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Monstarlab BFSI Q&A

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Cody:Chris, we know you just deployed a new software to build out an automated offering in theinsurtech space. Can you tell us why you chose this path, and what value it will bring to yourbusiness and your customers?Chris:Yeah, that’s an interesting question that I will try to make succinct. RPA, for people who don’tknow what that is, is robotic process automation. It's a way to automate platforms and systemsin a way that you can, create this holistic, horizontal view integrating platforms and systems. Inthe legacy world that most of us live in, that view is challenging to get. RPA is a way to kind ofautomate and bring together these fairly disjointed platforms and do it fairly quickly.Coincidentally, we’re working with Monstarlab in the Philippines to help us do that. My visionaround that is to take the core group of our back office team members. I think of it as kind ofcreating the ‘Bionic Worker’ where we can digitize and bring technology to them, to make theirlives more efficient and effective. Now, we think about that from the theme of EmbeddedFinance. I spend a lot of time thinking about the customer journey as it relates to the insurancepoint of view but ultimately we are looking at how we integrate these verticals across banking,insurance, healthcare, travel, whatever it might be. The end goal is to try to bring a level ofseamlessness to these areas. RPA is a way to do that.We’re all familiar with APIs, if you think of an API as sort of an idealized state, where we want toget to. A lot of the time, we don’t have that ability, held back by legacy technology, and legacyworkflows that were built by people who have since retired and left, so how do you rebuild andfix that, and cloud technology is a part of that and also RPA.I do want to make a quick comment about something we’re hearing and thinking a lot abouttoday which is ultimately, thinking about the customer, the customer journey and theirperspective.According to Reuters, 74% of people reported experiencing a product or service problem in thepast year, which is more than double the number in 1976 and a 20% jump from 2017.So if you think about how much technology is at our disposal, and yet something is not working.We’re still experiencing this degradation of customer experience, and yet we’re throwing moreand more advanced technology at the problem. So there’s a challenge there.Cody:Michael, your background is in organizational change perspective, how do you think theseadvancing technologies be they ChatGPT, RPAs, how do you see these technologies impactinghow organizations work and how do you see this being navigated over the next few years?Michael:I think there’s two answers to that question. One is how do you get collaboration between thetechnology and the human being, and that’s not the human the customer, how do you get thepeople in your organization and technology to collaborate? Human beings are super good atcollaborating with each other, we’ve done it for thousands of years, if you don’t like working withother people, you die. We’re just not as used to collaborating with technology. We think of

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technology as the thing we instruct it what to do and it does it. Of course technology,conversational AI is now making that easier and makes you think about how you can do that toget good collaboration.The second piece is, how do we take away some of the fears because, again, you see thesemassive changes happen in organizations, technology comes in and the legacy workforce seesit as a threat. How do I spend my time ensuring it doesn’t take my job away? So they’re going tolook for ways to find fault with it. I think it also plays into the customer space, human beings liketo deal with human beings on the stuff where humans add value. How do you spot those piecesof the value chain where a human being delivers insight? How do you spot the pieces of thevalue chain where there actually is no value added, it’s just an exchange of data. So I thinkthat’s the challenge people have to wrestle with. How do we get collaboration to happen andhow do you spot the places where human beings do something better than technology?Cody:Steve, I know that you’re a lead in marketplaces in embedded finance both from your time atVisa and now at SMBC, how do intrepreneurs approach these problems and opportunities?Steve:I think it all comes down to looking through the lens of the problem, working with technology, youdon’t want problems. Problems mean things break, but for someone looking at innovation from aproduct centered aspect, problems are great. That’s where you spend time and unpack what thespecific issues are. It’s all centered around the customer and when you apply this to embeddedfinance, the problem is how you create a more seamless experience. In banking, especiallycommercial and B2B banking, embedded finance isn’t that straight forward. I’ve asked peopleuntil recently, maybe they’re integrating one or two pieces, like accounts payable or somethinglike that but on the consumer side, embedded finance is simple. Uber, Lyft, for example, whenwas the last time you thought about pulling out a credit card and paying for an Uber? Never!That’s the ultimate, right? If we start to embark down the journey of embedded finance, it reallyhas to be about the end user. That could be both the client, or the internal employee. I think wewant to spend time in the problem space and not the solution space. Often when you comeacross a piece of cool new tech, you get all excited for the new tech and that’s the last place youwant to start. So define, where the problem is today, and look at the experiences and today theymay be fractional. Not only do you have experiences within clients that can be embedded or wecan have additional products. How do we get those products into that client’s workflow? That’swhere you want to sit, and build around that. As an example, you can do two things. You canpick some key clients where you have some idea around their problems, and set up a number ofdesign conversations. Which is really just two groups coming together to solve a problem but ifyou do it within an innovation construct, you can run a series of workshops. WIthin a couple ofdays you can actually build out a prototype and the value here isn’t telling the client ormanagement this is possible, it's showing them, demonstrating it to them.It’s critical to enable employees to experiment and spend time focusing on problem solving.

