Anna Bernasek: I'm Anna Bernasek, global head of thought leadership at State Street, and I'm talking with Brian Franz, State Street's chief information officer. Hi, Brian. How are you?
Brian Franz: Hi. Great. Thanks a lot for having me today.
Anna Bernasek: Thanks for being here. Brian, you've worked in a variety of very different industries over your career. How does that experience shape your vision for State Street's tech roadmap?
Brian Franz: Well, you're right, Anna. In my career, I focused on technology and operations in diverse industries like the food and beverage industry, the telecom industry and financial services. And the common thread. The key insight that I take away is that every company today needs to think of itself as a technology company. What does that mean for State Street? It's really about promoting a culture of innovation that uses the tech tools we have today, while investing in future technology to transform not only our own business operations, but the products and services we offer to our clients. And because we're in finance, there's an added imperative of regulation. So thinking like a tech company can help us leverage tech tools for our own compliance as well as for our clients. At the same time, being mindful of the social impact of the technology we're using. Just to give you an idea of the size of our commitment, since 2021, St.jude has more than doubled its annual investment in tech innovation, dedicating 20 to 25% of our operating capital to ensuring we maintain our market leading position and spending $2 billion on technology development and operational efficiency annually.
Anna Bernasek: Can you take us through State Street's tech investments in the back office, and how that will help clients unlock growth?
Brian Franz: Sure. State Street's innovation agenda is led by client need. In essence, we invest in our own technology so clients have a partner that can help them navigate the future. Let me give you three concrete examples of what we're doing in the back office. First, we're investing in our core data offering. What does that mean? We help clients unlock insights and accelerate decision making with personalized access to real time data and analytics through a single source of truth. We do this across the investment life cycle for public and private markets, as well as using enhanced integration via APIs and digital collaboration solutions. So now we're prioritizing a year investment in our core data infrastructure to drive scale through automation, enabling our clients to retrieve their State Street data in new ways. Our vision is to be a leading API provider by delivering scalable solutions that enhance client partnership and integration, drive agility, reduce time to market, and increase operational efficiency. Second, simplifying our operations is an area where we see significant opportunity to completely revamp and streamline our operating model with technology powered by AI. For example, automating tasks like document extraction through natural language processing, reducing repetitive manual actions using bots, creating operational transparency and controls through machine learning, and using AI modeling for Nav computation. We see technology driven solutions applied to the entire business life cycle, transforming global delivery with the most significant investments in middle office, fund accounting and private markets. Finally, our robust platform enables clients to modernize their infrastructure, accelerate time to market and build stability, resiliency, and scalability into their operations by aligning resource and priorities across our functions. We're able to deliver change in a more agile and iterative way so we can move quickly on business initiatives, modernize the IT environment, and meet key regulatory commitments.
Anna Bernasek: Brian, AI is top of mind for our clients today. Where will I deliver the most value, both for our clients and for State Street? Well, at.
Brian Franz: State Street, we've been developing and implementing AI capabilities to solve business challenges and deliver real world benefits to clients for years. Today, we empower clients via a cloud native infrastructure and machine learning based automation at its core. This supports data and AI teams as they analyze data, build models, and produce meaningful insights to guide investment decisions. Then, when it comes to State Street's own operations, we're already using AI across our digital ecosystem. So things like identifying and escalating suspicious trade activity, powering natural language queries and self-service portals, providing predictive and prescriptive analytics insights, and flagging anomalous data events. In the next 2 to 5 years, we expect AI will continue to transform our clients operations as well as our own, so the benefits of AI will shift from front office all the way through to the back. Office.
Anna Bernasek: Brian, thanks so much for talking today. It's great to understand how State Street is investing in the back office.