The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network

Everybody's talking about generative AI and ChatGPT… but few are doing so with the clear-eyed intelligence and honesty of Sandra Loughlin, EPAM's Chief Learning Scientist, and Alexandra Diening, our Head of Research & Insights for EMEA. In this episode of *Silo Busting,* our conversationalists think about how to optimize this new tech and the unique environment it is creating. Loughlin says that, regarding ChatGPT, there are "people out there who wish they could turn back the clock and just bury their heads in the sand and pretend that doesn't exist. But generative AI is here, and we need to find ways to live with it and… benefit from it." She approaches the subject, she says, from three perspectives—from that of her clients, from her practice as a consultant, and as a learning scientist thinking broadly about education. Diening addresses the hype, and compares it to the speculation surrounding, say, crypto and NFTs, saying of the former: ChatGPT is already delivering tangible value. Loughlin says she was recently asked to write an article for publication, entered a query into ChatGPT, "and within, you know, 30 seconds it had come out with a full article." She found the draft wanting, of course, and then dove into editing. Diening notes that the software's output "lacks the nuance of critical and ethical thinking," which means that people are still very much necessary, no matter how hot the hype. She adds that this might lead to a labor market shift. "I always talk about the death of generalists when it comes to generative AI." ChatGPT could take care of the dull and repetitive work that any general practitioner can do and allow specialists to shine. Could this be a force in the return to craft? Perhaps. Of course, they both worry about generative AI feeding on polluted data sets. Loughlin says that ChatGPT might, like social media, creating echo chambers “for things that are not true but are very attractive for a lot of people.” But that’s not the only issue. Diening notes that becoming a specialist requires one to experience the "tedious task of aggregating data" and that, traditionally, one must "go through a certain amount of dull work"—like drafting and redrafting one's words, unassisted—to "sharpen yourself as a specialist." She reminds us that ChatGPT is a tool, comparing it to a calculator, saying that it "doesn't take the job away from mathematicians" but helps them crunch their complex numbers. The smart way is to look to partner with this technology rather than rival it. And that tool, Loughlin says, will ultimately be beneficial for consultants because it will optimize their work. "It's a tool… to help us shape our offerings, get more precise, and create, frankly, more value for our customers." Curious how it might help *your* customers? Tune in! Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Now is an odd time to be a Chief Digital Officer at a financial services organization. The Fed is fighting inflation while watching unemployment numbers. Consumer spending is in flux. Banks are still—still!—trying to figure out their budgets. With all this going on, how’s a CDO going to proceed with a big digital transformation project? That’s exactly the topic Alex Jimenez, Managing Principal, Financial Services Consulting at EPAM, is covering with our guest, Tom Novak, VP/CDO of Visions Federal Credit Union, on *Silo Busting.* On the latest #TakeItToTheBank dialogue, Novak is all about adhering to his central principles. “If we stick to our digital transformation objectives, this whole play of humanizing digital as we look to scale our business, there will be short-, medium- and long-term benefits to doing that, and [they] will help us navigate some of these headwinds that are happening from a macroeconomic perspective.” Jimenez notes the irony that some firms are suddenly shifting away from their digital transformation efforts to focus on creating efficiencies. “It's funny to hear some organizations that say, 'We're gonna stop doing digital transformation because we gotta be more efficient.'” The two ideas should have been part of the conversation together all along. Novak says his org will “continue to invest in digital transformation efforts and leveraging the data and insights that we get from those” because that's how “we can really propel ourselves out of the doldrums of this, let's call it a mild recession.” The conversion is centrally about cost optimization in the present and preparing for growth going forward. The insights gained from the digital transformation work, Novak says, will provide “a lot of our insights to move the business forward in the future.” Novak and Jimenez also tackle Visions' venture into crypto wallets, the importance of getting business intelligence in order, of digital account openings, and of AI and ML and personalization. Yes, people are opening more digital accounts but, says Novak: “We’re still missing out on how we can form a real relationship with that member as opposed to more of a transactional relationship.” Episode 53 is what it sounds like when two financial services pros who have, in fact, a real relationship, speak honestly and well about our current moment. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

