything times two. And I’m going to spend everything times two, the cloud version. They’re going to sell me one slice of that times two. They’re going to give me one, one hundredth of that cost efficiency standpoint. It’s just you can’t afford to try to have your own data centers. It just makes so much sense. And the security has really gotten to the point where, that has been addressed, but that still remains as a haunting item out there for so many. It absolutely can be. Physical security is one thing. It’s hard to gracefully let go of it. I, this is my room. I know the five people that can get into it. I know where the sets of keys are. I get it. But then again, if you look at the hyperscalers data centers, they’ve got some technology that puts US three letter agencies that shall not be named to shame. Like they have some serious security. I’ve taken those tours where they walk you in and you really have to go. Get all kinds of Background checks and you have blinders when you walk through certain rooms and then you step into these really cool spaces it’s like They weigh you as you come in and they weigh you as you go out so that they can tell whether you’ve If you carried a usb drive, they’ll know whether you brought one in or brought one out wow things like silly little things like that you would never think to do when you Have your own data center. They go to the nth degree and That’s the physical stuff, the digital things, the digital security that they had out there. Quite honestly, they’ve seen all the attack vectors. They have seen all of these. They’re fending them off day in and day out. So even though you’re giving up a little bit of trust you’re putting it over to them. It’s just the scale and scope at which they’ve seen the security at which they do this for the living. Are you going to rent local security? Would you rather have the US army?[David] Yeah, that’s right. So it raised some really good points and why that is and I think more and more people are getting comfortable with the cloud computing. There’s some holdout still, certainly those of us in the financial world have concerns about that because of the lawsuits that have happened. Some of the data security can be well founded and they’re well founded. Yeah. One of the things that we’re seeing, Mike, that is taking over everyone’s attention and we’re all playing with it to some degree. I’ve got a chat GPT open window, but I’ve got a Gemini window, but I’m running things through there constantly. Where do you see this whole AI revolution? going, what are the various sectors that will be impacted? And in your opinion, what is AI really going to do for us, especially in the financial services area?
[Mike] So I’m going to go back to the Star Trek analogy that you talked about. This came up in our prior discussion. I really think AI is going to deliver on the promise that we saw in Star Trek where Scotty sits down in front of his computer, he’s looking at it and he just starts speaking to it. And all of us Trekkies who grew up with that we understand that’s how you interact with the computer in the future. You just speak to it. You tell it a thing and it does a thing for you. It goes back and forth. Scotty sits down and he’s flabbergasted that he has to use a keyboard and mouse and he’s actually taking that mouse and plugging it on the screen and slapping it around. It’s just this is so antiquated. That was 40 years ago. But that’s really where we’re going, like the ability for anyone not techies, not me, who’s been doing this since I was five or six years old. And I’ve just grown up with computers in my hands. Our kids who were basically born with a phone in their hand, like that ability to interact with the computer in natural language in a way that it understands you, that you can ask it questions and it not just respond in rote. That’s where the differentiators coming. I think we’ve all dealt with the. infuriating phone systems that you choose. Tell me number one and I’ll give you to this. Tell me number two. And you say a thing and it doesn’t understand you. It doesn’t. Those were so early on, like all it was a bank of, it had questions and it had answers and it could only pick between those two. What’s happening with generative AI is you give it all the data, you give it all the information and it’s able to piece together the language that you’re giving it and say, I think you want this. And with a reasonably high degree of predictability, give you a response that it sure needs. And that’s where it’s the differentiators between chat GPT three, five and four Oh and four zero that we’re now seeing, like it’s how confident they’re getting with the data that they have without having to be very explicitly told where to go and it’s getting better and better. It’s to the point now where I believe you can go and ask it a question where using, I’ll take this skill that I’ve had probably for the last 20 years, that’s differentiated me. I’m a fast Googler. Google is the verb now. Like you say, I’m going to go search for something. I’m really good at defining the syntax on how to search out that information and pull it out. That is a skill that I think everybody’s going to need with AI coming in the future. But it opens it up, pulling us back to open finance. It’s opening it up for everybody. It’s opening up for my wife, for my daughter, for my brother who could care less about interacting with computers on a technical basis. But they can go ask a question of the AI and say, can you tell me how to do this? And it will say, I think this is how you should do it. And then you ask another question. It’s a conversation. It’s a back and forth. There’s all kinds of potential for issues we need to look in their ethical and there’s all those challenges, but the thing that really excites me about it is just opening it up, democratizing access to that data, making it easy for people who might not necessarily know how to look for it.