>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. >>Welcome back to UI path forward three. This is UI pass. Third North American conference. We're here at the Bellagio hotel. You are watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise, we pick the brains of experts. Kevin crone is here. He's a financial services intelligent automation leader at PWC. Kevin, thanks for coming on the cube Bexar Avenue. You're very welcome. So financial services has always been kind of a leading indicator of technology adoption. I presume that automation is, is no difference, but you know, you're in the New York area, you're belly to belly with the financial services companies, the big whales, what's going on in Fs these days? Sure. >>So as we look across the financial services industry, they were one of the leaders with automation more because the overarching business environment really forced them. As we looked at, um, the regulatory burden that a lot of our banking clients we're under over the past decade kind of post crash that really, um, has kind of forced two things. One, it's limited the amount of um, discretionary spend that they have to spend on really big technology transformation projects. It's also forced a lot of margin pressure and having to think about, uh, differently how they could run their business at a much lower and more effective price points. And so that's, um, driven automation to the top. And we've seen tools like U I path and kind of the broader RPA ecosystem becoming kind of, you know, the right technology at the right time of being able to, um, really kind of embrace that, that, that, that rightsizing agenda and financial services sector. >>Yeah. And furniture at the macro level, they're a little bit out of favor right now you've had this, what we thought was this rising interest rate environment and that's reversed. And so that's not necessarily good for them. So they got to look for other ways to sort of drive the bottom line. So maybe you could talk a little bit about, you know, gen generally where you're seeing automation, um, back office, front office. Think about the maturity curve. What are the leaders doing? What, >>what's the sort of best practice right now for intelligent automation RPA? Sure. So as we looked at intelligent automation right now, I think one of the interesting things, vital services was an early adopter. So a lot of, a lot of the big banks and asset managers and insurance companies really start investing in this, this class of technology four, five, six, seven years ago. And so we're actually seeing the, the early returns from, from those, which is informing how this, you know, this topic goes to other industries. But I think as we look at those returns, we see a couple of major challenges. Um, there's challenges with getting the scaling technology, there's challenges with, so that's interesting. Okay. So the, the ladder changing, the nature of work is, as you're saying, largely automating existing mundane processes, kind of paving the cow path as I sometimes say. >>However, if, if it's a, if it's not the most efficient processy to begin read process to begin with, they need to sort of re look at that and that may be falls into the, to the, to the former category of enterprise life. And so where people investing in boat or they are they just hitting the low hanging fruit where we're seeing an investment in both. And then PWC is used that a while fucks your mission program should have both channels and each channel should be informing the other. So if citizens are coming up with ideas of things that they can automate themselves, that's great, but those should also be contributed into the kind of broader ecosystem. And there may be, um, what's called grander ways to, to, to solve that problem, both from a technology perspective and from a process reengineering perspective. Is there a, is there an automation ex-officio is there a chief who's sort of looking at all this stuff or is it more organic? >>It's, you know, one of the, I think interesting things we've seen and learned from our clients over the past couple of years is the con, you know, we thought there'd be an emergence of a chief automation officer or something like that. But really the automation agenda's owned in so many different places within our clients. And it's not consistent client decline in some cases. It's really a CIO own topic. A lot of cases it's more of a chief operating officer, chief digital officer, chief transformation officer. We're also seeing a push at the chief HR officer level because this is really, you know, there's a, there's a big question straight in terms of thinking about kind of skills and how you equip your workforce with the right digital skills for the future, which is now putting HR at the table for this, which is the place where I think traditionally with big technology transformations, they've never really sat. >>So, in thinking about, um, ROI, you know, you've laid out this sort of bifurcated, you know, paths to vectors the hard sort of end-to-end problems and then the sort of low hanging fruit changing the way to work. I would presume the second one gives you the quick hit, you know, faster break even, but probably lower net present value. Um, and, and so maybe you could talk a little bit about the ROI equation and how people are looking at that. Yeah. It's interesting cause I think yeah, to your point, I think an enterprise led initiative, you're going to want to define a business case and say this is why we're doing it and what we're looking to achieve going down to SIS and let channel, that's a harder thing to do because you don't want to stifle innovation. The organization, one of our views is that the people that sit closest to the business process are the ones that should be coming up the right ideas, if they're given the right upscaling and the right tools