It’s time for your authentication journey! Mandeep Khera, the Chief Marketing Officer at SecureAuth, is our guide in this #SecurityByDesign episode of *Silo Busting.* And Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP, is of course on hand to pepper Khera with questions about the fascinating concept of passwordless. Khera begins with a little history—we move from plain text passwords to hashing to one-time passwords to multi-factor authentication, biometrics, and behavioral—and then concludes: “But guess what, passwords are still around and it doesn't make any sense.” The role of passwordless, Khera says, is to “clear all the friction for users and provide a lot more security.” It isn’t, of course, that simple. “A lot of people are claiming [that they are using] passwordless, but it's not quite there yet,” says Khera. The reason—the real reason—we need to evolve to a real passwordless system, Khera says, is that roughly 80% of today’s cyberattacks happen because of credentials. Together Khera and Rehman talk about identifying ourselves via our phones and physicality and the annoying friction created by passwords (“Let's just get rid of all the passwords. Let's get rid of all the friction. We just have everything we need”). The pair zero in on the idea that behavioral monitoring and analytics might provide an answer. “I kind of know what you like to talk about,” says Rehman. “If all the sudden you start talking to me about, you know, Amber Heard… I’d be like: Is this Mandeep?” It’s a fantastic conversation about how our computing future might operate. To hear it, you need only intone the famed cinematic shibboleth *Klaatu barada nikto.* Just kidding. You need only click Play. Happy listening! Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

May we borrow your attention for a few minutes? If you have a vested interest in commercial, residential, business, and/or personal lending, pull up a chair to hear what Chris Karageuzian, CEO & Co-Founder at Help With My Loan, and Alex Jimenez, Managing Principal, Financial Services Consulting at EPAM, are saying on our latest #TakeItToTheBank conversation. The economy is getting softer but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad time for loans. According to Jimenez, some players are saying “This is actually a good time if you have the discipline” and “if you have the right team.” Karageuzian and Jimenez talk about how automation is changing the way front-end underwriting works today and will work tomorrow. In a time when rates and guidelines are in rapid flux, and some banks that have been in business for 30-40 years are shutting down, automation can be an important strategic advantage. “Our production is going up because a lot of people need to automate,” says Karageuzian. “They wanna move faster, they need to be able to handle the remote work.” It’s a complicated moment for banks. Karageuzian says that there's an “overflow of deals at certain banks that are staying in the market, but they need technology because they don't have the staff.” Listen as these two loan-minded interlocutors talk about FinTechs and VCs, the pandemic’s effect on commercial lending, and how salespeople can be, as Karageuzian puts it, “augmenting their talent with technology.” So lend your ear to this episode to get a better—a much better—understanding of the tech-enabled lending game. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

The cloud may have made business more flexible, but it has made security *complicated.* According to Jay Parikh, CEO at Lacework and our guest on this #CybersecurityByDesign conversation, the cloud model “introduces a whole new set of risks that I think the industry, we all, are really trying to put our arms around.” Parikh and Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP his conversational companion, try to figure out how to stretch the arms of cybersecurity to provide an adequate defensive posture. Part of the answer is starting early. “Ideally you understand risks in your environment before they show up in production and before they impact the business,” says Parikh. “But if there are risks that do creep through into production that you're able to find and remediate them as soon as possible.” Parikh says it’s important to rethink the way security is done “so that it's part of this move fast, this builder kind of mentality that is there in the cloud.” You need people who can build security naturally into the development process. Talent is an issue—a big one—here. “We need more builders in security,” says Rehman. “Constantly just throwing people at it is just not gonna solve it.” Parikh agrees, adding that security “has to be something that is there and it's part of the build process. It's not an after-the-build process.” Which means, of course, that you need the kind of people with the skills about capabilities for being a builder. “Finding builders, finding security expertise, is very hard these days,” says Parikh. “The demand just continues to far outstrip the supply of the talent out there.” And you do manage to bring them on board, you need to provide them with engaging work. “You don't want them to be doing repetitive, mundane things because they're not gonna be happy. Then you have a retention problem.” Listen to this episode. It’s so relevant and timely and thoughtful that retention won’t be a problem. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

