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- Well, welcome everyone to another addition
of "Taking Stock Live."
And I'm really excited for today's discussion.
Today we have someone here on the screen
who I consider at this point, a friend.
Someone who I got to see really through his evolution
of joining Microsoft and go from being really a leader
in the financial services industry with companies
like Bank of America and Citibank,
to coming over to Microsoft and obviously leading
our financial services industry vertical globally
but then also being a real leader and advocate
for Blacks at Microsoft or BAM.
So I am really excited to have Bill Borden in here,
our Corporate Vice President of Financial Services,
to talk about all of those things.
And Bill, just a huge warm welcome to you to this show.
Happy to be here.
Shelley knows that I will always join anything
that she asks me to join because actually Shelley
was one of the reasons why I'm at Microsoft.
She was part of my interview process when I was working
for DevCup and I just enjoyed our conversation.
And I was calling you on a conference call.
I was in Mexico City at Bank of America at an event
and I called you and we chatted.
So I couldn't remember if you remembered that,
but I stole away from my meeting in Mexico City
so I could talk to you
- If I had known that Bill,
I would've asked you to have me down for a margarita.
I forgot.
Obviously, I definitely remember,
I think it was an interview
but I had heavy instructions not just to interview you,
but to recruit you.
- Yeah.
- So I usually start this out actually,
because it's largely a retail and CPG talk,
on what someone's first job in retail was.
But given that I don't think that was your first job, Bill,
maybe let's start out, what was your first job,
maybe outside of obviously
the retailer consumer goods industries?
- My first real job was,
a buddy of mine and I started a lawn mowing service.
We actually tied our lawn mowers behind our bikes
and we rode around and we did lawns in the neighborhood
and we actually had a pretty good little business.
Then my real jobs, my dad was in construction,
and so when I got to like eighth grade and into high school,
he was in road construction.
So summers meant that I was getting up early
at the crack of dawn and going to work with him
on his construction site job.
So that's when I found out about real construction labor
and I said, "I'm going to go be a white collar worker."
(both laughing)
- That's incredible.
So here you are at Microsoft
and we'll talk a little bit obviously
about what you're doing in financial services,
but first before we go there, I do want to...
I know that you are a tireless advocate for diversity equity
and inclusion and I like to consider myself someone
who passionately believes in that as well.
So maybe, will you start there and talk a little bit
about why you're passionate about it
and how that shows up in your work at Microsoft?
- Yeah.
Being an engineer, being in tech, going to business school,
working in financial services and working technology,
there aren't a lot of people that look like me in the space.
And so, starting in it and seeking out people that were
in the space to get a perspective around their careers
and their thought process and how they became successful.
And as I grew in my career and had an opportunity
to have more outsized influence around that,
it's always just a big part about how I thought about making
the companies that I work for better by ensuring
that we have a broad perspective of talent that are thinking
about product, building products, serving our customers,
looking for our customers and serving the communities
in which they serve, which is serving a broad set of people.
And so when I joined Citigroup
in 1998 and about three or four years into my career there,
I actually had a chance to start Citi's first
African American employee resource group.
And so being a sponsor of that and creating that
and seeing the environment and seeing the energy
and the passion and the excitement around the organization,
around how that kind of took off and grew to something
that was quite large, was big.
And so I always viewed that as part of doing it.
And then outside of work,
I've always tried to be involved in community service
and organizations as well,
that do mentoring and career development
and try to present myself as somebody who's
in these industries that you can do it.
And then when I joined Microsoft,
part of my interview process was,
I had a ton of questions in the HR group and I learned
about BAM, Blacks at Microsoft,
and the fact that it was the first ERP group at Microsoft
and had a rich history and impact on the company,
I was very excited.
So I said on day one when I joined,
"I would shortly figure out how to be a sponsor."
And so that's how I became an executive sponsor here.
And I think it's important.
It keeps you grounded around what's happening, right?
When you hear such diverse perspectives across the community
around what's real, what's meaningful, what's going on,
not just about the company but what's going on externally
in communities and importantly enough,
"What are customers thinking?"
Because they're working with customers every day
and they're working with customers that look like me
everyday too, many of them.
So I just view it as a really fulfilling experience
and I've learned a ton.