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Cody:As you see how and why the data is becoming so important, how do you think organizationsshould treat internal innovations?Sorcha:The challenge of governing data well is very similar to the challenge of digital transformation ingeneral. It’s another way to look at it. You need to allow people to collaborate and be involvedinstead of the command and control style of management. That relationship today feels moreparental, which people don’t like. What you can do instead is educate around the types of data.Not all data is equal, with a sliding scale of responsibility depending on personal data, financialdata, but also confidential data, trade secrets that you want to protect. And we can say, wellmaybe that is off limits, but did you know for example that when you type a prompt intoChatGPT it’s recording that interaction and stored, and data is an example of a risk there.People from Samsung were caught feeding it code to check, and exposed a risk for Samsungso there have to be some logical safeguards for the organization. There are ways to work withpublicly available data sets, or synthetic data which is a great solution for privacy. Use thesedata sources to get started because if you keep a very risk averse approach, you’re going to fallbehind and you’re going to disengage with your workforce. I’ve seen it work in organizationsbefore where they have an innovation team allowed to kind of do their own thing, which I don’tthink really works, because it can create an “us and them” culture, so it’s more about havingsome principles, and parameters, not necessarily policies, but here, in this safe space, you canexperiment.Outside question:It seems like, if you get really good at it, embedded finance creates some of the silos that we’retrying to avoid. You get really good at solving insurance and that gets really sticky, banking issticky, but how do companies outside of the bank plug into that data to simplify customer’slives?Kevin T:I’ve seen it done well at a big bank where they created an innovation team separately, and itwas a disaster. I’ve seen another model like Lloyd’s who are investing in the companies thatsolve problems in the bank. A lot of the time, an organization will be stand-alone, one of the bestopen banking platforms in the world, and they have two teams. A knowledge transfer from theinnovation team flows into the organization to upskill key people, adopting agile and innovation.You can solve a lot of the back end bank problems while embedding entrepreneurs and fintechinto the organization. So you wind up with maybe folks coming to work with flip-flops and purplehair working with the suit and tie crowd and that can impact the culture. So you have bakingpeople working inside of fintech, who could seek out on their own, and you can survive osmosisthat way. You haven’t killed the startup, in fact you’re paying them an invoice, as well asinvestment.I’ve also seen it done really badly too, where you create silos like we’ve talked about.

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Outside question:Are there examples from other countries of companies doing this really well? The #1 embeddedfinance leader and they’re doing so well with it that government’s bought in, they're centralizingcertain databases, managing the cybersecurity?Kevin T:Australia. It’s not on a scaled environment, it’s testable, and easy with three major regions and atight audience of 28 million, so they’re building there and they have legislation called citizens'data right’s which basically says, any data any organization collects is citizen’s data. And if theyrequest it to move from one place to another, that’s the law. That’s the overarching piece. Theymoved it away from big companies saying I own that debt asset to the individual who wantsthe data.Steve:I’m just gonna add, I think the concept of embedded banking or finance isn't about this orthat app out there. That’s what the consumer is looking for, and yes banking is important,but the opportunity lies in solving client problems.I think better banking, better finance, is stillvery early and I think it's all about solving customer problems. And so it's really, how do youremove friction?How do you build deeper stickier relationships?Once you start getting those activities, those transactions flowing now you can start runningmachine learning on the top, you can start now building products, in addition to what you'reactually doing. I think when you look at this, it's really solving problems for your customers.Chris:Another thing I'll just throw out there is one way that we're trying to kind of look at thebanking, consumer and the insurance consumer and kind of bring them both together, I’'vebeen working with a startup in Thailand and we created our own bank.So we're like, ok, let's just build our own one. We have a Neo bank that we have launchedas a digital bank, actively taking deposits and now we're in the process of building thecarrier on the insurance side as well. So the ultimate vision is on the banking side as aconsumer, you come in and bank with us and then you also have the incentive throughreduced premiums and so forth to ensure to be insured with us as well and vice versa.If you, if you bank with us and you're insured with us, We're looking at using smartcontracts, Blockchain as a way to automate some of the claims handling as part of thatjourney. So the idea being, we're looking to own the entire kind of banking and insurancepartnership. And then look ultimately on top of that, things like travel and possiblyhealthcare as well.

