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the most valuable commodity on earth today is data how we make it use it move it and protect it my name is david mccall join me today for the qts experience [Music] three two one elizabeth hammackey with u.s bank i am so excited i got you to join me here at the qts experience welcome thank you i'm looking at your title i probably would have been way more nervous if i had read this double checked it senior vice president of i.t strategy and global business services for u.s bank go easy on me today as we have this conversation tell us a little bit about yourself for those of us those in my audience that don't know you okay uh well i'm one of the rare atlanta natives i was born wow i was born at piedmont hospital my father was in the military so we did do a little bit of traveling spent some time in saudi arabia and that was fantastic okay it was a great experience as a child there i don't know that i would have been wanted to have been a woman living in saudi arabia because you can't leave without permission but it was it was a lot of fun and learned a lot and um uh went to got back here to to atlanta uh right before high school so i went to high school up in marietta i went to college at georgia tech um and i have you went to college where at georgia tech what school is that that's the north atlanta the north avenue trade school from back in the day yeah uh that's so funny i i am a friend of mine he's not there anymore but he's a ceo over at accenture and um double major or double masters from tech and i was teasing him one day and you know i'm like you know that's kind of a big deal in school right he's like it's another school you know it just cracks me up you know you you georgia tech genius people oh anyway i don't know i thought i was pretty smart in high school and then i got to georgia tech and realized i was just average so it's a tough place i i told people forever nothing is hard after after tech yeah so if you can if you can get out yeah you know in four or five or more years then you're you're pretty well prepared for just about anything yeah and it's amazing school a lot of folks don't realize it's a georgia public school it is it's very very affordable yeah it's a great deal if you can get in i don't think i would get in now yeah well i don't know about that but it's um it's a tough school it's amazing so you you went to tech and then um spent some time with uh gas company uh doing environmental engineering which was which was very uh very fun terrifying rewarding then um switched to more kind of traditional um engineering and then made this sharp right turn into the computer science area and started working in technology and i've i've been stuck here ever since happily well how did that happen how do you go from this amazing investment in an engineering degree from a prestigious engineering school to i.t because most of us that got into it we could just fit fix the printer cue you know we got the facts working and we're in it yeah how'd you do that oh gosh um you know when i was working with the gas company with our local offices and i was designing regulator stations for for our some of our service centers and i just started to notice how antiquated a lot of the things were that they were doing like they had this this pipe report that they typed on a form right with a typewriter right and you know the secretary is the one who did that i mean we had those back then right um i don't know what you're talking about yeah secretaries or typewriters both we have neither one anymore right now would have to they'd have to search what's a typewriter yeah exactly and um and so i just started to look at the things they were doing very manually and i actually specced out the very first computer for our first service center wow it was a 386. wow and nobody's ever heard of those either so it was and then of course when when gwinnett got one then marietta found out and they were jealous and they said well where's ours so and and my my ascension to it really started with creating an online exact copy of that paper form that they recorded i mean it was so dense with data right and then they put them in a book and then they sent that book around to all the executives to look at and that was that was data analytics back back in the early days so i digit put that on a in it's called p forms um and and i held it up to the to the window to the light to make sure that every single font every everything matched perfectly and i'll tell you the stationery department that we had back then had a fit i mean because i this was it they were all going to be out of a job in a minute right but that was that was how i kind of got started um recognizing problems that people were having and how you could use technology to help solve it and so that just i was just off to the races ever since um it's just been fascinating to see all the changes i um you had me when you said 386. i remember when i had a i don't remember what the hertz was the megahertz were but my 386 was so fast and left skid marks on my desktop oh gosh it's funny we all have stories like that i remember the first pc that i actually ordered for myself from my home and we were having a big discussion about um whether to spring for the extra i think it was 96 versus 48 and they said oh you'll never need more than 48. right yeah and you look back at that now and now we're in the you know gigabyte tear you know it's just picobytes i don't even know how high we can count now we just save it to the cloud yeah infinite storage my dad worked for um ibm forever and part of his career good portion of his career he was a manager on the shuttle for ibm and then later the space station for boeing and um i remember i called him up and it was probably before my 386. i was so excited you know i can't believe i i bought this computer i bought it through like american express like 2600 bucks you know it was ridiculous i can't remember what and this was a long time ago so that's probably like ten thousand dollars now but i bought this computer and i was walking through the specs and uh he was he was super impressed that it had um you know the uh five and a quarter and a three and a half inch dual floppy drive sexy that's right four color monitor dot matrix printer which by the way if we had a dot matrix printer go off now we would engage the active shooter protocol if anybody in here heard that yeah it hit the ground but i remember telling him it had a 40 megabyte hard drive and he was like have you lost your mind you will never use 40 megabytes and we all have kind of stories like that yeah to correlate that um i have three um mostly adult you know 17 19 and 21 year old daughters and they were all telling war stories about the first phone they got i remember when my phone was you know whatever they didn't even know what a pager was or you had a pager where you know words would show up you're like and i'm uptown so anyway well i still miss my blackberry oh yeah i like the