- Yeah.
Thank you for sharing that.
And I think what you said, I know I feel the same way,
of when you get to a certain moment in your career
and you look around and there aren't as many people
who look like you.
And some might say, "Well, that's frustrating,"
but also I have the same perspective of like,
"Well, how do I leverage where I am and the people
who help me along the way to do more within the company?"
And then to your point,
going out into the community and doing more so that
you inspire in some way, hopefully,
you realize that people are looking and watching you
and if you can do more of it,
sort of just the the outsize impact it can have.
So maybe when you think about the opportunities that you see
around diversity, equity, and inclusion,
either like specifically within Microsoft and BAM,
or just in the FSI, financial services industry,
what are some of the things that really stand out to you?
- Yeah, look, when I was in financial services itself,
it's the blood of what we do,
it enables individuals and small businesses and entities
and governments.
It enables them to actually finance
what they're trying to do,
do their careers.
And so the idea of it being inclusive and open
and transparent,
and the history around how financial services in the past
had not been open and transparent.
And even today,
the issues around inherent biases
around the banking community and the insurance
and risk management community,
in terms of how things,
how minority populations may not be getting the same set
of full services or the opportunities around those services
is really important to me.
So when I was in industry,
it was always kind of top of mind around,
if I'm at a bank, how am I having an impact
on how the bank is doing?
But also, am I getting involved in things that drive
how we think about products or how we go to market,
how we think differently or how we are expansive,
or how we're inclusive in terms of the products
that we're delivering to the market.
And I had a chance to work on consumer products
and business products and corporate products
and deal with those issues of community lending
and why it's important
and why the government is pushing for measurements
around it and how institutions try to game
those measurements.
Because financial services companies,
they're very good at doing analytics and figuring out
how to optimize every loophole you possibly can.
And so how do you get the organization not to do that
and actually just do the right thing.
Think about it, it's something very simple, right?
Think about
Bank of America back in the day.
Remember in banking, you got charged a fee for everything,
right?
If you change something, if you overdraft,
fees for everything, and guess what?
When fees are everything,
then who's the hardest hit by those fees?
It's usually the minority populations that are
usually hardest hit by those fees,
just because of the nature of their understanding
around using these tools and the financing of it.
Well over time, Bank of America realized that
by taking the fees away and making their products
more usable and more accessible
and providing more education,
they've actually made more money
after they got rid of the fees.
And these were billions of dollars
that they were toying with, right?
How can we give up these fees?
They've made more money on top of that because customers
are sticky or they brought more balances in,
and they realize that, "No it's not about feeing to death.
It's about how do you provide the right product
and service and loyalty and expertise around knowing them
as a customer to drive a long term relationship
from when you're young in college and high school
to all the way up when you get a family
to when you have to educate and finance for college
or when you want to start a small business.
So that to me was really exciting,
that it's not all about just thinking
about the financial bottom line.
It's when you do things right,
typically there's a business model there too
and that's why inclusiveness and expansion
around that's really important.
And then now coming to Microsoft on the flip side,
one of the exciting things about coming out of an industry
that you see a lot can happen but you also know
that the industry is super slow
'cause they're highly regulated.
They're highly conservative, right?
They're about managing risk.
And so the pace of change is really slow and hard
particularly for the more mature organizations
and that's why there's so many Fintechs disruptors.
But the reality of it is,
is still the big banks still own the majority
of the population of financing,
same with insurance companies
and same with capital markets companies.
So coming over on this side, it's, "Wow.
How can I impact change at a greater speed?"
And that's been the fun part, right?
How are we talking about these institutions
and how they transform,
think about their products and services
and relationship development quickly
and how do we actually help them with time to market?
Because we have solutions that can actually get them there.
And that's really cool about being on this side
of the ledger, if you will, serving the industry.
So excited to be here doing it.
- And do you think when you were making those changes
sort of in terms of lending practices,
or even as you think about at Microsoft,
what tends to be your approach?
Are you data driven?
How do you convince people?
'Cause I think one of the things I know I hear,
I think about it for myself and I hear from others,
is how do you sort of advance that agenda
so it doesn't just feel like sort of your personal agenda,
but to your point,
where's the business going in the business opportunity?
