PegaWorld 2025: How EY and Pega are Reshaping Financial Services – Now, Next and Beyond

PegaWorld 2025: How EY and Pega Are Reshaping Financial Services – Now, Next, and Beyond

Um, hi, I'm Suzanne Clayton. I'm the senior director here at Pega that manages our EY relationship globally. So I work really closely with Deepak Tiwari, who is our global Pega practice leader and a managing director at EY. And we're going to be focusing actually, let me go back to the first slide. We're going to be focusing on reshaping financial services.

This is a very forward looking presentation, really looking at how, um, we can do more exciting things with AI. Some of the stuff that Kerim and the team talked about this morning and really helping you, you know, have limitless possibilities of what you can achieve with Pega. So I want to welcome the team. So I want to thank Arnie from Navy Federal Credit Union and Rob from Edward Jones and Kelly from Pega. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Deepak.

Awesome. Thank you. Suzanne, thank you very much. Hello, everyone. Thank you very much for prioritizing this session.

I know we have a bunch of other sessions in parallel. So you have prioritized this one. Thank you for that. If you're here by accident that's okay as well. All right.

So really excited about this topic today. First of all, big thanks to all of you for being here. Um, I would say something quickly and then you will hear mostly from our panelists today. These are truly exciting times in the industry. I think today, Karim's presentation was a good example, that how the pace of change has been just mind boggling over the last one and a half, two years.

And, you know, we at EY like to say, um, either you work towards shaping the future with AI or get shaped by it. So. So today, really the intention we have is to talk in the context of the future a little bit. That's why we call it now next beyond. You will hear from the great panelists here about where they are in their journey broadly with automation and Pega.

What does next look like, which is more like next 6 to 12 months? And then beyond is the next 3 to 5 years. So that's kind of the picture we'll try to paint here. So with that, let's hear from our panelists. Uh, I will ask you for a little bit more detailed introduction if you would like. And since we are talking about AI, how about you talk a little bit about any personal addiction you have, you know, an app.

I know everybody's into ChatGPT these days. Anything like that as you introduce yourself. Uh, good afternoon everyone. I'm Arnie Ignacio. I work at Navy Federal Credit Union.

I lead platform development. Um, for those who don't are not familiar with Navy Federal, we are the largest credit union in the world. We have over 190 billion in assets. 14.5 million members. We grow at about a million members a year.

We're a top ten originator for credit cards, consumer loan and mortgage. About 28,000 employees. 360 branches all over the world, along with our overseas military banking program, which adds another 60 plus branches worldwide. And the Navy Federal folks who are here. This doesn't count towards your evaluation.

But thank you for your support. Um, I use GPT on a regular basis. Um, my wife and I like to travel. We initially used it for setting up an itinerary with. That had to be time boxed, along with places to see, routes to walk, and food that met our dietary restrictions. So I thought that was really cool because it was on point and it showed us things that we wanted to see, and then it further evolved into like health coaching, like, this is what I should eat today. These are things I should focus on. I should do more legs, you know, as opposed to arms all the time. I was like, all right, this is great. Now it's a Coach.

And then finally I got it to help me do a barbecue for my family. And we just started to get into it. And at the end I was like, I appreciate the convo, brother. And he was like, real, recognized, real word. I was like, whoa, I don't even know what that means.

I had to ask my kids, what is real? Recognize real means? It's like it means you're on the level. I never say that again. I'm like, bet. Anyways, that Navy Federal our members are the mission. Awesome.

Awesome. Very cool. Rob we go to you. Rob Fienup I'm with. Edward Jones in our Tech Automation Co Center of Excellence.

Um, been with them for 19 years. A little bit about Edward Jones. We are a retail brokerage firm, um, over 20,000 branch offices in North America, um, US and Canada, um, over 8 million clients on our books. Um, I would say I like irony. It's healthy.

I go the complete opposite. I'm going to go with something more fun. My daughter and I love Snapchat, so we love the eye filters. I've done almost all of them. What do you look like? Young? What do you look like without the beard? FYI, you'll never see me without the beard.

I did not realize there was more than one chin under here, so you'll never see that. Um, the one that got me and my daughter got grounded from her phone for this was. We did the old one, you know. What do you look like when you're older? And I looked at it and I was like, oh, that, that looks pretty bad. And she's like, dad, you got to turn the I on filter on first.

And I was like, and give me your phone. You're done for the week. Um, but that's, that's just one of the fun things we do with I because right now she's ten and a half. So, you know, anytime I can get with her right now, I'm not the enemy. I know those years are coming, unfortunately, where I'm going to be, the dad, that's the enemy.