tactile buttons uh so i don't because i was desktop support and admin then and we had that was in the era when i had just gotten almost i was at the university of texas all of my um word uh entry people off of wordperfect to use microsoft word we had just converted from microsoft post office to uh exchange and off of windows for work groups to um novell and ipxspx and this is pre nt services and my chairman got a blackberry and it was the bane of my existence trying to get it to sync with exchange in the beginning and just work and you know because nobody you know these were analog people trying to get into the digital age and it was just so uh different it's different than if you're explaining somebody how to use an ipad pro from the ip ipad one or two they understand pixels and 1080p versus 720 or whatever you know and throughput but they don't you know if you gave a tablet to sir isaac newton as genius as he was he'd think it was magic you know look at these colors how can you how can you look at this and that's what my world was like it was a rough lumpy time it was a long time ago i dated myself but it was fun well i just found my blackberry just the other day very i was cleaning out drawers those junk drawers and i have to tell you i was i i don't have the cords don't know how to charge it don't even remember how to get into the thing because it's been sitting there for so long and and people were saying oh you can't just throw it away because you know you got to wipe it and and i couldn't do that so i took a hammer to it i swear to you i hit that thing as hard as i could in the garage probably 10 times screen didn't crack that would have been apple apple could probably learn a little bit from blackberry who's still in business i know i like this never i know or the one that uh there's a class action about uh battery life i know right well and every time you drop it you have to get a new one so it's actually marketing genius yeah it is uh you know pretty cool yeah so uh again thank you for joining me i'm really curious about um you know one of the things that we talked about offline before you came in was uh innovation and that means so many things to so many people but i'm really interested in um you know and we could tackle this however you want to tackle it in your role today as you look at you know the strategy and the tactics to employ the strategy for u.s bank i mean um i have a friend that is in the warehousing and reward housing business so i hear just a little bit one of the common themes that i hear is man there's just we have some tools that are very sophisticated and we have some tools that we use that are just you know it's like two styrofoam cups and a string pulled together because i think that in the banking community they're cautious we're dealing with money i mean there's a culture of um and i don't mind i mean it's my money and it and then you add to that data and privacy and you know all the i suppose if you rolled in health then you have the trifecta of all the things that are most important that you treasure and take care of um but what does innovation mean today for you guys and and um and we could talk a little bit about where you're going with it where you've been with it what are things that are interesting to you wherever you want to go but i'm really curious to hear that story yeah thank you well we have um i i'm really proud of our of our own personal journey on the innovation track about three years ago um one of the guys on my team jose rivera and i were sitting down talking and i i i'm not i share this pretty often but the genesis of our technology innovation lab really came out of just jealousy to be totally honest with you yes absolutely so you know we have we have a terrific product and innovation group uh the grove that um always gets a lot of press and hype and um you know people talk about how fabulous all the work they do is and it absolutely is fantastic building you know uh products for the payments industry elevon is the is the business line under us bank that we support and so they do a lot of really neat stuff um and then on our side of the technology uh equation um a little bit more of the legacy big what i call weapon systems our core transaction processing platforms things that you know let you swipe credit cards in stores buy things and then so that we can move the money to the to the merchants that we support so that's all really important work but we were doing some pretty innovative things in that in our space as well and so i really wanted to find a way to market and get credit for some of the innovation that we were doing on uh within our our own organization um very complementary to what product was working on but this is more kind of the you know like i said the weapon systems of the company and so we came up with this idea and originally it was just kind of a marketing wrapper that we wanted to put around all the things that we were doing and we had just started a robotics project and i mean a real robot a mechanical robotic arm to help us with credit card testing which is as you can imagine if you have to go through hundreds of swipes and taps and pins and over and over and over again that's really boring redundant work and so we thought let's let's see if we can get a robot to do that and so it's like how do we how do we really get credit for that and so we had a lot of wait did you build the robot um we partnered with infosys and they they built it for us okay um so the team did a fantastic job specking out the whole process um you know we have a camera that now does um ocr optical character recognition so it will automatically advance to the next step based on what the the pin pad the terminal that you put your card into it the arm grabs a card programs the card inserts it swipes tap does i mean does the whole thing it's fantastic and of course her name's ellie okay um and she never gets tired right so occasionally we have to upgrade her but um but she's pretty amazing and so we're really starting to get a lot of benefit from her though i especially since i have three teenage daughters i just heard an arm that has a debit card that never gets tired i know i know my bank account training but anyway so you guys yeah that came up with the yeah so we came up with the concept for the the technology you know innovation we called it the greenhouse and it was um let's grow ideas that was the tagline for the greenhouse and so it that just sort of slowly started to evolve into a set of services that the the lab and the team provide to to the bank um and we also are just getting ready to do our very first um sort of community give back and we're going to host a design thinking workshop for a non-profit in atlanta um so i have we've always wanted to we always try to the bank is really great about community service community outreach and so this is you know something that the lab can do to give back a little bit to the community and and so we're going to be bringing in the alma g davis foundation