- Well look like most industries,
it's about the data set you have and reasoning
and to really create value, right?
And financial institutions have always sat
on mountains of data.
The question is that they've been able to bring them
together and actually do something with it
and actually reason on it.
Then start to apply AI and those types of things
around lending and other things.
And that gets us into responsible AI.
So some of the conversations that we have
around responsible AI from our perspective at Microsoft
and how we think about using it,
particularly when you think about lending,
that's the easiest use case that you think of, right?
Great example, right?
When Apple launched their credit card in partnership
with Goldman Sachs,
they were going around,
I don't know if you remember the story,
they got in trouble because their algorithms were,
and it was written up, that same household...
So application gets sent to Bill Borden
and I'm on a combined household.
And Bill Borden gets approved for the card.
Same application gets sent to Bill Borden's wife,
same household income,
Bill Borden's wife gets declined.
So people are like, "Wait a minute. How's that working?"
So clearly there was something with their algorithms
around how they were looking at their credit risk
and how they were looking at their credit decisions
and they actually got written up for it.
So, but that again, those types of...
Now that's thinking about it more in the broader terms
but now start to apply that when you get
into minority communities and how even more dicier that gets
right around how you think about credit decisions
and lending decisions, right?
So all those things around responsible AI
and its discussions around that across data
and how you're going to reason over your data
and how you get your environment ready to actually do that,
that's where the fight is right now going on,
how we're going to compete for that,
as you feel it in your industry too,
in terms of competing for the data state.
There's more pressure as it is in retail too, right?
Banks have always thought that their,
their golden goose was their data.
But in reality now,
when they look at the amount of they have compared
with the amount of data that AWS and Google
and other big entities have on their same customers,
now they're realizing that,
"Oh, now we're really in trouble.
We really don't have as much data
on our customers as we thought to be competitive."
And that's why there's so many bank startups,
'cause so many bank startups can find data
on Shelley Bransten
and start to create a profile and start a business.
So you hit the head, it's around data.
And then how do we think about data
and how do we think about reasoning?
And then how do we think about not getting
into situations where it becomes not inclusive,
when you think about product decisioning or where you decide
to put a branch location or things like that.
- Fascinating. Yeah.
I mean, and to your point,
it's very similar in retail where,
and you have Fintech,
they haven't named it re-tech
or anything like that in retail.
- Re-tech. (laughs)
- But to your point,
a lot of the innovation that's happening in this whole
direct to consumer,
whether it's the Dollar Shave Club or you name it,
is because people thought about,
looked at the data and figured out more personalized
experiences or products.
But retailers have been sitting on that data for years,
they just hadn't brought pieces together,
they were using historical data versus, as you're saying,
some of these AI techniques to actually figure out,
not where things had been, but where the market was going.
- Yeah.
And where the market is going in serving underserved
markets can be profitable, so that's the biggest thing.
So many still today, in minority communities,
are still unbanked, right?
They're not either being pursued by financial institutions
or they are in the mindset where,
"It's easier for me just to try to figure it out on my own."
And that's a problem.
And the industry itself, as you know,
depending on the region of the world,
there's this big push to, how do you deal with the unbanked
and how do you understand how to get products
and services to them?
And how do you do that in a responsible way
and still protect yourself and make money,
but still serve them in the way they need to be?
And my retailing example of that is,
I love my Magic Johnson story with Starbucks, right?
Magic Johnson went to Starbucks and said,
"If you put Starbucks in black and brown communities,
which you're not putting any right now,
you can sell and make money in black and brown communities,
even at a higher price point,
you just need to do it with products
that are a little bit different."
He talked about the type of...
He said, "Black and brown people, they like lemon cake.
So put lemon cake in there and black..."
So I love that story because it's all about these
big companies saying that, "Come to where the people are
and give them what they want and you can make money."
And so it's the same thing in financial services.
- I had never heard that story, Bill, about Magic.
- Oh my gosh, go look that story.
That's why Magic partnered with Starbucks
and became very close with them and then opened up a bunch
of Starbucks in black and brown communities in California
and proved that Starbucks can be super successful
in cities of black and brown communities.
- Wow. Wow. That's a great one.
Thank you. I will look it up.
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