“When I meet with executives at banks, every single one of them tells me that they compete by how customer-centric” they are, says Alex Jimenez, Managing Principal, Financial Services Consulting at EPAM. “They can't really verbalize what that means.” By contrast, Frank Sorrentino, Chairman and CEO of ConnectOne Bank, our guest on this #TakeItToTheBank conversation, is quite articulate indeed. Listen as Sorrentino and Jimenez journey into the heart of customer-centric banking. “When we have a meeting with clients, it's not about what products and services that we have,” says Sorrentino. “It's trying to understand ‘What are they trying to do?’ before we even talk about any particular product or service.” This kind of customer understanding will be crucial in the upcoming year. Until recently, Sorrentino, says the economy was like a “small town, Little League where everybody gets a trophy…. everybody does well and everybody's rewarded and every decision you make happens to be the right one.” He adds: “We're now moving into an economy where I believe discipline is gonna matter. Intelligent choices are gonna matter. And I think there will be winners and losers.” They go on to discuss important subjects such as the impact of digital technology and humanizing the digital experience, the role of the branch, how companies can optimize their activities in an uncertain economy, and more. This episode, it must be added, features only winners. Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Insurance and cybersecurity have a lot in common. They are both highly relevant and profoundly misunderstood and need spokespeople who can explain—clearly—how they function. Fortunately, we have two people on this #CybersecurityByDesign episode of *Silo Busting* who understand the worlds very well: Lynn Rivenburgh, VP of Business Consulting at EPAM, and Sam Rehman, EPAM’s Chief Information Security Officer and SVP. “Cyber and insurance are always the same in the sense that people don't care about [them] until something bad happens,” says Rehman. It’s a tricky time for the insurance industry, says Rivenburgh. Rates have increased significantly. “For the top 25% of companies out there, it's been an increase of more than 80% and that's happening regardless of the industry that those companies are in or the size of the organization,” says Rivenburgh. She says that in order to mitigate risk, companies are “putting in place some parameters and preventive measures that if the companies, if their clients don't abide by those, they're going to see premiums in excess of 300%.” But that’s not the only challenge insurers face. There are escalating ransomware attacks and the potential of a recession. Insurance has a lot to protect—and they’re not alone. “We're all relying heavily on digital much more than before, which is great,” says Rehman, adding: “The side effect is that we have a much wider attack surface now.” Rivenburgh says when the insurance industry wrote its initial policies 20 years ago, they weren’t “anticipating some of the activities that we're seeing today.” Soon, she says, “There are gonna be some new regulations, in particular in the EU and UK,” and “companies will be obliged to have independent third-party assessments and infrastructure assessments obtained.” Together they discuss this complex moment, in which insurers are moving toward a more optimized mode and adopting a more conservative outlook on growth, how legislation and regulation will help assess where risk is, and the challenges regarding insurance’s talent pool. Much is said about how partnerships can help companies lower their risk profiles. Rehman says: “Partnership is so important because no one single company can really cover” the multiple aspects of cybersecurity and notes that we’re seeing more cyber-savvy boards. The key is “a defensive culture around security.” If that is a central part of your culture, he says, “then everything else would tend to fall in place.” Want to understand more about the area where insurance and cyber overlap? Listening to *Silo Busting* is the best policy. Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