to do do a workshop with them and i'm really excited about that so um well that sounds amazing yeah but i i i'm curious how do you um how do you persuade a bank to say um you know what i love the idea of an innovation lab one let me give you capital to do it um and two um you know go and let your fertile minds explore you know they tend to be risk adverse in my experience and they're they're watching where um it's not that they're not smart capable people obviously they are but they're uh they don't tend to be at the forefront of entrepreneurial new how did you or your group persuade them to try it um we didn't we just did it oh and uh ask for forgiveness yeah well it actually it it it brought a new term into our vocabulary trench warfare and uh it was the the team that runs the lab jose and and the rest of the group they it was a hard fought battle it's not that we were doing anything risky because the greenhouse has a totally separate network completely segregated from the bank but we had a lot of groups particularly in security [Music] who just wanted to say no right and they wanted to put up so many roadblocks you know and again they're doing their job the bank is extremely conservative and and they have a fabulous reputation customers trust them absolutely never would want to do anything to disrupt any of that um but it was it was hard it was a hard-fought battle we spent a lot of time i'll call it negotiating with security we had folks that would come down and they'd want to see the physical space and they said we need to have badges we need to come in anytime we want we don't want to have to let you know and we said no this is the place of business and this is and we also were co-located with another company so we had to really kind of um we had to toughen up pretty fast to be able to get through that and and i was just almost on the periphery of it because um when we started putting in that network and dropping in a you know an internet connection and we wanted wi-fi and all those things i mean every single thing we wanted to do was you know we had to negotiate with 15 different groups and and finally kind of almost bulldoze our way into get making it happen and then finally we had been up and running had a few successes started to build some momentum within the bank started to have repeat customers come in and say hey we had such a great experience last time we want to do it again and now we show up in press releases and the greenhouse and the grove are both on the metro atlanta chamber of commerce um list of innovation centers in atlanta so we say we're now officially on the map so we're super proud about that and the jose and the team have just done a fantastic job and so they have a whole set of services that they offer and they're continuing to evolve those services but i think one of the one of the most recent and kind of coolest things um that they've been working on is jose tries to he's always sourcing new partners so we have a couple of established kind of traditional app dev partners that we work with that make an investment in the greenhouse so when we talk about you asked about how do we get funding we didn't get any funding we still haven't gotten any funding and so we did all of this we self-funded the work i hired a group of folks to run what was originally my advanced testing practice kind of to try to be out in front looking for new better ways to test our software using ai type software packages and things and so they were doing this sort of off the sides of their desk in addition to their day job and until they had gotten enough success and had street creds as i like to call it you know they were kind of doing doing two jobs so they were really passionate about innovation really wanted to make this thing work and probably about six or eight months ago i was able to transition the last of their kind of traditional role to other folks in my organization and now they they do innovation full-time so so this was truly i mean self-funded with you know a lot of sweat equity and a lot of hard work by that team now do they innovate just for themselves or for the industry or i mean for themselves for us bank or yeah well right now um you know we have a kind of an aim small miss small approach so we don't ever want to try to buy it off more than we can chew we keep the lab really small on purpose um we don't want them to become a target right you know for absolutely reductions or whatever so they're kind of there's a lean and mean team right um but they right now they're really doing a lot of work for um the other the sort of more official innovation group that supports u.s bank and they really focus on horizon 2 and horizon 3. so things that nobody's thought of yet they're thinking of um using technology and or or anything in a whole new way a way that's never been done before and we really focus on what we call horizon one which is taking existing technology and using it either for the first time in our organization or using it in a little bit of a new way so of course robotic automation's been an automobile manufacturing for forever right and it exists in a lot of places and now we have one that helps us with credit card testing right that's exactly what i was thinking about was well there's a horizon one we have a process that's in place how can we take ideas that exist maybe improve upon them but bring it to our industry and um you know realize a level of efficiency and um uh is that even the even the innovation lab um that you started off talking about the sort of the big brother they got more is that always been part of the banking industry's uh nomenclature because i i don't recall if somebody said what do you think the source of groups are i um that a bank would have innovation labs would not be one of them i would presume that vendors would come and say we see a need in your business we've innovated uh it wouldn't have occurred to me that they have their own teams is that a newer phenomenon been around forever um you know i think that a lot of banks have centers of innovation so you can either have a very distributed model for innovation where all teams have sort of in their annual objectives to try to carve out a little bit of time to to be innovative and creative and to try to find some new solutions that's really hard to do i went to the stanford university innovative i.t leader program actually jose and i both went that was a six-day program it was fantastic and they talk about uh creating a an orange triangle in a big blue box so the big blue box is like u.s bank and orange triangle is our little lab and just how you have to almost you have to protect it from harm from people who want to shut it down who think it's too scary too risky and also just keeping it small and nimble enough so that it doesn't become just an extension of development right where people want to demand manage what you're working on and you lose your autonomy and one of the things i think is really great about the lab is they get to decide