at their disposal. >>Um, but you know, it's bottoms up exercise. And so again, going back to the concept of having a kind of an ecosystem with both an enterprise channel and a citizen channel is important because you're at the enterprise level, you're going to need to understand what type of benefits are actually being created at the, you know, at the micro level and figure out two things. One, are there things that, you know, do, have we built enough that we can start to release capacity from organization? Um, or is there something else that if I put in, will allow us to really think about transforming our business? So it's a, it's a lover. It's not that the end solution, right? When I tell people about you that don't know what RPA is, I say it's a lot of back office stuff and it is. Um, but we heard today that from one of the keynotes that, you know, we gotta move from the back office to the, to the front office. >>How much is that happening in financial services and how much of a sort of a holistic end to end strategy are you seeing? I'm sure you guys are promoting that are fans of that because you're going to get a much bigger business impact. It's transformational. But where are we at in the maturity of that? Yeah, it's interesting, right? So we, you know, staying on this theme of the enterprise and citizen light innovation levers, you know, the enterprise. Um, and you know, innovation levers tend to be focused more in the back office, high transaction volume type processes. I think when we look at the citizen led channel and a lot of the ideas that have been coming out in our cotton with our clients are starting to embrace this. They tend to be more front office oriented processes. There's lots of things, especially client servicing or that are tasks that are done are somewhat mundane. >>And um, you know, it's the business case and LOC isn't necessarily back capacity. It's about client experience and customer service. So, you know, you can take the, um, you know, the, the, the wealth advisor that has to log into five different systems to answer a simple client question. That's a, you know, that's a process that being able to actually have an automated way to generate that same thing at their fingertips, um, you know, could be really powerful. And so there's a big push there. I think the interesting part on the, um, going back to your bet, your business case question from before is that, um, you know, the, the business case for a lot of those types of automations, um, it's not just a factor of um, you know, have we built enough that we think that there's benefit, it's also about adoption. So if I build a robot to automate that wealth advisor process that I just noted, if 50 wealth advisors can adopt that rather than one wealth advisor, it's going to be a much greater business case. And that's a much, that's a different way of thinking about business case in the RPA sense. Because most people tend to think, here's a process, this process, I have five people that run this on a day to day basis. Um, and here's, here's my business case. In this case it's, I built something really innovative. If I can get a a hundred people to use this because it's, it takes 10 minutes out of their day, there's real, there's, there's real time there, but it is causing a lot of our clients to think differently. >>So you talk about three things as challenges scaled the business case, which you just talked about and change management. Is that part of the, and they're interrelated? Is that part of the challenge with scale? It is far as the channel. >>I mean just building on the last point around adoption, you know, that what we're doing, what we're talking about here with RPA, I think people that live in the RPA space day to day, this does this almost become second nature. And like, yeah, the technology is not that complicated. This is very basic, but you start going out to the entire organization and especially outside of technology. Um, it's, it's new. And so the change management's really important. Um, and it's important we, we view from two lenses. One is really thinking about how do you, um, upskill your workforce at a minimum so they know what technology is actually out there. It doesn't necessarily mean you're gonna make everyone a bot builder in your organization. But knowing what RPA is and knowing that, Hey, I have some tools to go help solve a given business problem is really important. But, uh, you know, the, the uh, the second point that we think is really important in here is the ability to, um, really think, sorry, really think about the, um, you know, what the longterm impact of kind of, um, you know, the overall organizational model and how that actually adopts to using automation over time. >>And that ties into change management, which is the other thing and people don't like change. Um, the other thing we heard this morning, um, Craig LeClaire Forrester analyst talked about how a lot of robots are idle sitting around ill, you know, then though at the orchestrator. And so I was, I was thinking, well, we're seeing sass models emerge, you know, UI path announced their cloud product and I would expect you're going to see new pricing models as well, kind of usage base pricing, which is kind of generally not how things are priced today. But is that something that customers are pushing for >>or definitely. I mean I think there's, um, there's two, two things we hear from customers in this space. I think as RPA, as a product is developed and you know, I think there was a push, uh, with most, with all the vendors towards kind of what's priced for bot. But the concept of a bot is a somewhat ambiguous concept to a lot of our clients. And what our clients really want is to price and value, right? And understand, um, if I'm building bots that are, you know, covering this part of the organization, I'm appropriately paying