Transcription:
Penny Crosman (
Welcome to Leaders. I'm Penny Crosman, executive editor of Technology at American Banker. I'm here today with Amy Brady, Chief Information Officer at KeyBank. Amy has done a number of very interesting things with technology at her bank. One thing they've been doing is adopting cloud computing with Google Cloud, and we're going to talk a little bit more about that today. So welcome Amy.
Amy Brady (
It's great to be here.
Penny Crosman (
What are some of your reasons for making the move into cloud computing?
Amy Brady (
Penny, thanks for having me today. Let's start with, we've been on this journey of moving workloads to the cloud for several years, and we've actually had this partnership with Google since about 2017. What we announced recently was an acceleration of that partnership, and I'm very excited about it. The reasons are multifold quite frankly. And the first and foremost, it is the right thing to do for a number of reasons. One, it brings efficiency for us from a technology perspective. Secondly and I'll go into this a little bit more, but secondly, it helps us with our security posture. And in today's day and age, with the ever increasing challenges around cyber security, to have a partner like Google helping you defend your institution, I couldn't think of a better partner to help us do that with the investments they make and the investments we make. It makes us stronger. And then third, being able to leverage their incredible capabilities that they have native to their technologies and then put that together with our knowledge of the industry. That's a powerful combination.
Penny Crosman (
Well, interesting because security I think is always a big question for any bank that's going into the cloud. Do you feel you can kind of outsource the security of your applications to a cloud provider, or are you also involved in adding your own layers of security on top of what they're doing?
Amy Brady (
Yeah, well, absolutely not. As a financial institution, you can never outsource your security. You are absolutely 100% responsible for the security of your data, for the security of your institution, and for the security of your clients. I think as financial institutions, one of the things that we have that is most important is the trust that we have with our clients. And so we would never outsource, if you will. What we can do is leverage the capabilities and the investments that Google makes in their infrastructure, in their cloud native tools to augment the investments that we are making. And they are able to make investments that quite frankly, we could never make. And so you put one plus one together and it's a lot more than one plus one. You put those together and we are much more powerful by doing that. Now you have to be very disciplined in your migration of your applications from your data center into the cloud. And we have developed, I think, a very, very good approach of doing that to make sure that when we migrate, we have enhanced our security posture and as we leverage the cloud for future development and for future analytics and for future innovation, that we maintain that security posture.
Penny Crosman (
Sure, that makes sense. And so you've been doing this for a while, what did you shift to the cloud first? What kinds of applications and workloads?
Amy Brady (
So actually back in a 2015, we started partnering with Google for our devs capabilities where we were launching our ability for our front end portals to be able to deliver our capabilities faster for our clients so we could really deliver our mobile app and our content faster for our clients. So we started there and with Kubernetes and all of the ways that our developers could develop content and really respond to the market faster and develop a better user experience. So that was our first foray with Google and really open source technologies. In about 2017 we moved some of our data to Google in a very controlled way. And what we found there was a pivot point where their advanced analytics tools were something that our analytics community could take a great advantage of to be able to deliver analytics and insights to our clients that would benefit them in a way that we couldn't do on premise.
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And the power of being able to scale that analytics and really power the digital experiences for our client journeys that were differentiating. And so we started that journey in 2017 and when we realized that that was really, as you talk about digitizing your enterprise, you can't do that without analytics and be able to do that with Google and partnering with them in their native environment with their skill sets and their tools just really helps us accelerate that journey. The pandemic really kind of shed a light on the ramping up of having to do that because all of our client segments, the demand really increased. You really went from a lot of our customers kind of saying, Hey, I want to do things digitally, to all of our clients wanting to do things digitally. And we saw the demand increasing and that's never going back. So that was kind of the pivot point of saying, now's the time to accelerate that move. And so we made the agreement with Google to take that partnership even further.
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So it's not really a matter of cost cutting, there are really benefits that you saw beyond what you could do on premise? There's actual added value?
