AWS Financial Services Symposium 2025 | Glenn Finch, IBM & John Glooch, Prudential & Steven Allen, Truist Bank

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More from AWS Financial Services Symposium 2025

Glenn Finch

Global Managing Partner, Cognitive & Analytics

IBM

John Glooch

CIO

Prudential

Steven Allen

SVP

Truist

play_circle_outline Continuous business transformation and modernization

play_circle_outline Enhancing Security Through AI: Generative Models for Fraud Prevention

play_circle_outline Focus on customer experience and fraud prevention through technology

play_circle_outline Importance of partnerships for business success and innovation

play_circle_outline Transparency and trust in partnerships for successful collaboration

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Transcript

Glenn Finch, IBM & John Glooch, Prudential & Steven Allen, Truist Bank

Glenn Finch

Global Managing Partner, Cognitive & Analytics IBM

John Glooch

CIO Prudential

Steven Allen

SVP Truist

At the AWS Financial Services Symposium, theCUBE’s Dave Vellante sits down with IBM’s Global Managing Partner, Glenn Finch; Prudential’s CIO, John Glooch; and Truist’s SVP, Steven Allen, to unpack how cloud-native architectures and generative AI are transforming financial services. From core system modernization to pragmatic innovation, the trio shares real-world examples driving measurable impact.

Finch highlights IBM’s deep collaboration with AWS to build agentic AI solutions that are not just experimental, but production-ready – empowering institu... Read more

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What steps have been taken to transform the business and improve customer experiences through technology? add

What are some ways that you are utilizing AI in your call center and focusing on improving customer experience and detecting fraud? add

What have you and your partners been working on for the past year and what are your goals for the future? add

What is the importance of partnerships in business and how can educating partners on technology lead to better use cases and problem-solving capabilities? add

What is the importance of trust, communication, and teamwork in a business partnership? add

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Glenn Finch, IBM & John Glooch, Prudential & Steven Allen, Truist Bank

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Dave Vellante

>> Hi everybody. Welcome back to New York City. We're wrapping up the AWS Financial Services Symposium. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE. Glenn Finch is back. He's a global managing partner from IBM. Glenn and I sat down, I don't know, Glenn, maybe a month or so ago, and had a great conversation. And he's got some really great guests with him. John Glooch is CIO for group insurance at Prudential, and Steven Allen is the senior vice president and chief data officer of operations and fraud payments, treasury, and digital commerce at Truist. Gentlemen, thanks for your time. Great to see you here today.

Glenn Finch

>> Yeah, Dave, awesome to be with you.

Dave Vellante

>> Yes. So Financial Services Symposium, to be told, this is my first one, even though I've interacted with a lot of AWS FS pros, and we're hanging out in New York a lot, so we talk to a lot of people in financial services. It is the leading indicator of a lot of businesses, as you know. But I'm going to start with IBM and AWS. I was talking to Arvind Krishna in a group setting the other day, and I asked him a question about his philosophy on partnership. And he had a great answer. He said, "We could look at this kind of like we used to as, well, there's somebody doing really well, I'm going to go do that." And then he said, "Our philosophy has changed." He said, "We do some things really well, better than anybody else. So how do we help those guys get better and how do we do well ourselves?" So really is a new attitude inside of IBM, and manifests itself in a relationship with AWS. Tell me about it.

Glenn Finch

>> Yeah, so Arvind's goal is simple. He wants half of our consulting revenue to be from strategic partners, which is a radical shift as compared to the previous CEO. And he's made it very, very easy to work together. And what we do is we focus on what AWS is great at, what we're great at, and what a client needs, and then it sort of transforms things. Nobody's protective about territory or anything like that. We focus on a client need and who's best able to deliver it. And oftentimes now, we're working based on outcomes. And you and I have been together for a number of CUBE sessions and we started doing these outcomes based things to transform how work gets done where we don't get paid unless one of these two clients gets business value. It's a radically different way to show up when we're all incented so that business results happen.

Dave Vellante

>> I love it.

John Glooch

>> .

Dave Vellante

>> That's awesome.

Glenn Finch

>> Yeah, it's awesome.

Dave Vellante

>> John, I want to ask you as a CIO, are you ever not transforming your business? You've gone through a number of transformations. Of course, COVID had a forced march to digital transformation. Now we've got this AI wave. And so where are you in that transformation? How do you think about transformation?

