The leaders of two of the largest companies in the world have stressed the importance of tech transformation to survive the COVID-19 crisis.

Speaking virtually during the second day of this year’s Sibos conference, BNY Mellon chief executive Todd Gibbons said the most fundamental change he’s implemented in the last six months has been improving disaster recovery plans.

Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella agreed that operational resilience has been crucial for financial services firms. “This pandemic has clearly caused massive constraints and challenges, and business have had to dig deep to respond, recover and reimagine core parts of their business – all in parallel,” he stated.

“Digital tech has become one of the most malleable resources to help continue operations – frankly I’m stunned with the level of economic productivity that’s been maintained.”

Gibbons said that the pandemic has clearly strengthened the case for digital transformation across incumbent institutions, noting BNY Mellon’s work with Microsoft, leveraging machine learning and improving analytics for clients via the Azure cloud.

“Scale is more critical than ever, and companies are recognising that they need to outsource to take advantage of that scale,” he said. “Client expectations around reliability, experience and transparency are all much higher than they used to be.”

Gibbons admitted that the services they had received in the past had “a lot of times been pretty clunky”, but things like artificial intelligence and automation of processes have helped make improvements to the back end and mobile apps.

Nadella pointed out that the financial services industry is both technologically advanced and also has a bit of a challenge.

“Most have been big investors in tech, but if you fall behind then there’s a much deeper hole to dig out of – this is something that plays out in FinTech versus traditional financial services more broadly, like those that start in the cloud versus having mainframe storage.

“Financial services needs to use this opportunity to move much more quickly to stay at the frontier of digital technology,” he added.

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