And, you know, you never let me have any fun. You don't understand. So it's kind of a fun way that we use I to to bond. So if anybody's curious afterwards, happy to show you some of our fun eyes. I'm really proud of the one where it's got my jawline looks really good and I look really buff and tan, so I'm always happy to show that one.

Awesome. Hello! I'm Kelly Wilson. I'm an Industry Principal with Pegasystems and Financial Services. That means I'm a subject matter expert in banking and wealth. I've been with Pega for about five years and prior to joining Pega, I was in global banking and markets, primarily in New York, working for European banks like HSBC and Deutsche in core roles, front office roles and regulatory project roles.

Um, my story is I actually moved a couple of years ago after Covid when we realized we needed a bigger house. Um, and so I like using remodel I and Home Visualizer to see what you can change in your house so you get a really good view of what what it will look like if you change the decor, if you change different lamps, whatever. So I think that's a really cool use. I also see all the mess that when I FaceTime my kids from here and they just change the they don't even talk to you, they just change the face the whole time. So I understand that one. But yeah. And if I could add very quickly mine as well. Very similar to Kelly's, except that it is outside the house. So every day I'm taking pictures of my house and then uploading in these apps, which will design the landscape, the front yard landscape for you. And then I'm planting the trees.

So my wife is like, are you going to become a landscaper or what? All right. So with that, let's get into the first question here, which is talk broadly about the financial services sector. Um, if we if we look at where we are truly now, right broadly across FS, how do you all see AI automation and low-code innovation shaping financial services? Rob how about we start with you on this? Uh, so I would say kind of our automated journey started with kind of freeing our, our associates up, um, trying to get them out of some of the mundane tasks, uh, you know, reviewing a document or does it have a signature on it, transposing data from one, one system to another? Um, right now, Edward Jones is really trying to focus on some new services in the high net worth and new to wealth sectors. So we need to free those people up to kind of act more in a startup type role, kind of work through some POCs, kind of find the right secret sauce. Um, that way we can kind of move more into those systems by them not having to do those non-value added tasks.

Also, for our branch side of the office, we're using, um, I what we call knowledge power AI not to replace the relationship. Um, Edward Jones is very big on the personal relationships our financial advisors have with our clients. Um, so we don't want to replace that experience. But what we want to do is actually augment it and supplement it. So again, thinking of our branch advisors providing some of that EQ or emotional quotient, and then the AI helping them with that intelligent quotient of recommending the right products, the right services where needed, looking at the client's records.

So that's kind of how we've kind of incorporated it both front and back of the house. Awesome. Pardon me. So we of course, we also focus on our team member experience and the efficiency gains there. But we've been really focusing on developer acceleration just accelerating time to market.

Um, EY actually helped us set up a center of excellence about six years ago, and it was really focused on on processes and federating out development to the different business areas. So as a result, we were able to stand up a pretty robust citizen development program with the built in guardrails, Self-documenting tools, situational Layer Cake and training program that we launched. We've been able to kind of push out a lot of development to a lot of different teams. So it's been a definitely a big value add for our company. Having so many other teams being able to develop.

And I had a cool story that was cool last week, but after this morning, it's not so cool anymore. But EY did this demonstration for us on a tool that they built, and basically we're starting with zero, and we're having the business use generative AI to come up with requirements. EY showed us this tool that converts those requirements into Gherkin syntax, which we then were able to import into Blueprint to create an application which also created test cases, which they then imported into the platform. So you went from like zero to a full blown application, given it was a simple application and may not have all the bells and whistles, but you went from zero to almost 80 in less than 30 minutes, which was which was pretty phenomenal. And you're starting to see that.

I heard that this morning in a lot of the keynote addresses. So very exciting. It's scary for us as well how fast the development work is happening, you know. But then that's where the whole intention is to to evolve towards more value addition like in your examples. I love them right.

Customer experience focused. That's the focus development. Acceleration is the focus rather than, you know, working on mundane tasks. It's interesting that you know, what is considered mundane today probably is different than what was mundane two years back, right? Um, so beyond, beyond beyond the automation and acceleration. Right.

Broadly, if you look at how AI would transform the financial services sector, your thoughts on that? Well, I could take up the rest of the session with what all the changes that are happening right now. But similar to Arnie, obviously you heard a lot about Blueprint. That's a really hot topic. Everyone's excited about it and then it's developing so fast where now you can visualize the Blueprint, which I think is a really great feature, especially for it. Working with the business and business always wants things set up a certain way so that visualization is huge.