for themselves what they work on so if they have something come in and they look at it and they go that's not a fit for us we don't do product development and if product comes to us and says can you help us figure out if this a solution to a problem that we can't seem to solve or if can we do a proof of technology to see if this software package or capability will even work for us then we'll do those kinds of things but we don't necessarily innovate product from scratch so we try to create not compete right and so we try we get business lines and sales groups that come in with a problem and then we help them solve that problem that's amazing i i is this pretty common with the banks of u.s bank or bigger size uh well i know that um we spent some time talking to the head of innovation at first data which is now spy serve and they you know they have a whole they had a whole floor where that's very similar kind of strategy they started small and then got a little bigger and they they take on business problems i know that um uh we just were at an event um anthem which i know is healthcare they have a huge they're building a whole building just for innovation we spent some time with honeywell and that's not banking but it's hvac you know building equipment and they're innovating like crazy doing some amazing things with smart cities and smart buildings so so i think banks traditionally um i would i would expect that many of them have innovation it may look a little different um i think u.s bank might be a little bit unique in that they've got a whole practice around that dominic ventura runs um the innovation group which again horizon two and horizon three and then you know originally they would go work with startups or third parties to do their kind of horizon one work because they didn't have a facility so when we were able to build the dedicated separate isolated infrastructure that allows us to kind of play with stuff without having to go through the tprm process or which is you know third-party risk management get everything approved and spend a bunch of money only to find out that something isn't going to work we were very attractive so we're there we're their in-house you know lab when they used to have to go outside to get those capabilities right where um i heard some i want you to react to something i heard um i think it was last year tim cook was on um what's the analyst's name who's on uh cnbc kramer jim cramer's at his name the buy it now i forget his name anyway tim cook was on there he's interviewing him and tim said something i may get the sentence wrong but something like look if in 20 years you don't think of apple as a health care company you know we're not doing something right we we missed i thought what what do you mean apple is a healthcare company and as i asked around and i looked into it further i think what he meant was in the wearables market and so when you're talking about innovation here's somebody that you could um you know whether you classify apple as a uh computer company which is what they were originally known as a computer company or um as a communications company or as a entertainment company or what you know there are all these different labels that people would want to apply to them um you know one of the things that he thought of or at least the way that i understood it was we really want to innovate so that we can get into healthcare through wearables and through you know the way that it it communicates you know your um your body's your ecosystem and how do we help human flourishing and whatever and i thought wow what a you know i would think it's how do we make this the glass not break which i'm sure is part of it when you drop it or the battery lasts longer or whatever but but to to you know have this paradigm shift of where do we want to go and and while there's a whereas obviously there's a business underneath it but we've got this big idea on how we help human beings we help our shareholders we help our employees we whatever it's is there i don't know if it's in the banking industry we haven't rehearsed this so i mean it says that but is there you know is there a seismic shift going on in banking because once upon a time um you know i i was chuckling uh i forgot we were going to be talking today when um last night or a couple nights ago i was helping my um two college kids with their taxes we were depositing some stuff they don't even know where their bank branch is they just do it all on their phone and their whatever and they waive it and they deposit it and you know their checks automatically deposited and while we had direct deposit two decades ago or three decades ago the idea of putting a check even ten years ago five years ago maybe um to have made it so much easier to do financial transactions it just it you know i take it so for granted just blowing my mind is there any anything you could think of that the banking industry is picking around now or that you're like wow that's really really cool i wonder where we're going with that yeah well it's interesting so banking and in payments there's a lot of disruptors in the payment space i remember having a conversation with our then ceo of elvon and square had just come out oh yeah and everybody kind of went and yeah it's micropayments who cares yeah and and now look at how disruptive you know they've become and how they've they've set the gold standard for a lot of aspects of payments and customer service and not needing a call center because your product's so solid yeah and how simple it is and i you know the days of complicated websites and having to send out manuals and having giant you know help files you know on the on the um on the site to teach customers how to use your stuff or just those are the dinosaurs those are the ones that are going to die you know in i think person-to-person payments is really disruptive it disintermediates the card brands uh u.s bank is part of a consortium that developed zell just like venmo if you use those i love those um especially for people who you know i don't know how often this happened to you you get a phone call and you're at work and your kid is somewhere else and they say i need 20 bucks right uh right no right there's no way to get you 20 bucks until until they you know unless you're gonna get them a debit card and when they're really young you know they're eight 10 12 years old it's like what do you need 20 bucks for um well well so-and-so's mom's taking us through the movie so right you know just how do you get someone cash or how do you give the money unless you give them a card so there's just a lot of changes i think that are coming in banking and and financial services and the payments industry in particular i i can't wait for the day and i i know our part of our company that does credit cards will hate this but i don't want to have a physical credit card yeah at all yeah um they're so easy to copy steal yeah um you're hitting close to home yes two weeks ago i took a colleague out to dinner we went to