Can you tell us about Google Financial Services?
Our mission is to help clients in financial services solve their biggest problems and transform their businesses, Our focus is on solving our clients’ challenges, from Markets in Financial Instruments Directive II (MiFID II) to improving their liquidity calculations, how they think about risk and pricing and reducing friction in their contact centers.
What trends are you seeing in financial services?
With a post-COVID lens on your question, the number one theme that has come up is cost takeout and the acceleration to digital, such as the migration out of datacenters, hosting things like Oracle and Microsoft, and moving to more cloud native technologies.
The second theme we’re seeing is around reinventing the core. A lot of clients have reached out to us to discuss mainframe modernization and migration, and we’re doing a lot of work with fintechs like Thought Machine and Temenos to provide alternatives for clients in that space.
The third theme, I’d say, is around how to use data effectively. Our clients know they have a lot of internal data and that there's a lot of data that's available externally. They want to be able to integrate that data to get more insights and then apply artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to become more predictive, and to provide more personalization around what they do.
From Google Cloud’s perspective, that can all be done within a wrap of a collaboration solution. Our G Suite productivity solutions include documents, spreadsheets and presentation tools, but also Google Meet for video conferencing, which has been very topical in the current COVID-19 pandemic. We’ve seen increased demand with over 100 million daily Meet participants globally.
How has Google been working with fintechs?
We have been working with fintechs for many years. Most recently, in the UK, we’ve created a fintech incubator to accelerate how fintechs create their offerings and go to market. As a part of the incubator, we’re working to bring the best of the Google brands together [Google Cloud, Google Ads, Google Pay, etc.] to help fintechs succeed. We’re also working with systems integrators, like KPMG, to bring more value to fintechs, whether it's creating the initial landing zones or providing the assurance of those landing zones from a security and compliance perspective.
What really excites me is how fintechs can be a key element to accelerating change, and how we can collectively work to reduce friction in financial services and provide more personalized services.
What is Google’s involvement with Reimagined Credit?
Reimagined Credit is one of the solutions that came out of the KPMG Google Cloud Alliance. It’s aimed at transforming commercial lending by providing banks relevant, timely and predictive insights to assess their customers’ needs.
Many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) struggle to get their value recognized by banks when looking for financing. With Reimagined Credit, banks can leverage a wider range of data — like demand and market data, network analysis, competitor information — to get better insights and make more informed and timely decisions.
The development of this solution started in the UK, but we’re now working with a number of Tier 1 and Tier 2 banks globally, in the UK, Canada, Germany and the US.
This is just the beginning. If you think about the overall holistic needs of SMEs, what we're trying to do is predict needs, but then help service any requirements through the lifecycle of a loan, so thinking about liquidity, risk and return on investment.
Part of the work we’re doing with KPMG is building an ecosystem to go around this. We're bringing in firms like Quantexa to make it more of a holistic solution, as opposed to a point solution. We’re also thinking about what some of the new use cases could be around these models.
What do you expect to see for the future of fintech?
The fintech environment is becoming a very positive ecosystem. The age where we build these megalithic applications is gone. I think the future will be about pulling together best-in-class fintechs and independent software vendors (ISVs) to create a patchwork of microservices. This approach means that change can happen more quickly.
What really excites me is how fintechs can be a key element to accelerating change and how we can collectively work to reduce friction in financial services and provide more personalized services.
About KPMG Reimagined Credit for SME Banking
Built on Google Cloud, Reimagined Credit is designed to give banks the relevant insights to intuitively assess their commercial customers’ needs while reducing time to credit decision and funds disbursement.
The Machine Learning algorithms seek to enhance existing data points with market and company data to generate in-depth and predictive financial profiles, anticipating bank customers’ financial needs and offering a tailored product set.
Reimagined Credit can also give banks the ability to visualize and understand their client relationships with their buyers, suppliers, providers and investors. It aims to transform lengthy product cycle times from months to under an hour and automates ongoing monitoring — offering RMs, product managers and customers an on-demand decision support.
The approach challenges ‘one-size-fits-all banking’ and is designed to increase return on equity, market penetration and portfolio growth, while also reducing cost and improving brand perception.
Find out more about Reimagined Credit and other solution areas from the KPMG and Google Cloud alliance: home.kpmg/googlecloud
Adrian Pool
Head of Financial Services UKI, Google Cloud