[David] It’s really interesting. I had dinner last night here in Austin with CEO of ELO GPT. They’re having to rebrand it as ELO. And it is really a large language model, AI technology company that’s searching out. And one of the things that we’re adding to our podcast right now is the ability to search virtually all of the podcasts we’ve ever done and be able to search out topics or specific things. And he was explaining, I said, like, when you go to search out secondary markets, he says, if it doesn’t understand a word, it’s going to go. It knows it relates to broader worlds. So it starts here. Then it goes out to a larger data set, and then it starts looking for other words. And so the ability to, and I’m sure I’m explaining this right, but it’s fascinating how. Yeah. It’s a getting smarter, being able to bring and deliver an answer. And the fact that we can do that now, verbally, we’ve gotten so used to that with Siri and all the ways we’ve speak to our computers. I get impatient when I have to, I have this one key I hit on my keyboard. I want to talk to my computer. I don’t want to have to type it. I have to go back and cracked because I use too many words when I talk. So, I’m learning how to be more efficient. And when they keep adding, But it’s really fascinating what you’re saying especially when you look at the competitive landscape. And I think those that are going to have the ability to jump ahead are those that are going to get a, get on board with the fact that especially baby birds, give them the ability to speak to their computer. And have it be able to understand complexity. If it doesn’t get this, it can go like my new searching on my website will be more soon to release. It could go out and find the answer and get it reasonably accurate. So how do you see large banks integrating these technologies advancement to maintain their competitive place in the market? And how does this change the world, the banking, especially knowing how slow they have been, you gave a great example of the data center, then why are we not that we’d never go on it? And then why are we not? What about this whole topic of AI? Are we going to see banks getting on board more quickly?
[Mike] I don’t know that we’re going to see them getting on board more quickly. Everybody’s wanting to do it. Everybody’s wanting to go that route. I do believe that they’re going to get a little bit of that fear of being left behind that FOMO Yeah they’re definitely going to feel that. And they’re going to say I see everybody using it. And why can’t we use AI? There’s that internal thought process around, how do I actually make this AI useful? Because most of the language models that are out there are trained on publicly available data. Like it goes out to the entirety of the web, pulls it all back and has this giant data bank. The process that you were talking about by which they, the secondary searches that’s a really cool term that I learned not too long ago. My the data scientists out there educated me. Mike, you got to quit talking about the AI. Because I branded and do that. He’s I gotta be specific. He says, when you go to talk about how the large language model has been enhanced, you take a rag to it, like rag. What do you, when you’re talking about retrieval, augmented generation, that’s the augmented generation. Interesting. Yeah. So you take that large language model and you polish it with a rag. That’s how my brain keeps it in track, but you polish that up and you build a model that’s specific to your data, to your customers. That’s only accessible to you. So you have this large model that one of the big boys provides you when you have the chat GPTs or the Gemini’s or the others, and then you build your own model inside on your data that never leaves your cloud or your data center But it gives that main model. Calls out to that secondary model and says, this is where I think we’re going. Are you sure? And it calls that secondary model. My secondary model understands all, yeah, I’ve got all these loans. I have all these customers that are maybe in the Southeast and they’re all impacted by higher rates because of X, Y, or Z. You can enhance that data that comes. Yeah. You just pile it all on and it stacks up and it gets better and better. I believe I will see banks going in that way, but it’s because. Rightfully so they’re being very careful. This is customer data. This is your financials. They’re going to step very carefully as they go through this. So it’s going to take a little bit to get there, but they’re not going to want to miss out on the benefits of some of this stuff. It’s just it’s so compelling. You can things that same things that might take somebody four or five, six hours to the standard operating process. If you do AI in the right way, you take a 10, 15 minutes. Everybody’s going to want those efficiencies.[David] I remember that this is applicable because remember they said, why do you rob banks? He said that’s because we’re all the money is. Why do you go after the big banks? If you’re a litigator, that’s because we’re the big money is, but let’s shift the focus to some of the smaller community banks who are adopting these technology trends. they actually have an advantage over some of the bigger banks because they’re not as big of a target for the plaintiff bar, that part of the legal system that is out seeking big damages and so they’re going to go after the big guys, which I can understand they might be a little more cautious, but is there more of an increasing advantage and opportunity? In spite of the challenges for some of the smaller entities institutions.