Amy Brady (
Oh, absolutely. I think cost cutting is kind of the ticket to entry, if you will. I mean, it has to be cost neutral, if you will. But quite frankly, that's just, as I said, the ticket to entry. What we see in the future is it's speed to market. It is a way for us to accelerate our digitizing the enterprise strategy. It's a way for us to really scale analytics in a way that we could not do on premises. It's a way for us to differentiate our business strategies. So going to the cloud is not technology for technology's sake. It is absolutely an enabler to our business strategy.
Penny Crosman (
Is there anything you would never move to the cloud? That you would always want to keep in house?
Amy Brady (
Not necessarily. There are technologies that cannot move to the cloud right now. Things that are hosted on the mainframe today cannot move to the cloud. So we will have different alternatives for that. But ultimately no, there is nothing that we will not move to the cloud.
Penny Crosman (
And does this change how you look at vendors, both cloud providers or your other providers?\
Amy Brady (
One of the reasons we chose Google was because we believe in a multi-cloud strategy. And we had already well started that journey as we were down the path on that journey as well. We already had multiple SaaS providers, so software as a service providers that were hosting things for us. And if you think about people like Workday or Salesforce or ncino or you know, could keep going with some of the providers that many of us use. And if you think about Microsoft is a great partner of ours as well. And then we're using IBM's financial services cloud for hosting some other workloads for us. One of the reasons we like Google was they also supported a multi-cloud strategy, which we think is important because you do have to link together best of breed solutions to be able to deliver against your business strategies. And so that's important to be able to link that ecosystem together to deliver against what your clients and your businesses need.
Penny Crosman (
That's interesting. And how do you determine which one will be best for which types of work?
Amy Brady (
It's part of what every tech organization and every business team needs to look at when you're looking at the right solutions to solve whatever the next business strategy is. And again, I think that's important for us. We look at are we going to build the solution? Are we going to partner with a provider to deliver the solution? And that provider may be a large fintech provider, it may be a startup fintech provider, or are we going to buy the solution and then have them deliver that solution? For us, the most important thing is those solutions need to deliver an outcome for our business and for our clients. And they need to be able to do it in a way that's agile and in a way that's responsive to our market and the client demands.
Penny Crosman (
And how does all of this change your work and role as a leader, do you feel? Because I think some people feel threatened like they're going to lose employees, the work is going to shift over to the cloud providers and they feel like there could be a loss of power basically through not having as big of an IT staff. How do you look at that?
Amy Brady (
Actually, we found it very exciting. We started about five years ago a program called Future Ready, and we purposefully launched it across my entire organization, across technology, across back office operations, across our contact centers to really enable the workforce to be the CEOs of their own careers, to see what are the skills needed in the future as we move forward with all these technologies. Because while we may sunset certain technologies we'reactually launching other new technologies and new roles, and so moving to the cloud is opening up a whole new set of technologies that we didn't have before that our engineers are getting to learn. And so they're really energized by that. Or we may develop new solutions, let's say in our fraud area that our operations agents get to learn, our technologists get to learn to deliver and there's a collaboration there that's really exciting. So as a leader, I think you have to demonstrate how does this benefit the employee as well as the institution, as well as the client. Change is good if you can explain how it benefits all the stakeholders and it's exciting and allow the employee time to prepare the skills to embrace that change.
Penny Crosman (
That makes sense. And that maybe could help with recruiting as well.
Amy Brady (
Absolutely.
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People want to learn the latest and greatest and the newest thing, and that's fun. And Google's been a great partner with that as well because they have great curriculum available for our teammates to learn.
Penny Crosman (
Is there anything you've learned through this process that if you had to start over again today, you would do differently?
Amy Brady (
Well, I will say never underestimate the people aspects of things, while we plan for it. I think you can never underestimate how much time it takes people to actually learn the new skills and train for the new skills and give people time to apply those new skills because change is a little threatening and it takes time. So while the technology may be easy to learn, changing new processes, changing habits takes time. So giving teams and organizations the opportunity for that is important. And that extends into your analytics teams, your business teams, your risk teams, your finance teams. All of those organizations have to change as you move work to the cloud.
