Graeme, we've been on an incredible
journey together over the last couple
of years now as well and it makes a whole
bunch of changes that we've been
experiencing as a country
and inside of the world as well.
I think
it's great to talk to you about
what this journey has been like
for Investec to cloud and why cloud.
Listen, I agree, we've been
in a hell of a journey together.
One of the challenges we've got is
we have to compete in a very competitive
market and if you just look
in the financial service industry,
our competitors are moving.
If you look in the fintech and startup
industry, they are evolving very quickly.
The question we had to ask and answer
is how do we respond to those threats?
It became very clear to us that we needed
to find ways as an organization where
we could evolve and change faster.
Using past technologies, past solutions,
infrastructures code and
engineering pipelines,
we are able to deliver change fast.
That's what we're solving for.
Why cloud? Well, in actual fact,
it's what cloud gives us
which is the ability to evolve quickly.
That's what we want.
Cloud is how we do it.
I think that's an important point as well.
You decided not to go into infrastructure as a service,
you decided we're going to look at sales
first, then we're going to look at pairs.
Now you talk about the technical skill
of the people of action making as possible
inside the organization and I think a lot
of the big problems that we see
traditionally when migrating to cloud or
having the strategy is what do we do
with our people, how do we bring
the people along on this journey?
And traditionally infrastructure as
a service would be that easy onboarding
point because you're still being able
to utilize those people in that space
from an infrastructure service
and then moving forward.
But you guys have done,
you've really been phenomenal in the way
that you brought your people along on this
journey and the skilling and bringing them
into this conversation and showing
them the possibilities.
So I think maybe what would be great
to understand is what challenges did you
initially see with the people who are
going to be doing this because you've got
some great resources out here and how did
you take them along
on this journey with you?
Look, it's really important to point that.
You can only move as fast
as your people can move.
We accepted that we would start slowly,
the people you've got are
the people you need.
We really respect that
our people have got lots of institutional
knowledge, they understand our business.
Look, I thought people were quite smart as
well if I may say so,
is we're also very conscious that how we
govern our state has to evolve as well.
We can't have risk managers and
information security,
using everything in the data center
mindset when looking at solutions
that are cloud based solutions.
It's not just the technologists that we had
to move and they had to rethink how they
take up their role, but it's also the
control functions and support functions.
We had learning paths put in place.
All of our people had access to training.
There was absolutely no
constraint on training.
A lot of our people are in the pandemic
were working from home.
A lot of that was digital, so they could
really get stuck in certification,
if they wanted to be certified,
we would foot that bill.
We try to take away as much friction as
possible so that folk could
really become invested in it.
We want our people to learn one
of the phrases we use, one of objectives,
funny enough, is we want our
people to be Azure native.
Yes.
We want them to really
understand the technology.
And it's been very successful.
It's been very frustrating at times.
I just don't want to make it sound easy.
It's not easy.
It takes patience.
Some people become very nervous.
What we do is we just stay close to them.
I think you've mentioned before as well,
I mean people have transitioned
inside of the organization as well.
They've grown inside
of the organization.
Yeah.
Listen, with a great resignation,
we've obviously lost staff.
It's not great for the organization
but I'm extraordinarily proud as to if I
look at people that have left Investec
and have taken up positions in other
organizations, they're considered thought leaders,
and two years ago they were newbies
in this space.
They're brand ambassadors now.
But I'm enormously proud that we've been
able to help people,
give them the opportunity to upskill
themselves and modernize their skills.
Often in banking and wealth management,
your platforms are old.
Yes.
And they're not always the most exciting
places to work from a
technology point of view.
I think the journey that we are
on at the moment has made it
really exciting for our people.
Absolutely.
And I think
a lot of this also relies on a partnership
between
I don't want to say like a traditional
vendor and consumer kind of model,
but I'd like to think,
as we've been working with you, you know,
we've been collaborating well.
We've been partnering well.
Have you seen, how you've seen
that partnership work for you guys?
Well, look, I think there's
the killer question, all right?
Which is why did we choose Azure?
Yes.
All right, that's the killer question.
First of all,
we've selected a single cloud provider.
Yes.
We're not multi cloud.
Again, that is a very deliberate
decision on our part.
I think most people are expecting me
to say, because Microsoft Cloud or Azure
is awesome and is the best,
funny enough, it's very competitive
but that's not the reason why. It was
important to us that when we selected
that we chose a very competent,
capable cloud provider.
So absolutely.
What is more important to us, though, is
firstly,
leveraging the ecosystem
that we've already got.
We already had an investment with
Microsoft around SharePoint, Teams, D365.
We've already got a lot of data there
and so it made a lot of sense to us to be
able to access and exploit that data.
Choosing an alternative
would have meant that we would have had to
use other techniques to gain
access to that data.
And so with Azure and the Power
platform we can go straight in.
So that's the first reason.