Um, another thing too, is that we see a very broad spectrum of how clients are using Pega, where even within the same firm, across different divisions, there might be a workflow that's highly automated using data has integrations, etc. but then there's another workflow that's not that. It's it's created a workflow, but it's not as automated. There's not as many integrations. So what we're really seeing is people wanting to build in those integrations, trust the technology, use the automation, and even if that requires some QA or still some approvers, but really an advancement in step forward in using the automation.

And a secondary benefit we see from that is improved regulatory and compliance and governance within the firm. Right. Most clients come to us and say we want operational efficiency, we want better customer service. But then what you also get is that the process is being done correctly, not the way the guy that sat next to me taught me to do it, which is the way I used to do it when I was in banking. And that wasn't always right.

We've seen some statistics where large clients have gone from, say, a 90% correct way of doing something to 98% once they add in the standardization, guided selling and more automation. So really that improved, you're going to get the improved customer service and operational efficiency, but then you'll also have lower compliance costs, better regulatory adherence, lower risk, etc.. So that's a big benefit. Absolutely. We do a bunch of work in regulatory compliance space.

Every time I hear about a grand regulatory compliance project, my mind is thinking, how can we put Pega there so that we can do a better job for our clients. So I'm still in the now part of the conversation, right? So that's where let's look at a little bit Pega specifically from a Pega perspective, if you think about how have how has Pega helped your teams become more agile and more responsive to customer needs? If you can quote a few examples from our organizations, that would be great. We'll start with you. Sure. So as part of our Center of Excellence, it was a real heavy focus on process optimization.

We realized early on that if we were able to optimize the process, sometimes we were able to eliminate the need for any development work, but at least we were able to reduce the amount of development work necessary. So when we brought in Pega, we went all in. We brought in WFP. We were one of the biggest users in the beginning robotics platform and then ultimately CDH. So with WFP, we were able to understand and assess the processes that our users were taking to complete tasks.

Robotics allowed us to weave together quick ad hoc solutions where integrations or connectors didn't already exist. So it got us to market a lot faster. And then ultimately we moved into Platform, where it was orchestrating not only not only robotics, but also APIs and other things that we had set up. And then ultimately we moved to CDH, where we were able to offer the right product at the right time to the right member. Using this framework, we've been able to undertake a huge modernization effort, which we call application rationalization.

It's migrating off of our legacy and antiquated systems, off of support systems, onto our anchor platforms like Pega, and it's really served us well. We've converted thousands of applications thus far, so it's really worked out for us. Yeah, quite, quite comprehensive with Pega. That's good to hear. Rob I would say we were towed in the water than jump to full in.

Our start with Pega was really replacing our legacy document processing platform. The platform was out of date, unsupported. So probably I'd say one of the best wins out of that was our Power of Attorney document. Um, so those of you who don't know power of attorney is when a client may become incapacitated and allows them to say who their attorneys are, what powers they can enact on an account, gift, check, writing, etc.. Um, kind of our legacy process was when our clients, uh, need to enact one of those, it's really at a client level rather than an account level.

Unfortunately, our legacy platform was all account driven. So what that meant is really our branch teams had to scan it under each of the accounts that it would apply to, then get routed to the Home Office workflow system, where it could be touched by one to many processors multiple times, as it just however it's sorted out in the queue. The nice thing with Pega is they have the the bundling logic that comes right out of the box. So what we did is took an approach of not bundling at account level, but really at a client level, saying, okay, let's take that up a level to the client and say, okay, what are all the accounts that apply to it? Have the processor review the document once and then apply it to the necessary accounts. This reduced a great amount of swivel chair, I think over a 30% efficiency gain with something that was just already out of the box.

So kind of a great win, I would say for us right out of the gate with no I know agentic anything yet. I got some more stories about that in a minute, but yeah, just right out of the gate. A nice win that really wasn't that heavy of a lift, although Luis will keep me honest on that one because Luis was in charge of that. Yeah, that's great to hear. And that's a good start.

Um, Kelly, beyond the use cases you just heard right? Again, it's probably a 40 minute conversation. But if you have to highlight broadly across FS, what are the key use cases where Pega is making an impact for, especially those who may be new to Pega. What use cases you would highlight? Sure. Um, to echo what Rob said, there's a lot of interest in the new using GenAI for OCR technology because it's just so much more powerful in structured documents, particularly in areas like wealth and commercial banking, where there's a lot of emails and a lot of email attachments. I've seen that where these, you know, these GenAI can read that unstructured document, pull out the data points, create a case.

