[MUSIC PLAYING]
PIP WHITE: Hi, everyone.
And welcome to this virtual Fireside Chat
with Google Cloud.
I'm Pip White, managing director of UK and Ireland
for Google Cloud.
And I'm really excited to be speaking today
with Gareth Richardson.
He's the COO from our customer and partner, Thought Machine.
So Gareth, tell me, who are Thought Machine?
And what are you looking after there?
GARETH RICHARDSON: Thanks, Pip.
Thank you for inviting me to take part
in this Fireside Chat.
It's really good.
Thought Machine was founded to build
a cloud-native core banking system.
Most people don't really know what core banking is.
It's unknown to them.
But really, it's the heart of the bank.
It's what holds the record of you, the customer,
and how much money you have in your bank.
And then we also are a product engine.
So we keep a track of how your products are running.
And by products, we mean a mortgage or a credit card.
So we're really the heart of how a bank logs and knows
what's going on inside itself.
In terms of what I do at Thought Machine,
I'm a COO, but not necessarily the most traditional one.
And I don't really run the operation as such.
What I run in Thought Machine is all the client projects
that we have with our customers, all of our customer banks.
I'm responsible for all of those, and then
also responsible for the partnerships
that we have with the technology vendors that make up the team
sport that is core banking.
PIP WHITE: Very busy then.
[LAUGHING]
It'd be great to have a bit more detail about what role
we're playing at Though Machine.
GARETH RICHARDSON: Absolutely.
So Google-- on multiple facets, really, we
work with you with customers.
And you are enabler of our technology
to be deployed in our customer environment.
So we quite often--
a lot of our-- the vast majority of our customers
are running on Google Cloud.
We're running in public cloud with our own instance.
And we deploy or they deploy our technology inside their estate
in--
that's bought from Google.
But we use all open source technologies.
But we rely on things like Google Kubernetes Engine.
We rely on Stack Driver.
We rely on the ecosystem of cloud-native software
that we get from you guys that our banks can then install,
manage, and run and maintain.
We also-- even inside the company,
we run a chunk of our development service
on Google Cloud.
We are-- run all of our Meet stuff
and all of our email and our business applications,
if you like-- all run on Google Apps.
And so we're both sides of it and use Chromebooks
as our way of limiting people's access to software and code
and things like that.
So it's quite embedded through different parts
of our operating system.
PIP WHITE: And what would you say
are the most impressive benefits that you've seen
or you're seeing by adding Google
Cloud as one of your cloud providers, as you say?
GARETH RICHARDSON: If I take it a different way,
having Google as a partner with our customers somewhat--
the benefits have been many-fold.
But we have ways of working.
We have a culture that we bring to our projects.
And for financial services, Cloud
is a people and a skill problem for them
to step towards those areas and a cultural problem of how they
manage these programs, how they run in an agile way,
but in a massively scalable architecture with controls,
with everything else.
And Google's been a huge help in bringing some of that culture
to bear, some of the tools and procedures
and the working practices that just bring to life how
they should be working.
We work very closely on one of our largest customers,
Lloyds, on how we can both work on building a culture that
actually enables agile change at scale,
enables an engineering mindset to be brought into the product.
So we bring a product journey there.
So Google's technology and--
is critical in the middle of that.
And it wouldn't been selected otherwise.
And it's been selected by Lloyds for that.
But it's also the other pieces that Google's
brought to bear around that-- brought to bear the ability
to think through different problems for the bank
and come up with innovative solutions.
Some of the--
I know in the past, they have been
great at solutioning some of the potential challenges that
are there and coming up with tools usage that has really
unlocked a chunk of opportunity that our banks really
wouldn't have come to envisage without it.
PIP WHITE: And you talked a bit about partnership there
and, obviously, the strategic partnership between ourselves
at Google Cloud and Thought Machine.
How do you think that's going to support your growth ambitions?
GARETH RICHARDSON: Our goal is to build
a cloud-native core banking system that unlocks banks
from legacy technology, which is relatively easy to say.
But the unlocking legacy technology
means huge amounts of migration, means huge changes
from this technology that's been there 70, 80 years.
And in some cases, just to talk about the complexity of this
slightly, if you take a bank in Japan,
a mortgage is a multigenerational mortgage.
It runs for 90 years.
And it can be passed on to your son and to your daughter
as you pass.
And they have to take on the obligations
that you've signed up-- sounds great in some ways
if you're being a bit vindictive.
But that complexity means that these products
been running since the 1940s.
They are still live today and have to be supported.
But there's financial innovation every generation.
Every 10 years, someone comes up with a new way
of doing something.
And they stay around.
They still support it.
And you end up with a proliferation
of really complicated products.
And for us to do those migrations safely--
these mainframes have not been turned off in 40 years.
They're still running because they
do a great job at what they do.
But they're not working in this new digital phase.
And people are doing a great job of covering that or hollowing
out the core.
But they've got to a certain point
where they have to make changes to move past that.
And for Google Cloud and others in partnership,
we're raising people's awareness of what's possible.