The second reason we've had a great
working relationship with Microsoft.
And I think whenever an organization like
ourselves goes on a cloud journey or
a modernization journey,
the people you travel with are probably
more important is you can't do the salon.
And
the partnership that we've enjoyed
with Microsoft up until that point,
fair enough, was critically
important in our decision process.
We got to know that in 20 years time when
we look at each other,
we are still partners.
Exactly.
You're not a vendor to us.
And often vendor relationships become
quite strained over time because
it's all about the margins.
I think with a partner we want
a company who can solve,
we can solve problems together
with and it's for our benefit
and for their benefit.
We felt that with Microsoft we have
a partner like that and we were very
comfortable to go with Azure knowing
that we would walk this path together.
That's a great story.
And also the way that we've partnered
and collaborated and things like that.
Obviously there's things that you guys
have learned throughout this journey as
well as have we as we've been
going on this journey with you.
It's probably a weird question to ask now,
but I mean, how do you see
us collaborating better?
Not just us and yourselves,
with yourselves and partners.
We've had this taste of what a good
partnership and a good
collaboration can actually do.
There's more opportunity right for it
depending on how we collaborate
and whether improvements or opportunities
for better collaboration and partnership.
Look, I think that's
a really important question.
I think we first had to get
the foundations right and I think Azure
and Azure technology
and modernizing our platform, our estate.
I think that's probably the first
act of a multi act play.
As I've said, we've made
fantastic progress.
We're seeing the benefits.
There's still more to do.
But where this partnership is going to is
I'm seeing ourselves and Microsoft now
getting involved in business specific.
We're talking about how do we modernize
onboarding and opening of accounts.
We're actually going into the business
experience, the business efficiency,
the business operations.
And so we're finding that Microsoft is
enthusiastically not constraining
themselves to being just
a technology company.
You're introducing us to third parties
who we would ordinarily not have
been had access to.
Together, we're going up the value chain.
Yeah.
I see that's where
the partnership is going to go.
I'm kind of excited about that.
I think one of your mantras at Investec
is finding the possibilities, right?
And I think that's what a lot of people
are doing now or being able to do now
at the moment now, which is great.
But based on something, we've spoken a bit
about the journey to Cloud and taking
the people and I think it's all great
and the partnership and the
importance of that stuff.
But now that you've been in it
for a little while,
what are some of the biggest
achievements you've seen or possibilities
that you've seen
from where you are currently today?
And I mean, it's still a long
way to go, but I mean, listen.
I still see us at the
start of the journey.
And so this particular problem
was a challenge to us because
the calculations took so long to assemble
the data and then to run the calculations
that we were looking at,
we weren't able to consume that data
during the next reporting period.
And for us that wasn't great.
So we targeted that particular problem,
the processing time, it was 19 hours.
We got the processing time to
around about 6 hours.
We've got some optimizations to put in.
We'll know we'll get that under 3
possibly under 2 hours.
And I know for a South African,
this data originates in South Africa.
The processing stake in place in Europe
and we're moving about half of terrace
monthly and augmenting the data set we
have there, which saves us
around five terrace of data.
So it's a substantial amount of data.
We're moving around the globe.
The cost is we're seeing 40%
to 43% reduction in cost.
So not only are we getting huge
performance benefits, all right,
we also see cost reduction.
Some of the fine print.
We probably had 15 different technologies
involved from different providers.
All of it has been built out
using Azure and Azure services.
So again, if you think about narrowing our
focus on what technologies we need
to learn about, our people need to learn
about, it's a far simpler solution.
Our people need to learn less,
to become skilled in less.
And so those are all the stuff
that's hard to measure.
So now that's been a roaring success.
That's great.
And then I think probably
lastly is what's next?
The future is now wide open.
Possibilities are out there.
Technology is coming at a phenomenal pace.
The way that industries are adopting
things are coming at a phenomenal pace.
I think you're enabled now to move
at a phenomenal pace as well.
But I mean, what's next for you?
I think exploring opportunities
together is what's next.
I think for Investec,
we have a very well established brand.
Yes.
I think the industry
understands us, what we do.
I think there are other things we'd like
to get involved in just outside
our existing niche target market.
And I think having access to technology
and really creative people will allow us
to go and explore those alternative
markets or those new markets or those
complementary markets,
and we will do it far more confidently
than let's say, we would have
done five or ten years ago.
That's super exciting.
And that's exciting for us as well.
Just to be on that journey with you
and partnering with you on that journey
as well, I think it's phenomenal.
Thanks, Graeme, for spending the time
and taking us through your journey.
Microsoft is incredibly excited about
the future and working
with Investec in the future.
Fantastic.
It's an absolute pleasure.
From Investec, we are super pumped
as to where our industry is going
and having a partner like Microsoft next
to us gives us lots of confidence.
So thank you so much.
Thank you.