for this, um, rather than worry about how much workload did I put onto one bod versus another. I think with, uh, with the mass adoption of cloud and the fact that the RP ecosystems quickly moving from an on prem solution to a cloud based solution, I think a lot of this is just gonna happen naturally. Um, over time. I think the other, I think the other really important part in there is not to just make this a technology question about the kind of the pricing. It's also a question on value delivered and realize the benefits case and can you actually tie what those realized benefits are to what the actual price that's actually going to pay for the software is >>all right. You ready for some curve balls? Sure. Okay. So you're, you know, thought leader you worked for one of the largest consultancies on the planet global scale. You guys do some really great work disruption. We talk about digital transformation, automation obviously plays in there, blockchain, AI, RPA, et cetera. Do you, do you think that banks will lose control of payment systems? >>I'm not sure. I would say the pro, the biggest problems that banks are facing, um, with regards to that isn't necessarily whether they control the payment system or not. I actually think it's how effective they can run the system internally. I mean, I'm a, I'm an automation guy, right? And my goal is to make clients run as efficiently and as effectively as possible. And I look at a lot of the legacy debt that sits within a lot of our clients infrastructure. I think that's the biggest problem to tackle. I think if they don't tackle that and are not successful topics like RPA and automation, it, it's going to create the forces of nature that allow some of the broader disruption to happen. So it's, you know, to me, at least in my mind, it's one of these things that you, you have your agenda in what'd you can control. These are the things that you actually shouldn't be focusing on. So you're set up to compete with some of the big disruptors in the future. >>Yeah, interesting. I mean that's one industry, there's a disruption all around us, but that's one industry along with healthcare and defense that it hasn't been highly disrupted yet because it's very high risk. Not only that they're, you know, they've got very strong relationship with the government. So this, and they're big and they're well funded, but, but it seems like that disruption scenario is coming to financial services. When you talk to people in the industry, they certainly see it, but there's also a lot of complacency. It's like, Hey, we're a big, big Fs. We're doing really well. Um, dots on that. >>Um, you know, there is, you know, when we looked across and I'll just say kind of technology investment in the banking sector, big banks and asset managers, insurance companies are some of the biggest spenders on technology out there. And in your view, look at a lot of the commentary that comes out of analyst calls. There's pretty consistent, um, push a to talk about, um, you know, Becky organization as a technology company or some form of that. And there's also a big push to talk about how much money they're spending. That's great. But we've also, yeah, I think when you, you kind of look under the covers, there's been a lot of historical challenges with um, with implementing big technology projects and things. There's a lot of legacy debt that's been built over the past 25 years and complexity really thinking about this from a front to back perspective. >>Like from the point, you know, taking a, the trading side of a bank, looking at the point of trade entry through post-trade processing through finance processing through kind of every step in the life cycle. It's still run from a technology perspective, probably not as efficient as possible. And I think especially when you get outside the front office area and some of the training areas and look at that. So there's a ton of opportunity for improvement and, and you know, kind of building on the last theme, I think to the extent that technologies like RPA and automation are embraced, it helps think about that problem a little bit differently and gives us a chance to tackle some of these big meaty legacy problems that had been around for a while. If we're successful at this and we can force the ROI to be proved, we can force the change management exercise to happen. I think it sets our clients up for, again, for success to avoid some of these disruptive factors. >>Yeah. So huge opportunity then for a UI path than some of its competitors, you know, penetration wise, adoption wise, what inning are we in? >>Uh, adding to we're, we're in early days. I mean, I think we've seen a ton of interest. It's under the excitement from our clients. But you know, our surveys of, of, of the financial services industry, um, most clients will acknowledge their past the pilot and proof of concept phase and there may be even past the first 10 bought phase, but they're not at scale. Right. And I think until three things happen, I think until we can prove that the technology is being used, um, you know, from an organizational coverage across a much wider swath than it is today. I think when we can prove that there's actually a real demonstrable benefit happening from a, from an organizational operating model perspective, and to the extent that the workforce is actually embracing this and I'm posing it, I think we'll, you know, >>be in a much better position to say, Hey, we're working now getting to ending five or six and, and this, this picture's becoming more complete. But it's still early. A lot of opportunities. Kevin, thanks very much to come into the Q was great to have you. Thank you for having me. Hi, and thank you for watching. We're right back with our next guest right after this short break. You're watching the cube live from UI path forward 2019 at the Bellagio right back.