Power of attorney is a great example. I've seen it demos with loan lending so it can pull out, pull out the data points from lending from a loan, the amount, etc. and then create a case to move forward on that similar product that's been around longer, but obviously getting better with genii's email bot. So reading emails, creating a case, understanding what's going on so you can really receive an email, receive a document. You know, there's in many wealth firms and commercial banking firms.

Someone has to read that email and then create the case, open the attachment and open the PDF. But now you can go straight through processing that to creating the case, you know. So that's a really powerful tool that we're seeing a lot of interest in in many markets. Um, another one is GenAI Knowledge Buddy. So the idea if you're not familiar with Knowledge Buddy, it's a Pega product that can look at your firm's internal processes and procedures. And basically it's a chatbot of how do I do x, y, z? If I get a power of attorney in Wisconsin, what do I do with this? And it's directed at your documentation so people don't have to go searching for answers. They can ask the buddy, and the buddy is fully auditable and trackable. So then you have the results of those searches. So those are really popular ones because we are seeing everyone wants to use GenAI, but for the most part, starting with internal use cases, the things like the buddy or summarizing cases and then figuring out where they want to use it for client facing uses. Yeah.

Well, we service a bunch of clients as well, and it's quite interesting to see so many back offices of so many big organizations running on Pega. And with GenAI, the opportunities are just endless. Yeah. Okay, so let's get into the next part, which is the next six months, 12 years. You don't have to share the specific plans, but directionally, if you would like to share.

How do you see Pega and I scaling the decision making processes in the next year or so at your organizations? Rob we continue with our. So actually we'll circle back. You were just talking about GenAI and Po. So I know right now we're partnering Pega and Efficent together to kind of take a look at those Po documents. Um, read them again, thinking most of those are very legal documents can vary by state.

So think structured but really unstructured at the same time. So the AI is using that to determine who those attorneys are, what powers they have now. Right now we are using a human in the loop as we get comfortable with the prompt, the success of it. But we can totally see an automated future where as long as the AI can make that determination with a strong confidence that we can move to that where we won't have to have that human in the loop. Only when the AI can't make the determination.

Another POC going on right now is also in our estates area. Looking at the death certs, um, another area where we see a lot of opportunity. Again, it's a structured but unstructured in that every every county can have their own format, their own labeling. So again, kind of a way right now of how basically we're putting our toe in the water, kind of keeping that human in the middle for right now until we get comfortable with our risk tolerances and making sure we have our controls in place. But moving towards that fully automated where unless the I can't make the determination.

Really no human processing needed. Yeah, and I hope everyone notices this, right? This is the same example you shared on the now part also, right? So the extension, it's basically an extension, right? Automation was already being done. And now AI is a logical extension of what you guys have already been doing. Right. You never attack the iceberg.

Full. Full on. Chip away at. It. Yeah.

So that's a great way to understand how you want to apply AI on top of automation. Already done. Um, how about an example from Navy Federal? Well, we've we have we've traditionally had a on premise implementation, but in order to take advantage of all the capabilities that are coming out and to be up to date with everything, we made a strategic move to move all of our platforms to Pega Cloud, starting with CDH, Pega Robotics and Platform. We're now moving all of our all of our instances over to Pega Cloud. That way, we can maximize usage of all the latest offerings and things that they have.

One of the use cases that we'd like to tackle is the modernization of a legacy app, which we call survivor support, which is estate planning. And the challenge with this application is it's got many touch points, so many decisions that need to be made. You know, there are so many different rules and so many different documents that need to be interpreted based on what state you're in, what state you lived in, perhaps what state you passed away in. And you know, we're all about the cradle to grave. So it's a very important, important aspect of our operation.

And so we're looking at Agentic and GenAI to kind of start reading those documents To Rob's point, we'd like it to be artificial intelligence assisted augmented as opposed to replacement. But it's just getting so much better. I talked to Rob Walker today, and he was just giving us examples of how it's sometimes it's better at explaining things than a doctor would. As far as a serious case. So it's a little bit daunting but exciting and scary at the same time.

Yeah, you might not ask all the questions to the doctor, but to ChatGPT you would probably, but then you would delete the chat. Um, so Kelly is a great point there, right? You know, the cloud adoption and cloud consideration. Now, I think many of you who are in office have been using Pega for several years. There's a very good chance that probably part or maybe your entire stack is on premise. That's probably a phenomenon across the Pega industry, right? Especially in banking and financial services.