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Michael:That is where regulation starts to become one of our challenges because these ideas areonly beneficial to the degree that regulators have the ability to understand and regulatewhat’s going on and of course, that's the Australian slow down.So all together you’ve got this very complex thing, regulated by regulators who barelyunderstand it.Chris:From a technology point of view, I think regulators have a minefield at the moment in termsof understanding where AI and machine learning, the visibility of all of it, the transparency,how is the decision, how is a claim decided where you have layers and layers of algorithmsand so forth? It’s very much a challenge. Personally, for us starting within a small testmarket, building a product that works and functions as we think it should correctly, then wecan start to kind of bring that to the regulatory space and say, hey, we built this, what do weneed to do to kind of satisfy those regulatory needs? I think when it comes to the US, that'sgoing to be a much bigger problem because you have the space and various various bodiesto deal with it.Sorcha:It’s also a kind of natural fact where regulations are going to run 10, 15 years behind thereality. But what we've seen in Europe is where they had a very kind of legal centricapproach to the GDPR implementations. I think now it's less about the focus on recordkeeping and on the build of documentation, and more focus on how we apply these policiesat that point rather than the kind of top down approach of having the CEO telling theorganization to follow these policies. We're shifting more towards engineering and securityengineering so as office leaders in the space where they are trying to come up with thesolution and then kind of pull the regulator up to speed so that it's almost kind of baking inthe back. The regulations are going to be a little bit clunky, legal based.So the privacy by design, it's hand in hand with design thinking, obviously in the solutions,we kind of preempt the regulations catching on later.Chris:I would say we also see much more cooperation from government entities and bodies aswell. In Thailand, they have a sandbox where essentially you can build products and test itand make sure that it does meet all the regulatory demand. So I think there's a bit moreversatility than perhaps there used to be.

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Cody:Sorcha, where do you see the near and let's say the far horizon for privacy and how do youaccommodate most of your clients needs in this field knowing that things are changing soquickly?Sorcha:Yes, it's such an exciting space, and in the last five years as I previously worked on DigitalTransformation and shifted into data and security because when I was first talking about it,they were like privacy, you know, GDPR, and their eyes glazed over a bit.But now privacy has just become much more important for individuals.So we've got this kind of ground up approach where people are much more aware of howtheir data is used and there might be a commercial element to that. There might be, I don'twant to share this or I do want to share this information because it makes my life easier.It's really kind of opened up a real global debate. We've also had, you know, numerousCambridge Analytica scandals and all sorts in between.So there's been this massive shift so privacy is going to be playing out for the next 10 yearsAnd so it sort of sits behind where security was and it's just kind of getting bigger andbigger.So what I see in terms of the trends is, it's no longer kind of having the data protectionlawyer and the information security leader, if everything is gonna be pulled together.I'm a security person, I'm a privacy person, and the other trend is, I guess it's part of thechange agenda more. A lot of the companies may have bought a big privacy managementtechnology or big data governance technology and the organization didn’t adopt it.There's thousands of issues and so they're kind of finding solutions to the problem and theyrealize that actually data governance, data management is an incremental change acrossthe whole organization. I'm seeing that it's become part of culture and change.Kevin T:So it’s shifted and saying, look if I share my data with this organization, if it's a syntheticdata asset and you've got 250 of the samples side by side, it means that you will say whatyou get, what data points to use in standard testing.So in a really safe environment, that's pretty fast now that these sort of synthetic assets arein play, and how it’s being used as major corporations relinquish the data, maybe solveinternal problems for themselves, but also for humanity.I say that big because someone like that left and passed some laws that gifted manymillions of records to help fight COVID and create an index around it so the government canmake better decisions.So I think that legislation is going to just open and open and open.