a lovely little pho restaurant right up the street i drive a big truck and um parked in a mostly empty parking lot but well lit came out an hour later my truck had been broken into with my briefcase that had been behind tinted windows you couldn't see anything down below gone with my income tax and my uh all kinds of goodies they were on my laptop they weren't the paper forms were in there they were on my laptop which was locked and secure you know digitally but i rushed home while calling the police to file my report and logged into my password manager and i was thinking man you know it would and it was hard because i use a lot of cloud services on my device and there wasn't a uniform disconnect all right whatever and so another that's almost a form of digital but whether it's a credit card or my kid it's less about um my oldest in particular she doesn't have her heart stolen it has been washed 700 times it has been misplaced too many times she is gonna be so mad at me she's like i love her to death but it is you know some people are really good at holding on to that stuff and some not and um just one less thing to keep up with and so uh you got to keep up with your phone but that's glued to them you know that it's a symbiotic part of their body right um yeah i walked out of a hotel in phoenix and left my purse sitting on the table in the lobby got all the way back to atlanta walked up to my car my car door didn't magically open and i just went uh-oh and i i was convinced someone in the crown room stole it out of my backpack that's i just became crazed driver's license all my credit cards debit cards i mean it was i was hysterical yeah on the phone for two hours canceling everything that's no fun and then realized hmm was the last time i maybe so i called the hotel they're like oh yeah we've got it we saw that there was a hotel key in your wallet right and it's like and you didn't think to call me yeah you had my number yeah um oh i was very very disappointed in that customer service it's kind of like finding your lost child oh you're so relieved but you're furious and you're so serious at the same time oh yeah it's uh um you want to strangle them and kiss them at the same time and thank every under the sun yeah i know i know that emotion and feeling what are some of the um you know we've talked about some of the disrupters but a lot of folks that i have on here so far i love to ask them what are they thinking about that probably those of us not in the industry wouldn't be thinking about that whether it's um you know when you mentioned ai earlier and uh i talked to a lot of i am not an ai expert or a machine learning expert um i don't know if there are any out there one of my favorite um guy he's the um oh gosh his name's melvin greer and melvin and i have done some panels together he's a um chief data scientist for intel and i was teasing one time and i said you know what's that what's the most powerful form of ai or computer or whatever that you and he said you know well the most powerful machine on earth is a human brain i thought well maybe there's some hope for that and he's not particularly concerned about the robot showing up anytime tomorrow but he will talk about you know there are some ai and um uh analytics and automation are going to disrupt industries as they always have you know a hundred years ago 98 of our communities were farmers or related to the farming industry and one percent less than one percent is now so businesses change things change um they adapt as you think about the industry that you're in and how technology or even you know the way people consume the services are changing that you guys are thinking about what are some of those things that you're trying to innovate around or think about well we just um we invested pretty heavily in the lab in in creating um a connection to one of our partners so that we could take advantage of all of their sort of big data hadoop type capabilities and we just recently partnered with pitney bowes so we now have all of their data in the lab and they've they're allowing us to use that data to just experiment so it's not as much for us about what are we thinking about it's what are we trying to learn and so one of the things that the lab is is challenged to do is to be looking at these exponential technologies research those understand how they might be relevant to our business so that when a problem comes in the front oor we'll say ah this might be a really good candidate for ai or something like that um so the pitney bose date is really really interesting we're starting just starting to do some work to create a pci compliant environment so that we can actually start to apply some of these technologies to our own data and never get in trouble with our auditors right keep everything safe secure compliant et cetera but i think using i think you know with uh this quantum computing we've uh we're doing they're doing some research on that in the lab and understanding 5g and edge computing and data latency is going to largely be handled and so having the ability to get access to a lot of data and store it or have it in a cloud and then be able to access it and then manipulate manage that i think it's going to allow us to do a lot more experimentation that might lead to a eureka moment right to something that that we haven't thought of yet have you guys ever worked with the uh nvidia people i don't think so so we have my group hasn't okay the bank may have do you know who nvidia is they are um uh if you have any gamers in your family uh they know who nvidia is that's how i knew them back in the um 90s and early 2000s so they my experience with them first exposure to them was they made some of the best video gaming cards uh in the business so if you wanted to be the whether it's the racing or the shoot-em-up or the knight elf lord you know attacking the orcs or whatever you wanted to have a card by nvidia well they among other business units um they've really um they discovered and i may screw this up a little bit but they saw the bitcoin people start taking these cards meant for gaming and ray tracing with 3d modeling and other things and they were using the compute power to do uh bitcoin mining well nvidia sees this and not only do they make this product set but they really get into they make um gpu cards probably the leading most powerful gpu cards on earth for ai and machine learning applications and so um they're big proponents of uh you know if you're a new startup start in the cloud like why would you build infrastructure go start in the cloud and the big cloud providers absolutely do dana mining or whatever but if you're in order to do real data crunching the data has to live next to the devices that are doing the crunching this is their premise and so they have this thing they call the round trip which is your business starts off here but some components are eventually going to end up back at a co-location where you're going to have gear like theirs i've been out to their facility in