Right. So how do you think clients should think about move to cloud? Is it worth it? What's the approach around it? That's a big question that I get from my clients as well. So I would like to get your thoughts. Sure. Yeah, I would say we have a decent amount of clients that have moved at least part of their estate to Pega Cloud.

So that's good. It's in it's in transition. It is obviously a transition, but our happiest clients are clients that are on Pega Cloud. They have lower infrastructure costs, lower architecture costs. They stay up to date.

They can spend more time focusing on the value and the business value of their applications, versus versus on the architecture and infrastructure side of it. So we really are seeing the clients that have moved to Cloud experiencing that ROI, as already mentioned. So, um, obviously we understand that firms need to get comfortable. Um, we do a lot of business with the government. Some people from the government might be in here.

So we do have a completely safe Cloud. It's, you know, it's the trusted by the US government and other governments around the world. So it's completely safe. And then also the biggest objection we hear often is about PII and data, etc. but chances are, if you use Salesforce or Bloomberg or a lot of other technologies, you do have that data on the cloud already, so we know that it can get approved if we do the work together to answer the the questionnaires.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I'm I'm also surprised by the pace of new releases that Kerim releases every few days. And if you're on premise, it's going to be a little bit hard to catch up with that pace. So that absolutely has started to make a lot of sense. Um, so we're going to go into the beyond part here, and it's like a five minute heads up to this audience here.

We'll do questions after that. So please start thinking about questions. Um, so the beyond is, you know, next 3 to 5 years, right? I know AI has really made everyone think, what does the future look like? So if you have to answer right. What technology is beyond AI and automation. Do you see shaping the next decade of Financial Services? What is that which is going to really shape the financial services sector in the next 3 to 5 years.

What would be your thought? Rob will go with you first. So I'm going to cheat a little bit, Deepak, on this and say it's not probably going to be a technology that's going to be the revolution. To me, as everybody develops their AI again, we're seeing the to Arnie's point, the good work coming out of some of that, that it's really going to be that human experience. It's going to be the differentiator as more firms go to an automated response, automated portfolios, customer service representatives. It's going to be those human interactions are going to be the part that kind of stands out.

So I think the job for all of us in financial services to go, okay, where where are the right places that we want to make sure that we maintain that human interaction. Um, and then supplement that using AI so that we can free up those people to do those things. So, um, I loved your cradle to grave, right? The states process is what we would call it. Um. You think? Okay, I've got a financial advisor sitting across from a widow that's got a life insurance check, right? To me, that's when we need that emotional side of the human experience.

Again, I can help them do the reinvesting move all the money. But it's kind of that personal interaction that's going to happen across the desk with all the stuff in the news, right? You're going to see a lot of retirees probably worried about, let me pull my money out and put it in my mattress. It's going to be those financial advisors telling them, okay, let me let me really quick run this GenAI and show you the summary of how your wealth has increased over time by holding it and staying the course. Right. So again, I like to call it the supplementing eq IQ thing.

Um, again, very Edward Jones very big on the personal relationships we have. So we don't want to get rid of that. It's how do we enhance that using the AI? And I think to me, that's going to be the secret sauce in the ten years of finding that right balance of when does it make sense to have the human in the seat, versus how do I supplement them with the AI? Awesome. So you, like, change the whole answer, you know. You know, it's not.

Actual witnesses that. No, I don't stay in the box. I love the cheat answer. It's not exactly the technology or so much of AI, but actually the human experience that will change things. Which is so lovely to hear your thoughts.

I'm going to cheat and just copy his answer because it's true. I mean, we continue to build branches because we believe in the experience. We want them to be experience centers. If you want to know how great Navy Federal is, call us. Ask us questions.

We won't say, oh, you called the wrong place, call back later, or call this number instead, we will do everything we can to help serve you and to solve your problem. And it's it's important. And that's, that's where a lot of the trust and brand equity comes from is that trust that we've built with our members. So if we can get to a point where we're able to explain to our members and walk them through how decisions are made, why we're using the technology and how it's making everyone's lives easier, it's just going to continue to build that brand and that trust. So we want to continue to maintain that level of service regardless of the technology.

We'll always use it to better serve our members so that those who protect this country were able to serve at the highest degree. Absolutely. So I definitely work with you guys very closely. Navy Federal is always about member experience, member experience, and Edward Jones is about financial advisors and how do they actually support the customers, right? I mean, the mission comes out very clearly in every conversation. Great to hear that.

