Event Highlights – Winning the Innovation Game | May 13, 2025

Winning the Innovation Game: Modernizing IT Without Disruption
May 13, 2025 | New York

Finance and insurance industry executives are implementing groundbreaking AI, cybersecurity and data management technologies to transform their workplaces at a rapid pace. This event convened industry leaders to: 

• Collaborate on new solutions to some of the thorniest technology issues facing the finance and insurance industries today
• Spark new ideas by engaging with peers
• Amplify best practices to create a safer and more efficient workplace

Speakers:

• • Mike Baker, Senior Vice President, Chief Information & Technology Officer, PGIM
  • Kristen Bessette, Chief Data Officer, Zurich North America
  • Ranjita Iyer, Executive Vice President, NAM Services, Mastercard
  • Sean O’Coiligh, Director, Offensive Cyber Security, Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation
  • Hilary Packer, Executive Vice President & Chief Technology Officer, American Express
  • Jude Schramm, Executive Vice President & Chief Information Officer, Fifth Third Bancorp
  • Milan Shetti, President & CEO, Rocket Software 
  • Patricia Voight, Chief Information Security Officer, Webster Bank
  • Larry Zelvin, Executive Vice President & Head of Financial Crimes Unit, BMO Financial Group 

Bloomberg participants:

• Diksha Gera, Senior Analyst, Global Fintech & Payments, Bloomberg Intelligence 
• Lisa Mateo, Business Correspondent, Bloomberg
• Tomasz Noetzel, Senior Bank Analyst, Bloomberg Intelligence 
• Niraj Patel, Senior Software Analyst, Bloomberg Intelligence

Event Highlights:

Sponsor Opening Remarks

Rocket Software’s 35 years has been focused on mission-critical software for regulated industries. That makes “modernization without disruption” vital, Milan Shetti, President & CEO, stated. “What we have learned is modernization is an evergreen need and an evergreen opportunity. You are never done. You have to continuously be in the process and at the forefront of your industry on modernization.”

Shetti described the three trends of modernization; security—assuring mission critical data is secure and continues to be, connecting technologies with a hybrid cloud environment and, “perhaps the biggest trend of the current year,” using generative AI effectively and non-disruptively while preserving privacy.

Panel Discussion: AI: Transforming Finance & Insurance

The thread of the need for seamless transition was picked up by Kristen Bessette, Chief Data Officer, Zurich North America, who spoke about it in the context of dramatic change. “Things that were cutting edge 18 months ago are commoditized now, so that the cost of buying things is really changing all the time. Part of that challenge is to really understand who your major partners are. Who are the vendors that you really want with those capabilities built in that you can leverage? And then, where do you add that unique value from a building perspective that you can layer on to really drive your agenda forward?”

PGIM views AI implementation in distinct turnings. Mike Baker, Senior Vice President, Chief Information & Technology Officer, described the first as a contained black box that you could talk to. “The second one is where we’re actually marrying things like RPA with AI and now we’re actually able to talk through what’s called MCP out to other things, so now we’re building an ecosystem of automation through AI. The third turning for us is going to be when these things actually start talking together.” That is going to happen around data and analytics, with better insights for portfolio managers.

“But we always have a human in the loop today. We don’t want investment decisions to be made automatically in the process and commit capital without a human in the loop.”

Jude Schramm, Executive Vice President & Chief Information Officer, Fifth Third Bancorp spoke about balancing AI and technology in a financial advisor’s workflow. It’s a relatively slower transition as humans learn to leverage it. The bank’s process includes building AI into their policies and procedures so it can inform things like model risk management and bring more of that capability into advisors’ decision-making criteria.

“But honestly, in the world we live in today, it’s probably a step too far from where we’re going all in on AI, and from a genAI perspective, because we want to understand how we’re going to manage the risk, and the standpoint of interactions with our customers and how we’re advising them.”

Rocket Software Sponsor Spotlight

Sean O’Coiligh, Director, Offensive Cyber Security, Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation has been overseeing continuous penetration testing by the financial market utility for more than a decade. By mimicking bad actors, they observe how threat chains play out. “We’re responsible for quadrillions of transactions per year, millions of transactions per second, so obviously it’s a very critical space.”

Critical extends to choosing software and hardware partners. Those 10 years have included a quest to find the best testers for these “very specialized, restricted segments.”

“It’s really key to form relationships with those guys and work with them year after year. It has certainly been a challenge. It takes us years to validate the need to onboard a vendor, but more to build a relationship with them and understand what their capabilities are. You’ve got to understand their limitations and be able to trust them in those environments.”