their santa clara san jose and it's phenomenal what they're doing um but they are looking they look to partner with people in industries that they may not be in yet to see how their infrastructure and their technology can help them they they love to work with innovation groups how can we you know a small rack they are exploring into liquid cooling and actually they are leading pioneering into liquid cooling um within these small environments as people are developing if you've got big data sets and you want to experiment they'd love to see their gear crunching on that and get your feedback and then how can you help them because it might be an industry that they're interested in getting into and they're really pretty open-minded with that and you know they're not a big chipmaker like a intel or amd but they're one of the largest certainly they're the largest in their uh space around ai and machine learning uh in developing the infrastructure to make that happen so that might be somebody fun to introduce you guys to but they are constantly looking for and i see this a lot as when we talk about innovation how do these groups that are sort of um you know they don't appear to be uh quick partners like why would i why would the video game card company talk to the banking company because we're trying to solve you know similar things although it may be going about it a little bit differently and so they're really cool people over there yeah that would be great yeah i'd love to get in touch with them but it's it's a little scary though coming out of their lab because on the one hand you're like wow that's amazing on the other hand you call up your wife babe we gotta get off the grid like the robots are coming this is wait what country are they doing that ai face recognition i mean it's um you know some of the stuff out there is really pretty uh um you know as i started off sort of like preamble with how valuable i think data is it can be used for forces of good it could be used for forces of evil so yeah you know i know i was just watching a ted talks um the other day on it was a guy was talking about hackers and he demonstrated in in the in the ted talk the hacking that they i mean they were doing it almost real time in the in the meeting uh or in the session it was pretty amazing and just something like the key fob on your car yeah talked about going through a parking lot and just click click click click click click click and eventually somebody's car opens yeah um it's you know i went to an ethical hacker um event and in new york city a couple years ago and it was fantastic i loved it it's really interesting group of people they think differently they really do yeah how can i break it how can i break in do you know how how can i make it do something it's not supposed to do that was kind of his point what i i would say a different my perspective was i'd say it a little bit differently how can i solve this puzzle yeah they were all puzzle solvers and the harder the puzzle the more interesting uh you know they didn't seem to but anyway one of the groups that was there absolutely terrified us or me anyway and they talked about the vulnerability of the global health care system and there's a big healthcare thing going on now and as you and i know working in i.t especially i worked at the university of texas medical brand so i worked for the big healthcare arm out on galveston island for the university of texas where they had medical school and um big giant operating hospital and tens of thousands of students really interesting and uh many times medical is in particular as you move out of the big urban areas and you go into the suburban or out into the hinterlands those medical staffs aren't the it staff at the medical facilities aren't uh they're smart people but they're usually understaffed and underfunded and they illustrated how i think it was in the uk when the wannacry buyers had been out for a while pretty much everybody in the world had mitigated against it but wherever this event happened they showed a couple things how a ransomware attack on a old mitigated um virus that had come along they applied it to this hospital system that had not had the time you know everything that comes into the environment they plug into the internet and so if there's a password it's the default password if there's a username it's the default username and you know you're talking about the key fob just drive around a neighborhood that buys their router from best buy and you could probably log in with admin and p at s you know whatever the generic stuff is and it pretty much wherever you want to go and so they illustrated first this was terrifying about how vulnerable these places were just from a security perspective but then they they took it up 10 notches and what they showed you was in simulated labs this happened they had a they had an environment called an innovation lab where they were simulating a person going into medical distress and the machines were indicating medical distress medical distress and the the doctors and nurses and everybody were trying to save the patient and the patient died they couldn't understand why because the machine had been hacked and was giving them wrong information then they showed and they did this like five times before anybody even thought maybe the machine's hacked oh maybe so they ran into the next room and they got another machine off of where the shelf where they had all been compromised because they had all been honey pots hung off of that same network and they rolled in the new good machine and the next and this was like um not cadavers but dummy you know they have really advanced dummies that they can operate on and do all these simulated things and they failed like six out of eight times before they finally figured out and they just went to old school you know squeezing and bags and medicine and measuring and they were illustrating how vulnerable that is globally spectacularly not just from a security but from technology and understanding we've trained so many technicians on how to read gear but they can't tell if it's been compromised or not and can't read the patient can't read the patient and it was a couple combination of things people in distress where the machine was giving you false information but also where the machine for a perfectly healthy person the machine was saying oh they're in distress so they run in to treat them and all of a sudden they go into distress and the machine starts to say it's okay but obviously physically they're not they can see it but they can't they would just they would get just tied up and then you've got two it people for this you know 100 bed hospital um and they'd come in like it was i was like why would you show us this this is terrifying and that's kind of the world we we live in this world of these amazing blessings and we're talking about 5g and um the edge and what does the edge mean to who and how is all this work and autonomous vehicles and innovation at the same time but but to