So last question to you, um, where is Pega taking us? What does beyond look like with Pega? Um, I would say we need to talk about Agentic AI, right? We haven't mentioned that. I'm seeing some really cool demos internally about Agentic AI. So the next level of of course there will be predictable AI and predictive AI, machine learning, etc. but with agentic AI, things like you can do a stare and compare of a document comes in for KYC and from a client, but then it doesn't match what you have internally. So Agentic I can look at those two and say match check, move on or mismatch send to a human to work.

So you still do need those humans, but the agentic I can start doing processing for when things do align and match up. Um, we've seen some really cool demos about, you know, payment exceptions. A check is missing. How can the agentic I go search the payment systems, check the value of the check, look for the value of that check in different systems, etc.. So integrations to various systems internally.

Um, a lot about I used to do a lot of KYC when I was in banking, and it is incredibly hard for some reason, to write the accurate name of a fund like Pimco Emerging Bond Fund, LLC, blah, blah, blah for and there's dots or periods or missing dots or periods, so things like that. With GenAI, they can recognize it's the same name in different systems. Just one has dots, one doesn't. Whatever one wrote for one wrote Roman numeral for. So things like that is where we do think agentic AI will really help banks and wealth firms, etc.

become much more efficient. And then I do hope from as they come become more efficient, we'll see similar use cases where if you think about credit card disputes, I recently had a dispute, a charge, and they said yes, we'll automatically give you back your $100 and it was $100. So it was a relatively high value to automatically give back because they know they can then go fight for that money from the from the issuer or from the payer. And then on the inside, they know they're going to save money versus just not giving me the money back, having me call, etc.. So I think as there's more automation, then hopefully fees will be reversed faster because the automation will help the firms become more compliant, more profitable, higher margins.

Obviously they're going to keep some of that for themselves, but then hopefully they'll be returning some to customers because they've got better customer service, they have more automation. And hopefully then when you do need to call in and talk to that person, you'll get your issue resolved more quickly. Yeah. Makes so much sense. And, you know, I really feel that nobody needs to move 100% of the work from humans to AI agents.

Right? Probably someday. Who knows? Right. But if you move, like 10%, 20% of the cases that are being done by humans today to AI agents, the most boring and mundane ones, that's probably a significant saving for any organization, right? Okay. So I think those were the questions. And our time is up as well for the this part of the presentation.

Um, let's open it up for questions. And please come very close to the mic so that we can hear you all. Thank you for being brave. Thank you. I do what I can.

Um, thank you for that amazing presentation. Um, what I've observed is that it's pretty obvious where the use cases are for AI and financial services, and where I've personally seen a lot of our clients struggle is not necessarily finding that use case, but rather getting executive buy in both on the upfront implementation cost side, but also just like trust in the technology. So based on your experiences, how have you gotten your decision makers and your executives on board? Great question, Annie. Move into that executive position to give their approval. Nice.

No, I'm joking, I'm joking. Can you omit that from the tape, please? Um. It's really it's really about a lot of due diligence and sharing what the value is, what the return is. So when we started off, it was about time savings, efficiency gains and doing a lot of demos, um, showing them current state and potential future state and then capturing those metrics and presenting them on a regular basis. We had tons of dashboards.

Obviously, things are changing. This was five years ago, but at that time it was very effective and demonstrating the power that the platform was bringing by continuing to show these types of, um, these types of the value that we've been able to achieve through automation. So it makes sense. Rob do you want to add? Yeah, sorry. Go ahead.

I would say similar. I think honestly the best was kind of the same example I gave with Poe of sometimes you do have to just say, you know what? I understand the fear. Let's keep a human in the middle. Let's do it. I've had processes.

I know that unfortunately, we've had to do 100% audit on for a short period of time. But it's getting your usually your risk and control people comfortable with that and proving that. And it's like again what also what can you do in reporting or statistics or dashboards as already mentioned, kind of behind the scenes to say, okay, if this would fall out of line, here's where it would show up. So we can watch this, that we don't have to necessarily do 100% review on this. If we have the right reporting in place.

So it's kind of convincing of some of that. And it's with all all things right. It's a spectrum of some are going to be early adopters and some are going to be laggards. Um, it's getting them comfortable. What's the benefit? I mean, moving into the executive position always makes it easy.

Unfortunately, we don't all get that. Um, but yeah, to me it's kind of the let let let the let the results kind of speak for themselves. Um, and then you've got that buy in and it just makes the next one easier and the next one easier, and then it's never. And then it's not a question anymore. Um, it's just, unfortunately, it's you got to take that first step and.