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Cody:In a hypothetical world where you set aside regulation and you set aside the incentive of allof the institutions involved and you just focus on the consumer, whether it's B2C or, or B2B,what shouldn't be embedded if anything?Kevin T:I’ll answer in terms of China, in China and Singapore they’ve adopted different standardsLet’s say, I'm driving on the way back from a conference with four people in the car and it’ssnowing and we have a very bad crash. We’re lucky enough there’s a button in the car thatsignals for help, or you can call from your mobile.Same scenario in China, but let's put it on the water.We have a crash, and now two drones come out the back of the car.One flies down the road to warn drivers there is a crash ahead.The other scans the car, can identify the people in the vehicle, or determine how much fuelremains in the tank. It then sends the paramedic team started to become equipment to beprepared to deal with their specific medical histories.And I think that the reason this is not a current concern is there's about 10 different datapoints and the medical records and all, but they've stacked it up in such a way that says, theend user pays $99 a month for that protection service and it is huge.Now, that's the point where the legislation was started.Nothing is off limits really.Michael:And that's an incredibly benign example here.How do you deal with the 57 year old male obese diabetic who's never gonna get healthinsurance because his exercise records are available to the health insurer.His lifestyle records are available to his credit records and everybody's gonna say sorry,we're not your fit. How do you deal with that the other way around?Kevin:Yeah, that's humanity, isn't it?Find a way to deal with that.Because it's the right thing to do, and there’s a responsibility to take action. And then if youcan build an app that would help, you know, might be a mental health issue that you know,and also try to look at technology and how it can maybe solve that.

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The BBC has a documentary called XXXX about how in Scotland and where we used towork, you asked people to give their medical records, like if they were terminally ill or theyhad rare diseases.And then everyone thought, well, you're not going to give them the medical info for medicalresearch on how fiber cures cancer, and many of them did. Almost everybody gifted theirmedical records.But they said, don't give it to the insurance companies. I don't want that data to impact mychildren and other people. So it's done a clear service in ethics.So I also think that micro loans are a good example of giving people with really high risk andareas a loan, and there's four or five companies out there doing that now.So I think the point is, there's ways to solve this, I haven’t got the best answer for you(Michael).Cody:Steve, how do you feel about the near and future products and looks for global banks andtheir relationship with some of these new fintech organizations or some of the adjacentorganizations that could be partners for some of these large banks.Steve:I think this is almost like the third wave, you know, fintech and banks actually know how towork together but I also think it's a very different world because I think that trust didn't existthe way it is today. I think the VC market over the last, you know, 6 to 8 months haschanged the world a lot. There's a lot of startups at, at every sort of stage that, that don'thave the runway that they once did. I think valuations have dropped, I think they've had topivot from growth to revenue and longer range challenges.So I think there's a big opportunity there. I think the other one in embedded finance is reallyaround transformation.The opportunity is, a better customer experience which you can usethat customer driver and its business outcomes, to drive the business case internally fororganizations to go and invest in the model.To do embedded finance, you either partner with a company that offers the client side ofthat, and on the bank side, we need to upgrade our infrastructure. We need to build APIs.Once we build the APIs, we have to then build that ability to grow and do that, you need rawdata.We need data because all of a sudden now we can start innovating around not just that firstexperience, but what are those other products that we can actually start building where wecan look at machine learning and other new tech.So the whole world to me is starting to open up.

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A lot of smart people start startups, they sit there in the corner, they come up with theseideas and they put it on paper and they create these presentations and the pictures, right?But they've never been out to talk to customers.So my advice is pick a couple of close customers that you can have those relationships withand just start talking about the products, and collaboration.Michael:You can guarantee there is a 19 year old female sitting in Jakarta at this moment creating abusiness that is gonna destroy your institution in 10 years time.So you need to be scared .Cody:Michael, how do consultancies stay ahead of these digital shifts in this rapidly changingworld?Michael:And the quick answer is I think there is a huge competition for the smartest and thebrightest and the most innovative individuals coming from wherever in our wonderfullyconnected world they exist.How do you get those people into an organization like ours or his organization like yours todo that?Thinking to compete with that 19 year old who's kind of thinking about how to fix banking,that's my role and I want to be the master of finance in 10 years time, you go to attractpeople into your organization and they don't exist in the normal places that you’ve gottenused to. They're not coming out of the big universities, they kind of gave that up.They're doing something different. So how do you find them?Kevin T:Just, just a quick question here to Caitlin, what was the quote you had from Barack Obama?Audience member:Yeah, if you don't disrupt your business, someone else will disrupt your business.