So what’s in your mobile wallet? Questions around digital payments are on the minds of our two guests on this #TakeItToTheBank episode of *Silo Busting.* Chase Petrey, COO of Pi, and Alex Jimenez, Managing Principal, Financial Services Consulting at EPAM, talk—with great gusto—about real-time payments, data complexity and scale, the evolution of fraud risk monitoring, embedded finance, “fast fraud,” and bias in AI and machine learning. The digital payment world has a fascinating history, one in which India has led the way. The US built a lot of the foundational infrastructure in the 60s and 70s and, according to Petrey: “We're still using those systems today because there's so much process built around those systems that, you know doing a rip and replace is just untenable.” But when it comes to digital payment innovation, he says, some booming BRIC economies are “really able to leapfrog the United States,” because they get to work on a “blue sky blank canvas with the luxury of current-day technology.” Digital payments, our interlocutors note, require an enormous amount of computing power, even for something as straightforward as mobile check deposits. “The computing power to maintain all those aggregations at every customer level is *insane,*” says Petrey. “It's not just averages across the whole business, but it's averages at the individual member or customer level being computed in that moment.” If you want to hear some fascinating about talk about financial services risk management and bringing what Petrey calls “the right friction to the right person,” then you’ve in the appropriate place. There is, in fact, nothing average about this conversation. And the transaction costs for listening? Zero! Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Loyalty: It ain’t what it used to be. The customers of 2022 are much (much, much) more demanding than customers used to be. Not only that, when their high expectations aren’t met, they’ll let the world know all about it, which can quickly degrade a brand. Which is why Pierre Kremer, Senior Director, Retail & CPG, Digital Engagement Practice EMEA at EPAM, and Chris Hosmer, our Managing Principal, Experience Consulting, are here—to parse what customer loyalty means *right now.* Kremer says that customers don’t just want to accumulate points—though there is still interest here—but that they say: “I wanna be part of something. I wanna be part of your brand. I wanna join the community.” But the nature community itself has changed in our digital age. Hosmer notes that Starbucks' just-launched Odyssey Program is “an extension of their Starbucks Rewards” as well as “the first notable example of Web3 and NFT being integrated with the loyalty program of this size and scale.” The guys make all kinds of good points: about measuring—*really* measuring—emotional loyalty, the duality of loyalty (experience-based vs score-keeping), airline miles, the peculiar loyalties of cult brands, and more. And, as a bonus, they’ve included a tantalizing thought experiment into their dialogue. Got your own favorite loyalty program? Join Kremer and Hosmer and ask yourself: *How would that brand do if you removed the loyalty program?* Tune in to discover their answers on the latest episode of Silo Busting. It’s a conversation that remains loyal to our usual high standards. Listen! Host: Kenji Ross Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon

Home, they used to say, is where the heart is. Now it’s also where people do an enormous amount of shopping. We learned all about this in the most recent installment of our *Consumers Unmasked* report, and our experts—Jen Jones, the Chief Marketing Officer at commercetools, and Mario Crippa, Head of the Physical Experience Practice EMEA at EPAM Continuum—employ these insights to fuel an animated conversation with *Resonance Test* producer Ken Gordon. The group talks about a number of relevant issues including how small local retailers are transitioning in the post-pandemic world. “Many local retailers built strong relationships with their customers and their communities throughout the pandemic,” says Jones adding that they must be sure to “build on that and extend that relationship into our post-pandemic world” because “We all know that consumers have very short memories.” This is seconded by Crippa, who says that after the pandemic, “We all need a little a little bit of human touch, some human contact,” and that small local business are well-positioned to reach out. They definitely have the ability “to come up with better propositions or sharper positions,” to “show off their values, what they believe in.” As an example, Jones talks about a local restaurant that sold curbside family pickup meals during the pandemic: ”They've sort of shifted that to a pick-up-on-your-way-home-from-work [offering] and have a nicely prepared meal with instructions.” Jones and Crippa think through the falling value of being able to physically view products. Crippa says “the entire way to create desire has changed,” with the advent of product drops and the continuous digital campaigns consumers encounter. “People just click ‘buy.’ They feel like they're missing out, so they buy. They buy immediately.” Jones suggests that smart online retailers employ a combination of “emerging technologies, which are continuing to improve and evolve, plus great customer service” and that together this “can basically eliminate the need to see something in person.” The conversation also looks at how Amazon—“one of the very few companies that is basically a bank of consumers desires,” Crippa says—has been approaching home shopping (“They're testing, testing, testing to see what sticks and then rolling it out to a bigger market,” says Jones). They even touch on gaming. Says Jones: “people are leaving their houses again doing other things like concerts and travel; that would take you away from being at home gaming.” So many insights, at no cost to you! Bring them into your home. Just hit “play.” Host: Alison Kotin Engineer: Kyp Pilalas Producer: Ken Gordon