Yeah, it's a doozy sometimes. Thank you. Hi. I wanted I wanted to challenge the the human in the loop, uh, thesis. So, like, in the wealth management space.

So, let's say, like, a year or two from now, people will generally understand that the the intelligence is smarter than the human when it comes to complex things like wealth management. So when that happens and clients know it, then what's the value proposition for the human in the loop? And if we take an analogy like the travel industry where the same thing like really complex processes, it's way easier just to do it direct through the intelligence. Then, you know, you can see people are not are not, you know, appreciative anymore of humans in the loop when it comes to travel. So just love your perspective on that when wealth because you can kind of see where the trajectory goes. Oh yeah.

Especially for younger generations. And I would say human in the loop is kind of a an interim step. Right. Until you can kind of validate that you've got the prompt. Right.

Right. That you can prove over and over again. So the reason I say that for Poe is there is so much variance in state to state rules. The format that again, where you think may be a good prompt and you can do a lot of test cases, you never know what some lawyer may write in a document. So for right now, it really is kind of about how do we test it real time and still get benefits.

So that's where we do. I don't want to keep human in the loop. By all means. Please understand that is not where I want to keep people, but it's it's some of that risk Averseness that again, being a financial industry, right, highly regulated. We're trusted with people's financial savings. We want to make sure that we get that right. And that's one of the ways we feel right now that, you know, let me see what the AI says. Let me have a human read that document. Do you both agree? Yes. Great.

If we get that consistently enough, I get out of the process. Get out. I have better things for you to work on than reading that document, but it's making sure that we've got that prompt tweaked just right that we're catching those cases. I was going to just comment on the travel piece or like restaurants and reviews. Right.

You go to Yelp, you go to Google reviews and you're like, oh, this one's got 4.7, 4.8, whatever, whatever it might be. Um, and it's the collection of all the different reviews, but eventually someone's going to come up with a bot to write all these reviews, right? And it's going to start to skew it as opposed to just asking someone, was it good? It's terrible. But they've flooded these reviews with all these positive remarks. And so it's actually a crap place to visit or a crap place to go. So you just it's it's very contingent upon the data, which I know we didn't talk about.

But as anyone that's in this space will tell you, it's the most important part of any. I would also just say in terms of wealth advisory, we're all somewhat involved in technology in this room. A lot of the general population is not. So they probably still want a human saying, yes, this is how you should invest your money. Yes, this is the right asset allocation and hearing that from a person, even if the information that that person is telling them is completely red and generated from a technology, it's that psychology of the reassurance and the human connection, etc., I think that will still stay important in any sort of client facing role in wealth management or banking for for many years.

Yeah, I'll add my bit as well. Great question by the way, and I hope others will challenge us as well. Um, I'll quickly say this also, that risk and regulatory agenda is also a big part of this whole equation, right? You know, You know, we have an awesome Pega practice, but we do a bunch of risk and regulatory work at EY as well. And, you know, it's amazing that how many people do that work within our firm. It's always manual type of work because there's always a time limit.

The risk and regulatory things always come with a time limit. So leaving that to bots or AI, I really doubt that's going to happen 100% at any point of time. Go ahead please. Yes. My question is we just I came out of a call center where it is important to have a human interaction, but I managed back office in fraud and I've let go of many, many folks who I have and my people have.

But it is a tough discussion to say, you know, you're putting in all this automation and you are going to let go of people. So I wanted to see how you guys have addressed that, because it's it's always a hot topic in my organization. So I would say one of the things we've Edward Jones is really kind of focused on for, I would say early 2020 and maybe even earlier was we called it foundational skills for success. How can we keep people fresh in their skills? Again? Um, thinking of a simple person that's transcribing from one system to another that's going to get you by today, but what does it get you for tomorrow? So it's how can we make sure that we're keeping people's skills fresh, um, investing in the people. Um, and then unfortunately, there are as with any population, there's going to be some that I don't want.

I don't want to. I like my little 9 to 5. And unfortunately those will wash themselves out in the way. But it's how can you support the growth mindset, um, making sure that they can move into those next levels? How do they become the next people that help us shape AI, help us redefine those processes? Um, I would say that's that's been very big in our area of how do we skill people up for these skills of the future? Um, at Edward Jones at least. Yeah.

I mean. I totally agree, you have to be adaptable in this new world. Who knows what type of jobs might surface? We have process improvement analysts today, but perhaps in the future process improvement with Agentic taking that into account. We used to look at the mundane, repeatable tasks as things to automate. Now we're looking at the complex heavy manual tasks now to automate.