be to totally go in an opposite direction yeah but what's occupying almost all the airwaves right now probably a million year old virus yeah probably a millionaire eurovir and look at how much is disrupting oh but yeah one of the cool things that i so so i tend to be an octopus yes and yeah i think it's changing you know as we're all evaluating what's going on in our in the real world today we're talking about um profitability of the fortune 500 and all these other things and pilots aren't furlough and you know they still got bills to pay and kids in japan aren't going to school and china's got stuff shut down like all of these all this disruption but you know when i'm sure you've heard this before when people talk about 5g the single most common thing i hear is what's the business case how are we going to how we're going to spend whatever the estimated number is i've heard 180 billion i don't know what the number is but a big number how are we going to roll this out other than in stadiums other than in user experience places like how are you going to roll this out everywhere much less solve the problems of penetrating walls and all the other things getting networks to play nice together well what if you have an event come along that immobilizes 100 million 200 million global workers and disrupts the economy of the largest most profitable companies on earth how does that change the social infrastructure of work from home policies or so that you can operate your bank or your data center or whatever securely in a pci or hipaa compliant or gdpr or whatever the compliance um policy how's it gonna affect policy to where i can securely operate it without making myself vulnerable how do we do we change workgroups to where they're much smaller do we farm out all of our sourcing to one big giant workforce or do we pull some of it back or do we distribute it but if we want to talk about something that's a business case for rolling out high capacity highly secure connectivity infrastructure this seems like a pretty interesting you know yeah let's not miss this opportunity to take advantage of it well we all lived through snowmageddon and we all had to work from home yeah once we got home after we walked 10 miles both ways in the snow yeah and we just actually did on monday we did our um a small simulation of if the coronavirus really does wipe out the ability to come in to work and everybody is self quarantined working from home yeah anything it could be anything right um snowstorms in knoxville have a horrible impact on us that's one of our biggest call centers and when those folks all have to work from home it tests our it tests our metal and our networks right um and our connectivity and we find you know just like every other company you know we need we need more juice right for those you know hopefully once every 10 years but shoot it seems like they're getting to be more frequent they're just different well we've been raining i don't know about the snowpop apocalypse you know people that are built like me we like the snow but it has been raining for freaking ever i started getting nervous when i saw you know this old dude at a boat with rabbits and other things lined up and it kept saying only two you know but you know on the other hand the optimist in me is like what opportunities are in front of us you know whether you're the you're the the new you know you're the latency people like how do we how do we now i've got you know private just think about all those firms that are losing money because they're vulnerable are gonna say okay how do i take money and pour it into my innovation lab how do i take money imported to my groups to help me to solve in a in a different way or partner with the connectivity people for latency things that we hadn't thought of before and and one of the things i saw that if we've been messing around with 5g here lately and we do them in this bottom of cell towers you know it generates a lot more heat than we thought a lot more fiber than we thought so how do we solve that well if it's not a pressing business problem we'll get to it when we get to it but with some of the things that are going on now maybe now we'll get to it so we get all those benefits but again just more opportunity and you know i don't know i tend to i tend to go that way but um we'll see we'll see how it goes uh what else what else are you guys messing around with that we should talk about before i let you go today what's the cool secret stuff oh i can't talk about this [Laughter] is there something over the last 10 or 15 years that's really surprised you that you didn't see coming you know when we were talking before you came here it wasn't so much a technology thing i don't know that this was a surprise but you were really excited about um some of the teams were doing things a little bit differently you're using agile and some other stuff what what's going on with that well it's it's not new it's 40 years old but again banking and finance tends to kind of lag a little bit um you know once you get your your approaches ironed out all the controls in place all the checklists and the checking the checkers it's really hard to change some of that but yeah we just um we just completed sort of having all of our sort of legacy waterfall development approaches all have adopted uh the safe framework um scaled agile so that went really really well and and we're really just there's two kind of from my perspective one of the best things that have come out of that is it gave us an opportunity to upskill our entire workforce so we've taught everyone a whole new set of skills that makes life more interesting for them it makes them more marketable also but that's the price you pay for having an upskilled workforce so that's that's a risk we're absolutely willing to take we've upskilled all of our testers so they're all doing automation first now and so it's you know we're trying to get our workforce ready for some of these more advanced more exponential technologies and get them back in the habit of learning something new right because we've been doing things the same way for so long suntrust i know is in the middle of an agile transformation cox is too ihg i mean it it's not just banking and finance there's just a lot of the larger companies that have big shops are are kind of finally getting on board but it it creates such a better partnership with your your business stakeholders and the people who are generating the problem or bringing the problems in or bringing into new ideas because it's a much more collaborative approach and we have a much much better relation hip with our product organization now than we ever have because we are co-developing everything and we're working together on a daily basis and that's been very exciting and and culturally we're not there yet we haven't fully shifted the way we think about about the world but we are practicing the mechanics and and hopefully the the culture will catch up pretty quickly well it seems pretty remarkable to me um