Featured Participants
Steven Lichtenthal
Managing Director, Head of Americas Operations , Natixis
Can you tell us a little bit about your background, and how you ended up in your current role?
Career roles centered on process and organizational optimization, strategic change management, within Operational at regulated banking and capital markets businesses, and consulting to same.
Current role result of career evolution from consultant hired by client, subsequent internal role expansion through periods of acquisition, merger, financial crisis and contraction, growth and expansion, facilitated by continual curiosity/learning, proactive collaborative mindset, embracing change and automation, partnering with business and support group partners.
What is the biggest challenge you face within your role today, and how are you looking to tackle it?
Balancing rapid industry change, disruptive market entrants/technologies, ever-increasing regulatory burden, process inefficiency, changing workforce and required skills, hiring/training/retaining talent, finite budget,.
Tackling with as much automation as possible, particular focus now and in future on smart automation low-code tools, agile framework to address many small-medium size inefficient/manual task, with small dedicated teams of developers and tech-savvy users.
Biggest Success you achieved for 2018/ 2019 so far?
Continued high level of client satisfaction, quality service, risk management, regulatory review results while maintaining staff stability, retention, satisfaction, and cost/ budget control.
What are your Key Objectives for attending the upcoming event?
- Solidifying foundational understanding of relevant AI capabilities, use cases across various financial services functions, processes.
- How /when AI should be integrated to existing IT toolkit and smart automation solutions program and workflow optimization.
- Familiarity with the most capable, interesting/relevant AI vendors and tools currently in the market.
Which connections or content sessions, are you looking to engage with most at the event?
Day 1:
- All the open session content is of interest – I am more interested in the topics related to general applications on process optimization, qualitative evaluation/machine learning/interp on data both structured and unstructured for insights, patterns, etc.
- Discussion Group 1A: Strategies for Establishing a Business Case for AI Applications at the Organization Level.
- Discussion Group 2B: Best Practices for Introducing Robotic Process Analytics.
Day 2:
- Open sessions: Evaluating Emerging Tech – Worthwhile v Fad; Data Governance Challenges.
- Breakout 1B: Developing Talent Increasing Diversity.
- Breakout 2A Explainability and Interpretability in ML.
What are you most inspired about in regards to AI & Emerging Tech for Finance?
The evolution of low-code tools that allow the right IT and non-IT tech-savvy end users to partner to have more capacity to improve inefficiency in a more agile manner, minimizing dependence on the finite capacity of IT developers, inspiring and improving employee experience and therefore client service experience.