Speed and agility were ‘paramount’ during COVID-19
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Speed and agility were ‘paramount’ during COVID-19 06 OctoberLondon Reporter: Maddie Saghir
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Speed and agility were “paramount” during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighted Greg Keeley, executive vice president, chief information officer, TD Bank Group, during a panel discussion at this year’s Sibos.
The panel discussed how the industry coped with major workforce disruption during the pandemic, and how leader behaviours changed.
During the lockdown, Keeley explained that TD Bank Group had “a team-based approach which was very focused on protecting colleagues and supporting customers and the community in which they operate. Focus and clarity of mission allowed us to do some amazing things during this period”.
Addressing the disruption caused by COVID-19, Keeley noted that the impact was significant. He said: “We had business continuity plans and then we had to change those. The business continuity plan was to work from one environment and have a backup in case of a certain type of incident but that was thrown out the window with the realisation of the need to go virtual.”
“We rapidly focused on building capacity for over 90,000 employees to work from home. We created a clear environment and protected infrastructure and made sure we tripled the capacity from a digital environment. It was about serving large volumes online. A real shift happened in the early days of the pandemic,” Keeley explained.
Also on the panel, Claire Calmejane, group chief innovation officer, Societe Generale, commented: “One of our main priorities is to ensure colleague safety and to ensure everyone is protected in the pandemic. Overnight about 50,000 colleagues set up to work from home remotely. It was not the first time that the finance industry was going through so much disruption and resilience was needed.”
Moderator Catriona Wallace, CEO at Ethical AI Advisory, asked the panel about the role of the regulators in Europe during this period.
There was a lot of focus around consumer protection, according to Calmejane, which was interesting from an innovation point of view.
“The pandemic has encouraged people to think a lot more deeply about the future, which is super impressive to see. We are thinking about innovation and that is going to be at the heart of the rebound and the economy tomorrow,” she added.
Wallace then turned the panel’s attention to digital transformation and the coming of artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain.
Reports have found that there has been a 19 percent increase in investment in AI this quarter when compared to the previous quarter.
Some reports predict that 40 percent of jobs in the financial services industry over the next five years will be automated and carried out by robots or machines.
Meanwhile, it has been suggested that 30 percent of customer interactions will be handled by AI in the next two years.
Wallace asked the panel: “Has COVID-19 stepped up our focus on digital transformation? Are we implementing this well? Are we doing this ethically?”
Keeley argued that ensuring customer interaction is “significant”. He noted that digital transformation is accelerating and has really been ramped up.
Calmejane highlighted the importance of data when it comes to technologies such as AI. She explained: “Before AI, there is data. There are a lot of problems that could be solved through data. The industry’s data quality is not super mature yet but there has definitely been an awakening in realising the potential of data. This has been accelerated by the pandemic.”
“When data quality has improved and you have the infrastructure in cloud technology then you are in a good position to scale some of the AI services. I think for AI you need good data quality; and it is important to remember that not everything can be solved through AI, especially in a pandemic crisis. But it can do things quickly. AI serves to equip the banker.”
The moderator highlighted that there is difficulty in building AI because of scalability.
Wallace said: “Products like this are in demand to support at-home workers. We will see the more augmented capability of AI coming in to support home base work - this will absolutely be the case.”
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