you know you have an organization that is set you know when you were where you're describing you know this this is uh you know we have an organization that looks like this and you know we have these safeguards and and um to affect that change is hard to do but there's a reason why those things are in place right and so i love that thoughtful but just that they're even willing to entertain it and that you um uh you know not only are they innovating to make that happen um but it just creates value for you know not just your shareholders but for your employees you know and and i think that's attractive i you know so many of the great leaders and the great organizations part of their part of their success at least until they lose it is how do i how do i reinvest in you and i make myself vulnerable and you may lose people that you don't want to lose over time but a lot of those people boomerang you know if they if they go out if they have a great experience and you help them with their life and they may be part of that journey as i go out and get more experience and i come back or you meet in another organization it's got to be better than uh to have people with the you know really good ideas that are really trying to be thoughtful um than people that no i want you to be more narrow-minded and be more rigid and just you know history's got a whole bunch of those companies on its ash heap i gotta imagine that doing that that way would be much better yeah well you you when you were talking about apple and becoming a health care company you know just like madonna they are reinventing themselves all the time and i think if companies aren't figuring out what they're going to do next and how they're going to reinvent themselves they they get left behind sure and um you know you've got to stay out in front of how people want to pay for things i mean just look at how disruptive you know uber and airbnb and you know what's next i mean i i want to disrupt the real estate market right um i'm trying to sell my house and i i the thought of the check that we're going to have to write to our agent you know i i love him i hope he sells our house but but you know houses sell themselves on the internet now right so why has that model not changed as well why hasn't it not not evolved they either have to change the value you're getting for the investment that you're giving to this person that's doing it on your behalf because once upon a time you know i don't know how to do this paperwork this is an uncommon thing i don't know how to get into the mls system or get mine like all of this experience and benefit comes uh as a result of this expertise and so i'll pay for that expertise so we have we don't get to title and we have a disaster or whatever i completely get it but if so many of those things have been done for you um that if you want to stay in that business you better find a way to create more value or differentiating value or you just won't you know you're one of the things that i do love though i'll bet about u.s bank and apple are you familiar with simon sinek oh gosh he's one of my favorites so simon sinek talks about apple one of the very first things i ever heard him speak about and he makes this point i'm not gonna go through it but the way the apple marketed their products even though it wasn't the best music player or the best whatever that was kind of the illustration he gave whether it was or not i don't know but he said people bought it because they would say something like um we make products that are beautifully designed that challenge the status quo this happened to be a phone or a computer or a music player you want one now whether they're in healthcare or music or whatever who they are and i'm not i don't own apple stock we're not saying apple i have nothing against their competitors or anything but i love that big idea which is we're about this and u.s bank or any bank if they want to be in business it's probably less about um although it's part of it how easy it is to buy or deposit i mean their core has to be look we're about you having a fantastic and safe experience with your finances that you've worked so hard keep them secure and whatever we're not innovating away from our core tenant of belief that you have an experience around these things in this way we just want to make it easier without losing this other thing or in a way that you want to do business right i think that's where innovation is great whether we're not innovating for the sake of innovating or trying to reinvent ourselves you know he talks about simon sinek talks about the tivo um did you ever use a tivo i had a devos original dvr player i had one and while i'm not a gadget guy i'm a kind of a technology guy sweet mother of pearl yeah to make sure like the the curtains and the sun rays hit that thing just right like it was so finicky to try to it could record 7000 things eventually we relegated it probably to the drawer your blackberry was in and we just used the one that came with the cable company it had one 100th of the features but if i push the button it works which i could teach by then four-year-old or whoever to use they all worked without trouble so anyway i think that's um hopefully as whether it's banking industry or any of these other industries continuing to innovate they remember that core and just keep making cool things yeah um that'd be awesome yeah we're moving a lot more towards the do-it-yourself model um we have a new a new leader um of our digital space derek white and he talks about diy and intelligent interactions and eventually getting to the point to where i mean imagine imagine if you logged into your banking app on your phone and it said hey i recognize you've got ten thousand dollars sitting in your savings account and if you moved it over here you could earn five times the interest rate do you want me to do that you just go sure right or hey mortgage interest rates just went down do you want me to refinance for you and you go heck yeah you know it'd be really cool i mean that would be awesome that'd be cool for stage one that's what would you call it horizon let's call that horizontal one high res two yeah verizon three i'd love for him to make the app where i can go in and tell it what the conditions are so it doesn't even have to ask me if you see in the next 30 days i can move your money and make you three percent more at this risk threshold you want me to just move it for you you want me to just move this over here or do that and check in once a quarter or whatever so long as it's within these parameters that'd be horizon three yeah just do it just work for me right ai making human decisions human-like decisions based upon analytics and intelligence that's what i'd wanna i'd wanna see yeah all right well if that happens i want credit and you got it elizabeth thank you for joining me today i really appreciate it thank you very much all right we'll talk to you soon and thank you for joining us on the qts experience see you next time [Music] you