Good morning everyone! My name is David Wicks, Vice President, Listings here at
Nasdaq. And thank you for joining us for this episode of Behind the Bell. And
joining us today is a company that has been part of Nasdaq for the past 20
years and today, this morning celebrated their 25th anniversary of being a
company and did so by opening the market and joining us today is the CFO of
Cognizant Karen McLaughlin. Karen, welcome. Thank you, David. Thank you for having me
thank you for joining us and congratulations on the 25th business
anniversary. Thank you very much; we're very excited. so can we start by telling
our viewers a little bit about Cognizant and its mission and who it serves.
Absolutely! Cognizant is a New Jersey-based Fortune 200 company. As you know, we
were founded in 1994 and were listed on the Nasdaq as you said about 20 years
ago. So we celebrated our 20th anniversary as a listed company last
summer and today our more than 270,000 employees around the world provide
business, technology services and software to industry-leading companies
such as fintech, healthtech, biotech and the smart product revolution companies.
Our clients range from the very largest financial institutions to healthcare,
pharma companies, retailers, social media companies and many others.
For example, in healthcare, we help insurers and hospitals expedite claims processing.
We're a leader in applying artificial intelligence and big data to help
companies personalize services around the world. And Karen, one of the
things I've had the pleasure of watching Cognizant grow and innovate since
listing on Nasdaq and just some things I personally find astounding is the total
return is over 26,000 percent since your IPO and I think when you listed or when
you probably had about 200 employees... is that right? About that... yes
and today you have... over 270,000 employees around the world. Amazing!
Absolutely. It's truly an amazing story. So one of the things I think would
be interesting to talk about is some of the trends that you're watching that
really present the most opportunity for Cognizant. Certainly and it's always been
important for Cognizant to innovate and change
and as we've grown over the years but today there's a lot of very powerful new
technologies. Things like artificial intelligence, internet of things, virtual
reality, blockchain, robotic process automation, cloud and others that are
really continuing to shape business models and help improve lives for
people around the world. And as our clients continue to adopt these and
other powerful technologies, you know, they often depend on us to help keep
them at the leading edge of these shifts in the technology markets and over the
past five years in particular, we've seen tremendous demand in these new
technologies, particularly as the markets that we serve have started to move away
from the physical and towards the digital world. Our clients know that
today they have to build new customer experiences, they have to have automated
processes on top of a secure and scalable technology for them to be
successful. And I know that Cognizant has done some research into kind of the type
of new jobs that will be on the forefront, on the horizon and a lot of
that involves data and massive amounts of data. Can you talk a little bit about
you know what that entails. So you know really one of the things we focused on is
the future of work. And the jobs and we have a Center for the Future of Work
that has recently issued a report on the 21 jobs of the future and 21 more jobs
of the future, but starts to highlight that the way
that work is changing towards automation and artificial intelligence and most
importantly jobs are not going away and this is really important so people need
to be able to use the new tools of the trade, they need to understand AI, virtual
reality, big data for example and this will help them solve problems and
explore new opportunities and so as history has generally shown over the
years, new tools, new technology actually creates better work to do and the human
touch will always be critical and so that's one of the things that we're very
focused on is how do we really help to support and create those talent pools
for the future. Amazing and last question, Cognizant has been named one of Fortune's
most admired companies for many years. What does it take
and how do you consistently deliver that people-want-to-work-at-
Cognizant... they are engaged, they like the culture. Can you talk a little bit about
that? So thank you; it's a tremendous honor. We've been named for eleven years
as you said as one of Fortune's most admired companies and I think it's
really about the unique culture that we have at Cognizant. Fundamentally we are a
company of people who love to creatively solve problems; we have deep knowledge of
the world in which we operate of our clients businesses, their technology,
their infrastructure and then to our credit the things that we work on are
constantly developing our people, improving, renewing our knowledge which
makes us a force to be reckoned with in the marketplace. Yeah it's amazing; it's
such a great story and we're so proud of our relationship, we're also a client and
we appreciate all that you do for us. You're ready to go to the lightning
round, Karen? I'm gonna ask you to take your Cognizant hat off and I'm gonna ask
you totally random questions that will not get us in trouble. Let's start with
the obvious. Who's gonna win the Super Bowl? The LARams or the New England
Patriots. Oh my goodness me. I'm gonna put you on the spot. I know my Patriots fans
will be angry if I say say the Rams, but you know I think they're both wonderful
teams, I think it'll be a great game. The two last playoff games were wonderful
games; each and have their own rights so I think it'll be a fun event. Alright.
Fair enough. When you're not at work where can we find you? So usually at home
if I'm not not at work, but you know I love to travel even when it's not for
work. I like to get out and be about, being with friends and family around the
world. When you look back on your career, what is the best advice you've ever
received? Always hire people that are better than yourself.
I think talent is really the key to success and having a wonderful team
around you helps to make you look more successful. Yeah great advice. Well... Karen,
thank you so much for joining us. Thank you very much. And congratulations on
the 25th anniversary... business anniversary and for all our Facebook
viewers, thank you for joining us for this episode of Behind the Bell.