So it's certainly a paradigm shift. Um Navy Federal. I'm proud to say that we do a lot of community outreach. We have a Navy Federal serves. Perhaps we allocate more time to that and less time to some of the back office front office work.

I'm not making any decisions for the organization. I'm just saying the things that we're doing to try to keep everyone's lives rich because it's not just about work all the time. Right. So there's this balance, and, um, it's hard to say, but I'm excited for the future. I think it'll be better for humanity if we have more time for ourselves and our families.

Awesome. So. Rob and Arnie, both of you mentioned that both of your organizations, you keep the human touch at the core, and you build a lot of trusted relationships, but still, like a lot of processes are generalized, I'm assuming. So how is Pega systems like helping your organizations personalize the entire process? Um, is it doing that in the first place? Yeah, I mean, it would be that full ecosystem right from task mining all the way to automation and robotics. Now with Blueprint, it's just it's just a game changer.

It really is. And every time I see Blueprint, it changes. Like today you're uploading videos. Videos? Yeah, right. I felt like last week I looked at it and I could upload a process map.

Now I've got video. We even said like there's more options. Since I looked at it last week. I'm. Afraid I get back to the office.

I'm gonna get all these videos on my desk, like, all right, automate this for me. I'm like, hold up. So because we still use 30 to 70 screens. Um, so it wasn't so antiquated. I mean, that's a real thing for a lot of our organization.

Yeah, I Very much the same of just kind of looking at our entire ecosystem. Um, again, we've started with document processing. We've moved into some of our transfer spaces. Um, I know our engagement lead out there. Mark, thanks for having me here.

Um, we're really right now for our operations division, trying to Pega Process Fabric and looking at how do we make a single pane of glass for our operations division? Um, so kind of really changing their ecosystem. So right now they're going into multiple systems all over the place. So how can we make it feel very seamless for even the back office processor? Not not even just not even thinking client back office of like I come in, I go into a Pega screen, I click on a work item. It may take me actually into Salesforce, but as far as I know I just started in Pega. I don't know that I've I've moved.

I click in another work item, maybe I'm going into ServiceNow or XYZ system or Lmnop system, but I start and end my day here at this one screen. I'm looking forward to the Knowledge Buddy stuff, because I think to me, that's going to supplement as I bounce from one to the other. Hey, I haven't seen this one in a little bit. How do I do that? And boom, I can. I don't have to have super subject matter experts on everything. There are definitely things we're going to have to keep those type of people for legal purposes, but for certain things it would be like, great, I don't know, one seamless, one process really kind of view. I look forward to that hopefully here in the next 3 to 5 years, hopefully. Awesome. Thank you guys. I just had a quick follow up.

Isn't that leading to like losing the human touch or like reducing the human touch? Say that again. I'm sorry. Is that related. To leading to like losing the human touch? I don't want to lose the human touch. But what you mentioned, like we are still losing the human touch in a way.

Right? Because our dependency on humans are going down. We're not relying on them anymore. We're pro-human up here. We're just to be clear. Choose between humanity and I.

One Infinity works, I think. Freeing them up so I can go back to when I started at Edward Jones. And I'm sorry to say, this was my job when I started. I was taping pieces of paper receipts from our financial advisors to another piece of paper so that we could run them through a scanner. I don't know how I made it through a day I did not feel.

I don't know how I felt like I added value to the company at that point in time. I'm hoping that what this is doing is actually freeing us up for those people to do new services, new offerings for our clients so they really feel more a part of the client experience. It's very hard to feel like I'm doing good for our client by taping pieces of paper. Now, if I'm writing requirements or I'm I'm kind of working with a branch team or a client to like, okay, you're new to wealth. Like, what are what are your basic needs? Like, what's your financial experience? What? What education do you have on that? Getting that to me.

That's where I feel like I'm hopefully we're empowering them more to feel more part of the company. And again, very pro-human. I think it's giving them more value to their work versus the mundane. Where I started, I never want to see anybody ever have to do that again. All right.

So we're almost at the end of the time here. Looks like that humanity is going to be safe now. It's, uh. Rise of the. Machines shall not happen yet.

Yeah, yeah. The Terminator is not going to happen anytime soon, so. But it's really good to hear from all of you. I'm sure everybody got the message that AI is really about more opportunity, more than how scary it is. It's actually more about capitalizing into those opportunities.

Right? Well, Rob Kelly, Arnie, thank you very much. Thank you for all your insights. And thanks, everyone for joining us here. Thank you. Thank you, thank you..