Howard Silby

Generative AI has a massive role to play on a number of immediate issues that our customers and society is facing.

Chris Evans

We're in an age of increasing uncertainty, a lot of disruption in the markets. There is an ongoing battle to figure out how to manage risk and economic disruption. What do you see as the biggest areas of innovation that you think can help within that scenario, in that market context?

Howard

We need to distinguish between some of those more disruptive, perhaps longer-term elements and things that are causing some of those risk issues and economic disruption for our customers right here, right now. In terms of where my team is largely focused on what we call the leaps ahead that we need to face into.

So, climate. What's the bank's role in the ongoing climate challenge, both physical risk and decarbonization? AI, particularly generative AI. I know it's really hot topic right now, but it's got a long way to run. We see that as something over the long term, we need to build a lot of muscle right now, but continue to face over the coming years. Another one for the financial service industry that's going to be a continuing long running theme is payments. That's a massive area of focus for us. It's the main way that customers interact with financial services.

Chris

That's super interesting. Thanks Howard. Just thinking about, there's longer term, there’s big leaps, and the role that you and NAB can play within those. Where do you see the bank operating? Are you a leader, are you a partner or a sponsor or a fast follower in the development of those technologies? Where do you think you sit within the innovation practice?

Howard

It actually varies, Chris, depending on which topic we're speaking to. If I take climate as an example, I do think the bank will end up leading in that space. A large number of banks globally have made net zero commitments and locally in different geographies. If I take Australia and New Zealand, for example we're certainly being asked and expected by the government to take a lead, particularly with respect to decarbonization.

That is the topic where we have an enormous range of exciting partnerships as well. For us it's about partnering, it's about working with others who are bringing great customer solutions to market and then working out which of those do we put into our core propositions.

Generative AI has a massive role to play on a number of immediate issues that our customers and society is facing. I talked about scams and frauds as well earlier, and that's a good example. But we do need to be mindful of the fact that banks are highly regulated entities and when it comes to recommendations coming out of generative AI tools, there's a huge amount of work we can do internally. But surfacing those to customers is not something that the banks are going to be doing in advance of other industry sectors. There's a very simple reason for that — we cannot afford to be wrong one in 10,000 times. We're a highly regulated entity and near enough is not good enough. There's a huge set of user cases that will be applied using generative AI as an example. We're not going to be at the forefront of customer interactions that are entirely generative AI-led.

Chris

Really interesting to hear your thoughts on where the bank will be leading, and then enabling, sponsoring, and partnering to move forward. Taking this back a little bit more personally, I'd be really interested to hear from yourself. What are you personally most excited about?

Howard

Well, it's hard to pick your favorite children as an innovation leader. From my perspective, my postgraduate degree was in machine learning in the AI winter, one of the many. But showing my age, certainly neural networks were somewhat out of favor.

I ended up doing a lot of study in genetic algorithms and other techniques. I'm really excited with the advances in the last two — three years. We are now seeing some real customer impact as a result of these tools and that one for me is like a personal area of interest that I can dive quite deeply into.

Chris

Taking a step back and looking at the broad innovation agenda, you said, there are many different elements. There's a lot of innovation happening at different parts, some of which banks are leading, some of which banks are sponsoring, and some of which fintechs are pushing and you are helping to enable. Where do you see this continued evolution going?

Howard

That's a big philosophical question, Chris. My only answer to that can draw on the timelines of history across all sectors. There's always a concern that there'll be one super app to do everything in our lives or one dominant corporation. Where are we? We’re in 2023.

If I go back to 2010, I think I'm right in saying that Cisco, Oracle, and IBM were still in the top five tech companies and they're not now.

I see a world of super healthy, competitive tension for many years to come yet.

Chris

Okay, excellent. I'm sure we'd all look forward to that.

Howard

Thanks Chris.

Chris

Thanks Howard.