Penny Crosman (
I think there's much more third party contracts and management.
Amy Brady (
Procurement has to change. I mean, there's tentacles into the entire enterprise as you make these types of transformational moves. It's not just the engineers.
Penny Crosman (
All right. And now shifting gears a little bit can you tell us anything about what you have done as a leader to help your community or to help the bank have an impact in the community?
Amy Brady (
Yeah, so we're doing a lot of things. A couple things that I'm very, very proud of. And first on the workforce front, I would talk about we have launched a program called Tech Ready that is both internal and external, where we're working very hard to make sure that we're helping people reskill both internally from our operations and contact center teammates and putting them through tech boot camps and allowing people to really shift their careers from entry level operations roles into entry level technology roles and changing the trajectory of their career path. And it's exciting because in this program, about 50% of the program are people of color and women, and that's a very underrepresented workforce in technology. So we're very, very proud of that. And we're doing it both internally and partnering with groups externally in the community to help that workforce. So very, very proud of that work. And I think that is important because across the country, quite frankly, we don't have enough technologists to fill the number of open roles.
Penny Crosman (
And just going back to this overall idea of moving a large organization to doing things in a new way, like in cloud computing, how do you pursue an idea like that and make it happen? Do you have any advice on bringing your ideas to execution for those who might struggle with that?
Amy Brady (
Yeah, I think it's important when anytime you're thinking about a forward leaning strategy, something that may be a little bit more transformative, something that may be a little bit edgy is to really think about what is your core mission of your institution? What are the things that your institution is trying to achieve? And tie your bold idea still back to those core goals. Because I've always said, as a technology organization, we're not doing technology for technology's sake. We are implementing technology to drive the outcomes of the institution. And at the center of that for Key, we are helping our communities and our clients thrive. And for us to do that, we have to be able to deliver, in this case, leading edge technologies. And for us to do that as a regional institution, we have to be able to compete and we have to be able to deliver technologies that our clients want to use and want to engage with.
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And we could see, for us to be able to do that in a long term way, getting to the cloud is going to enable us. So it's always tying those bold ideas back to your core mission. I think where people fall down sometimes on these bold ideas is forgetting to bring the stakeholders along and tying it back to what's in it for them. And you've got to start with the mission. And then going back to each of the stakeholder groups, what's in it for them? What's in it for your business partners? What's in it for risk management? What's in it for finance? What's in it for each of the groups? What's in it for your regulators? And making sure that everybody understands and bringing the groups along. So communication is also a big part of it as well.
Penny Crosman (
So you have to sell all these different constituencies.
Amy Brady (
Yeah, I guess there's a bit of selling going on, but yes. Yeah, you do. You have to understand the stakeholder analysis and really bringing them along with you.
Penny Crosman (
Is there any advice you would give to young people starting out today, career wise? What do you think are the qualities and the skills that will be most important to them to get to a level like you are today?
Amy Brady (
Yeah. I think the number one skill for anybody in quite frankly, in financial services or any institution or any industry today, is to never stop learning. I think about what's going on in the world today and in our industry for sure. And the amount of change and the pace of change is it's just incredible. And if you think about the past five years and what it took to be successful, to get any of us to where we are today is probably not what's going to take to get to be successful five years from now. And not because we're not good at what we do, but because the market is changing and technology's changing, and technology is changing how we work, and clients' expectations are changing constantly because they are experiencing something in another industry and then applying it to our industry or vice versa. And so I think we have to be voracious learners to be successful. So that's number one. And number two is don't be afraid to try different roles and put yourself in uncomfortable places and in uncomfortable roles. I always say if you're taking a role that you're a hundred percent qualified for, it's probably not the right next step. You're probably not challenging yourself enough. I look back on my career and some of the roles that made me the most uncomfortable at the time were probably the best stretches in my career and the ones that taught me the most
Penny Crosman (
Interesting. Well, Amy Brady, thank you so much for joining us today.
Amy Brady (
Thanks for having me.