This isn't us with a technology looking for a problem.
The problem's there.
And the business case has been well understood
for a long time.
But the risk is what's held people back
from making any of the changes.
But together, we really are able to move an industry
and help an industry move to where it patently
needs to go to.
PIP WHITE: Well, we're excited to be
part of the journey with you.
I just flipped the question a little bit
into something that's a topic that's close to my heart--
I'm sure to yours, as well, Gareth.
But relatively young company, lots
of ability to shape and influence
the culture that you're building there-- and as you
grow, what role do you see DEI playing
as Thought Machine continues to expand and grow
momentum in the market?
GARETH RICHARDSON: Massive, obviously.
We have a huge part of our human capital
to enable that we can bring together.
It's a bit of a grim technical, technocrat word.
But there's a huge amount of potential
in lots of places in this business
to be able to bring benefit and bring great people together.
We're very proud of the sheer breadth of nationality
that we have in our firm.
And we've done really well to gender that.
But saying gender, we--
struggling at the moment.
We're not happy with the gender balance,
particularly, just to be--
we're an engineering firm.
There is a general problem with the demographic
of engineers and other things.
60% of our firm is engineering.
But we do-- we need to do better at that.
And we're sponsoring things like Django Girls and other areas
to really get girls into STEM and coding sort of subjects
and things like that.
But brilliant people appear everywhere.
And we have to be able to unlock that.
We have to-- we've looked at quite a lot at how do we
reduce--
how do we change our-- from the job apps
that we put out that may limit some people wanting
to apply who could do it.
And how do we look at our imagery in the firm?
And that's not trying to massage anything.
It's just trying to sell the-- show
the real reality of what could be possible
if people come on board.
And you have to spend quite a lot of time thinking
about those things to make sure that your culture is
supportive of those types and have a very adult
discussion about that inside the firm, about what's important.
PIP WHITE: It's good to hear that it's top of mind
for you as well as for us here at Google Cloud.
GARETH RICHARDSON: Absolutely.
PIP WHITE: So final question from a--
I'm very keen-- obviously, we're in the middle
of a very difficult and challenging time globally
right now with the pandemic and the economic impacts of that.
How is Vault-- as you talked about Vault
at the beginning of our discussion.
And we know that's powered by Google Cloud.
But how is that--
how is Vault helping your customers
to get prepared for and better equipped to handle these more
unexpected events that we, as a global people,
are facing every day of our lives right now?
GARETH RICHARDSON: Well, there's this huge macro trends.
Cash is stocked in a-- large amounts of the market.
So we've all moved to digital money, not crypto.
We've moved to having--
using online transactions and things
like that, which is a totally different usage
model than a lot of the banking platforms
are already set up to handle.
The branch was there to handle cash and move that backwards
and forwards.
That ain't happening in the same way,
and hasn't been for a long time.
But it's accelerated.
This has put a huge amount of pressure on the digital change
initiative, digital agendas there.
And Vault enables that to happen.
Without Vault, you are stuck with a huge amount of pieces
you cannot do.
If you want to have, like I said,
one account that has a current account and a credit
card on the same place, it used to have
to be that you had to settle the credit card,
wait five days for the process to come through
before you can recognize it in your current account because
of those silos moving backwards and forwards.
We can break all that down.
It also enables people to work and banks to work more flexibly
and be able to-- we all know the story is that-- or stories--
when certain organizations, obviously,
lost their call centers in India and other things
as they went through the pandemic or operational
controls or operational ways of working
had not been digitized because they never needed to be.
And then all of a sudden, the people
can't get into the office.
So now what do you do?
If the reason they weren't digitized was it didn't need
to be or the core wouldn't allow it-- and whenever you get to--
in banking, there was always a phrase.
But how would you do that in the core?
And it stopped a lot of innovation.
It stops a lot of ability for the-- for banks
to be able to react to pandemics and other things like that.
And moving to these sorts of tools and technologies powered
by Google Cloud, we were able to break free of some
of those physical barriers.
We can also bring the processing closer to wherever people are.
And I think to date, we've, obviously, built
processing around megacities and things like that.
If this continues with the pandemic and other things as--
we've-- what, 1 and 1/2 million people have already moved out
of London in the last six months.
That's a big demographic change.
It's over 10% of the population-- has moved.
What we can do is we can bring--
on a macro scale across the world,
we can start bringing our processing closer
to the customers without having to invest in huge data centers
without--
we can put edge services into different places, which
gives people better performance, but also
means banks are more responsive and seem to be more responsive.
PIP WHITE: Very interesting and--
to hear your thoughts around that.
Gareth, thank you so much for joining me today.
It's been so interesting to hear how Thought Machine are using
cloud technology to really change
the way banks are running their core banking
infrastructure, definitely disrupting the market.
And I really look forward to following the Thought Machine
journey in the future and seeing more of our continued
customers coming on board.
So thank you so much for taking the time to be with us today.
I look forward to speaking again soon.
GARETH RICHARDSON: Look forward talking soon.
Thanks.
Bye.