[Mike] 100%, I think there is. And somebody highlighted this for me years ago, back before I got into finance again, I was working with Jonas must’ve been 15 years ago now, and I watched him deposit his paycheck with his phone. This is like one of the first iPhones, like iPhone three or four. So way back in the day, I was like. Holy crap. You can do that and he was like yeah. And I asked him why. And he’s yeah, my local credit union has this app. It’s pretty phenomenal. It was it’s a credit union. You’d probably know like they’re a little bigger, but smallish. They were not one of the big, large national retailers. And mine didn’t have into three or four years before my bank got around to it. And I can see that’s what happened. Yeah, they had an easy way. But now that’s technology. Everybody has you if you can’t deposit your check via mobile, perhaps going on here. I think we’re going to get to that route. The smaller banks have the ability of picking up the agility, trying things out the commoditization that happens. You’re we’re driving this via like open banking and open AI. And an open API is to be able to access this stuff. It’s much easier for you to pick off a small piece that a community bank will want to use and say, I’m going to embed that in my website. I’m going to take it. I’m going to use that when you’re a big bank, you’ve got 50 other things you’ve got to rewrite to get around it, but you have the agility at the smaller banks. You can pick up this piece. I want to offer it as a value add and quite frankly you don’t have to go through all the layers of bureaucracy. It’s That is such a good point. Yeah, on a website, you can just sign it. You can swipe your credit card. You can pay a few hundred dollars a year and get this thing that I can embed and use. Whereas when you’re a big bank, okay, I got to deal with it for 4,000 sites. And I’ve got to employ, I got to do it all this and all these other things. I don’t even so much think the compliance risk is there. I think that’s one thing that they’re going to avoid, but it’s just, you have a much smaller decision chain at the community banks, you get a group of four or five people together and say, this is the right way to go and we’re going to do it rather than a 400-person committee to make the technology decision.[David] I’m thinking of one of our active listeners and a recent client is Carol Barton over at Security State Bank and Trust. And she’s chuckling about this because they’re being so nimble. Dan, who’s the president of the bank and they get to gather what they need to do. And they make decisions quickly. That’s not to say they’re making them carelessly quick. Does not need necessarily being careless. And I think that’s going to be really interesting as we look forward into that. So Carol, I know you’re listening to this podcast and giving you a shout out and that’s one of the advantages I think the smaller banks have and it’s really a great point. We talked about large financial institutions. Finastra is the largest fintech company in the world, and I’m looking, there’s got to be a certain level struggle like you working. We’re talking about the big banks versus the smaller banks being agile and be able to form this, but obviously Finastra is really stayed ahead of the game. They’re number one and they’re staying there and they’re bringing in guys like you, Mike. To really continue to advance why should someone consider Finastra given their size and some would say, are they as agile as we need them to be? Why would you say someone should consider Finastra?