AI has been used to do some pen testing components, mainly around surveillance and discovery. Over the next two years, O’Coiligh expects it to evolve to taking a defensive role in security operations. “It’s going to be very interesting to see how that plays out.”

Bloomberg Intelligence Presentation: AI vs. Banks: Seizing a $180 Billion Transformation Opportunity

Tomasz Noetzel, Senior Bank Analyst, Bloomberg Intelligence, presented detailed findings of a survey offered to banks globally. The goal is to give the conversation a grounding in hard data, so Bloomberg asked about AI usage, strategies, innovations, expectations and boundaries, as well as investments and determining ROI. “It is very important to understand this as we want to identify the winners and the losers of the most exciting tech race that banking faces at the moment. Why? Because banks need to invest in AI if they want to be competitive, capital is limited, return on investments is very difficult to measure, and blindly following the crowd might prove to be a very costly strategy for many banks globally.”

Survey results include that more than 40% of banks expect transformation to increase their cost base while also bolstering productivity gains as an offset. Responses also answer Noetzel’s opening question: Is AI hype, or opportunity?

“We believe that AI is a transformative force, but the $180 billion upside is very much conditional. For the banks to capture this opportunity, they have to commit capital through the cycle, not around the cycle.”

In Conversation With Hilary Packer

Embracing continuous modernization is actually the best way to avoid disruption—an intriguing spin from Hilary Packer, Executive Vice President & Chief Technology Officer at American Express.

She offered the analogy of updating cell phones and how intimidating that used to be; the time and the fear that by doing it yourself, your phone might end up being a “brick.” Today, we don’t think twice about it. “Now think of your software stack. The more continuously you modernize the less risky and the less of a challenge it is. At American Express, we don’t think of it as a one-time event that happens every 10 years. We think about a continuous investment in that we actually invest 25% of our technology funding into modernizing our platforms. We thought in advance about a multi-year investment and we said, ‘Let’s commit to it. Let’s not say we’re funding year one and then good luck in year two’.”

 What keeps her up at night? Not a worry, but excitement over agentic AI. “Anyone heard the word agentic? Anyone? It’s having AI now work autonomously. We’ve thought about chat bots, we’ve thought about small automations, we’ve thought about transforming our business in these real time interactions, and now, think about agents that can go off and act on your behalf.”

Panel Discussion: Securing Data to Safeguard the Future

Mastercard is detecting 40% more fraud over last year. Ranjita Iyer, Executive Vice President, NAM Services, explained that making a dent in the $10 trillion global cybercrime problem means evolving strategies along with fraud tactics. “For over two decades, we’ve been protecting transactions using AI models, but then we realized that the fraud is moving. Everyone’s applying models, so fraud of the time of the transaction is going down, but it’s migrating to identity fraud and use of devices to trick the ecosystem by making it look like it’s human when it’s a bot.”

That $10T, in GDP terms, would be the third largest country on the planet, she noted. Focusing on cyber was essential because that’s where credentials and PII are being breached. “All of this data is out there on the dark web and threat actors are able to use that to perpetrate fraud into the financial ecosystem.”

“Why hack in when you can log in?” is how Larry Zelvin, Executive Vice President & Head of Financial Crimes Unit, BMO Financial Group, sums up the most prevalent cybercrime; credential theft. He painted an even darker picture, describing “fraud farms” in detail. An estimated hundreds of thousands of trafficked humans are held captive in places like Cambodia and Myanmar, trying to make revenue quotas through illegal online activity, hoping to be freed. “It could be a dual-edged crime,” Zelvin said, noting that the scams like unpaid toll bills might be coming from these prisoners.

What attracted him to the bank in the first place was, “the ability to use data in a way that I thought was rather innovative, to understand the customer holistically. We’re progressing nicely in that area.” He told the story of a woman who repeatedly called the bank, hoping to be authenticated on someone else’s account. Instead of eventually hitting on a human-based flaw in the system, AI was listening across all channels and connected the dots.

Direct transfers essentially means moving money on unsecured networks, according to Patricia Voight, Chief Information Security Officer at Webster Bank. “It’s the velocity with which it’s moving. The ability to move it through many major accounts quickly prevents the ability to do fraud detection.” One way Webster is working to counter that is through a lot of cybersecurity awareness and fraud training, particularly for seniors who may be most vulnerable. “The more training and the more skills that you’re able to get out there is very helpful.”

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