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Cody:I’m going to pass to Chris and ask you a very similar question and that is how do you seeinsurance companies, let's say traditional insurance companies partnering with some ofthese more modern organizations to advance their portfolios?Chris:I think the positive of it is that a lot of the legacy carriers, agencies, brokers and so forth aremuch further along now than they were five years ago.Many of the optic cloud technologies have API, so the ability to partner is perhaps there,where before it was not. At my company CoverDesk, we are building a human centeredtechnology lab in the Philippines, and the goal of that is to partner with banks and insurancecompanies and explore these very questions that we're talking about here.How do we create a Human centered insurance experience?That for me is still the key piece.I think we sometimes forget about the customer, the excitement is around the technologyand how do we use Blockchain to do something? We don't know what, we just want to dosomething with it.We’ll find the problems to solve and then work backwards from there.That's the design thinking, that's the lean process mapping, that's all of that cool fun stuff.It is fun, and there's a lot of opportunities.Cody:On that note, one area that I have the least understanding is privacy and as we look atthese problems, when is the right time to bring someone like yourself Sorcha?Sorcha:As early as possible. I think there is this kind of trajectory with a type of startup that theybring in an advisor and then they go a bit bigger and they get maybe SeriesC, and theybring in C-Suite etc…but that's for a general business, for early stage businesses that areprocessing high risk sensitive data, medical data, financial data, it has to be as early aspossible because you're going to bake that stuff in from start as foundational.We do things with startups where they run a PIE or a data collection impact assessmentand it's more than a risk assessment because you're also looking at the architecture andyou're able to kind of look at the pipes and where does that data flow and where are thetraps and all that. If we could make changes and tweaks to the architecture early on, itmeans that they don't build it and then start putting things in later which maybe likeChatGPT, where they’re trying to build in features like that. We know Meta did that.

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So that's not privacy by any standard, that's like your data model is something different, andthen you're trying to fix things later. That's going to cost you more money. As early aspossible, actually bring people in. That doesn't mean that you need to stand up a wholecompliance function but it's important to gather the right stakeholders early.Audience Member:As an individual that sits between the wealthy gen X and the young and hungry, the 11 yearolds, and Gen Z, how do we gain trust from the younger generation? I profoundly feel thatthere's a growing distrust towards institutions, towards developing society by design, that it'sbeen kind of really an accumulation of patchwork after patchwork.As you may know, in South America, the level of distrust is so high in the financial sectorthat young people simply aren't creating gains and they're just bypassing it.They’re making it through their lives using what we in the States would equate to Venmo orPayPal and I think that is a very profound threat.How, how do we remedy that?Kevin T:Look at Brazil. It's the fastest growing open banking country in the world.The reason being you have a lot of the young entrepreneurs coming in or young people areattached to a purpose, be it sustainability and the environment, or economy, and thinking ofwhere people can make an impact but it’s not often a bank. That's the fundamentaldifference.I think that is pretty true of millennials and the movement is historic. My daughter is kind ofan activist and that's all on her mind every day. She used to write on that and write this allbecause we screwed up, big style and not just in Brazil but in many other countries as well.I think gaining that trust back by putting some of the younger generations at the front of theinnovation. Atom Bank is one of the biggest neo banks started by nine interns, the threefounders.He designed the bank from the beginning that was built on trust and designed by youngpeople that were piloted for it.When you go out and hear what they say about banks and mistrust and all of that, you haveto design something different, the banks aren’t going to solve it.That looks like, kids that are going to school, getting access to digital because these kidshaven't got computers at home or a mobile device or wifi for £30 a month.They’re on the bread line. It is a switch to a financial education from us, teaching kids tokids, teaching parents. It’s a completely different animal.I think the question before is about big innovation and it's not just Fintech, it's any tech, it'swell tech, it's clean tech, it's all those things are. There is a big move around green energy

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at the moment about micro financing for alternative energy for rented accommodation. Wedon't fix rented accommodation by the way, we won’t get to NetZero. Not going to happen.That's about giving microloans and tokenizing heat pumps and solar panels that theindividual renting accommodation doesn't own, but it's tokenized and people like me caninvest. I'm getting 16% return on the energy back, which helps with the upfront investment,so that is one way this fits in with grant accommodation.There's one big test in Cardiff at the moment which is mini servers like in the US andGoogle servers and the ground accommodation was for poor people, the heat and theenergy the servers give off provides poor people access to free gas and electric, tiny littlemicro servers.So we have those sorts of ways of financing that and I've got loads of examples. Justplease hook up and let’s create a little community here.Thank you.