[Mike] So first of all, I’ll throw the safe Harbor out there. I always get that out before I say anything about forward looking statements, but like speaking about Finastra, like I think we’re in that sweet spot of where big enough. To understand the regulatory compliance issues that you run into the dangers that there be like there’d be dragons over there. We understand them, but we’re also not so big that we can’t move nimbly. We can’t move too fast. We’re putting together and that’s just been open banking for a long time. We’ve been open finance. That’s our driver backing that up with actual technology, being an API led company at cloud first company. That’s customer centric. When we listen to our customers, we’re hearing what they’re saying, but actually putting that out there in an API that they can call, whether it’s a regional bank or whether it’s a large bank. We can do that. We can offer that same level of service to everybody through an API like that commoditization of technology and making it open accessible, whether it’s to a very small fintech that’s just starting up that wants to use us to gather. They want the security of running through our platform that has been through all the audits and all the fun jazz. Like we’re, I would say we’re that sweet spot of a teenager. That’s just moving out of their parents’ house. That knows all the play but we’ve lived on our own for a while, but we’re still fast enough that we’re not quite going to get caught by the person chasing us down the street. That’s we’re in that nice, sweet spot.[David] I love the innovation that I seen coming out of financial. And I also am encouraged by your hire there because. Your background is just going to bring so much more depth and agility to that company. And I’m it’s a great company and I’m looking forward to hearing more. Mike, what a joy to have you on the podcast and I have enjoyed this interview. I joy again, I don’t know if it’s your Trekkie background, but it’s just something I connect with people so well on that and it’s, it really came through in this interview. Thank you so much.
[Mike] Thanks for having me, David. It’s been fun talking to you. As you can tell, I love to just run my mouth. So, I look forward to come to talk to you again.[David] There are people that run their mouth, but then there’s people that you, whether they talk, you go, you sit forward and anticipate every word. They said, “I want to go back to something, what you said at the beginning, it says doing well by doing good. I wish you well there. You’re doing good with the way you’re coming on the podcast and talking about this. This is really good for finance. It’s good for our listeners to hear about it. I want to have you back, Mike, would you agree to come on back and give us a report and some of the things that are developing and how it’s going?
[Mike] I wouldn’t be much good if I couldn’t come tell you what’s going to happen and then actually deliver on it. So I, that’s my big thing. I want to deliver on what I’m talking about. So I’d love to come back and tell you about it.[David] I love it. We’d love to afford to have you back, Mike. Thanks so much. Have a great day. And again, congratulations on a new career at Finastra. I’m really looking forward to seeing what happens as a result of your contribution there. Thank you, sir.
[Mike] Thank you, David.Important Links
Working in the Office of the CEO at Finastra as Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Mike is responsible for Finastra’s customer technology and innovation initiatives. He oversees the customer technology senior leadership team, championing operational excellence in this space. He also drives the company’s customer technology and generative AI (Gen AI) innovation initiatives.
He has over 25 years of experience in building modern technology stacks and cloud transformation. In particular, he is passionate about Gen AI and the innovative potential it holds for the financial services industry. At Finastra he is building on the success of the company’s comprehensive internal learning program to bring external, customer-facing solutions to market which encapsulate Gen AI benefits.
Mike previously worked at Collibra, a privately held Data Intelligence platform, where he was SVP of Platform and Production Engineering. Prior to Collibra he spent nearly eight years at Salesforce where he held various roles facilitating Public Cloud transformations for Pardot, Sales Cloud, and finally at MuleSoft as VP of Systems Engineering. Before his time at Salesforce, Mike managed multiple datacenter migrations and virtualization efforts at WebMD.
Mike has a B.S. in Information Technology, Magna Cum Laude, from Southern Polytechnic State University, Marietta GA.
Born and raised in Florida, Mike currently splits his time between Lakeland, Florida and Atlanta, Georgia. An avid sci-fi reader, he lives with his wife and their two cats, and together they enjoy road-tripping, theme parks and movies.