At Money20/20 Europe this June, Kelley Knutson, Chief Growth Officer at TSYS – a Global Payments company – shared his insights on the evolving fintech environment, and how AI and cloud services are defining the future of financial services.
While many are concerned today about AI’s potential impact on the workforce and employment, like many others, Kelley sees AI not as a replacement, but as an enabler for employees.
“It really is a partnership between the technology and its capabilities and humans,” he says. “Some jobs will get displaced, but then I think people will be retrained and reallocated to other things.”
For Kelley, the most crucial element of AI implementation today is instilling the right governance and structure, calling it “a continuous learning process”.
Responsible AI implementation
Kelley highlights TSYS’s responsible approach to AI adoption and the creation of an AI centre of excellence.
“For us, it’s really around the governance framework that you have in place,” he says. “It’s vital to ensure that the content and the data are accurate and validated. Then we have to ask how that data can be applied to specific use cases, in areas that make sense for us, but more importantly for our customers too.”
Better access to data and higher quality data has seen cloud adoption increase in the financial services industry – but as different organisations transform at varying paces, the adoption of technology is not as equally advanced throughout the industry.
Kelley notes that legacy players often face more significant challenges in transitioning, while newer entrants can adopt cloud technologies more readily.
Indeed, there are regulatory and compliance issues surrounding cloud adoption too, and Kelley notes that strategies often vary between on-premise solutions and regional approaches.
He acknowledged that cloud technology has delivered on some, but not all, of its initial promises. “Everyone thought cloud adoption was going to be a lot cheaper, a lot faster, which it is.
“But what’s happening now is hybrid cloud models are showing the way forward, especially for legacy players who are trying to strike that balance between getting to the future quickly, while ensuring they don’t disrupt the service and capabilities they already have.”
Kelley believes hybrid cloud and hybrid multi-cloud models will persist for several years, as banks and other financial organisatons navigate the complexities of a full cloud adoption.
This hybrid model, according to Knutson, is likely to persist for several years as financial institutions navigate the complexities of cloud adoption.
Customers front-of-mind
No matter how a financial institution’s services are powered, for Kelley, it has to work for the consumer.
“That won’t be easy,” he says. “Consumers want a seamless experience but they also want a safe one. A customer-centric approach must drive the decision-making around data management and cloud deployment strategy.”
Compliance is central to this. And, while Kelley admits “it doesn’t always sound sexy,” it is something “at the heart of payments infrastructure”.
He adds: “Continuing to be compliant not only with local regulation but regional regulation, and making sure you’ve got the risk protocols in place and infrastructure in place is key.”