John Glooch

>> Yeah. No, appreciate that. We talk about that as a business all the time. We are constantly transforming. So it's not really an event, it's just the way to do business. We started in earnest in 2022, and we had to fix the technology foundation. We had decades of legacy technical debt. And really focusing on what matters to the customer and our customers, and that's particularly claims. So modernizing our claims platform. We did that with commercially off the shelf software. And then with the advent of microservices, what we do is we take those claims capabilities, we develop those microservices where we can really differentiate and innovate. We unified our rating and quoting platform and engine, did some customer level pricing, dashboards, automation. And if you fast forward to 2025, we have extraordinary business growth, and that's really powered with technology and differentiating customer experiences. So within group insurance, you compete on price, but you win on experience and service. So we just launched a mobile application for our supplemental health claims that we developed in partnership with a couple of key customers, and really just taking advantage of event-based architecture and data platforms to modernize and digitize the entire lifecycle from quote to claim. So we're excited, but it's never going to end. And now with the advent of AI, we're really looking at where can we embed that in our technologies and our experiences for better customer results.

Dave Vellante

>> I don't know if you guys saw the keynote this morning, Scott Mullins, he gave an example. I just went through the same thing with the insurance claim, and it was actually really good, really easy. And I'd gone through it before, maybe years ago, and it wasn't good and it wasn't easy. Steven, I want to ask you to talk about transformation. It always comes back to data, I always say. Everything's a data problem. And it's a challenging problem. But how do you think about transformation and what role data, harmonizing data now with all this wonderful AI and agentic talk that we have here, it's a real challenge.

Glenn Finch

>> Yeah. So I have to tell you, I've been with Truist one year, and we have a super team. I mean our leader who we've worked with for many years ago, he brought in all the best and the brightest. And he wooed me. He said to me, "Hey, we're going to get a chance to do something the right way." And to me, that was everything. We talked about it for a bit, just to make sure the right way was the right way. And I was like, "Hey, I'm tickled pink. I just want to be part of this." So came over, and that's exactly what we've been doing. Pulling data, rebuilding everything, doing it all the right way, regulations, compliance, working with all the auditors and all. This is all the most important things, especially in banking. So to have the opportunity for the first time really in my career, to do it the right way is fabulous. And I mean, like I said, I'm just tickled pink to be part of it. As far as the AI side, we're now, I think we just came in, if I'm wrong, I apologize, but think we came in 87th place this year for being, I don't know how to tell you this, sorry, 87th place for number of patents in Truist. And that-

Glenn Finch

>> Really?

>> Yes. And it just came out just the other day. And to me, that says it all. And those are AI patents. So we are really rocking the world. And I don't even want to be on here saying too much because I want everybody to forget about us because we're going to come out really strong. It's a really great opportunity.

Dave Vellante

>> IBM better get cracking there on the patent front.

Glenn Finch

>> We better step up our game. We're asleep at the wheel.

Dave Vellante

>> So of course all kinds of talk in agentic, we were at IBM Think last week, and we got a healthy dose. Same here. I think of Rob Thomas's comments. He always used to say, "You can't have AI without IA." Right? Information architecture. And so again, it starts with the data. I hear sort of two sides of the equation at this event. On the one hand, we saw some this morning, some customers that are leaning in, there were I think 12 of them, 12 logos up there. Of course with AWS, you know if it was mature, there'd be 1,200 logos, I joke.

Glenn Finch

>> Pushing the boundary, from this morning, right?

Dave Vellante

>> But last week at Think, I had a number of, we had Heineken on, we had Pepsi on, L'Oreal didn't make it, but we looked at their case study and others. And they're all thinking about agentic. You guys are sort of the Switzerland of agentic. I wonder, John, if you could talk about where you guys, how you think about it, because there's risk. We talked to the security guys that was at RSA a couple of weeks ago and they're like, "Oh, agentic. You got to secure the agents." And then Steven, maybe you can chime in. But John, what's your thinking on this and you, where are you at as an organization?

John Glooch

>> And everything we do is in cooperation with Responsible AI and the Responsible AI governance. Those guys have a very, very hard job. So our jobs are fun, so we get to do the cool, innovative stuff. When you take a look across the digital span and the digital lifecycle, it's really about putting information in the hands of people that need it. So I often call it intelligent search. Some people call it chatbots, but I think chatbot doesn't do it justice. But embedding intelligence search in something like our websites so customers have an easily way to navigate, provide information, and education on their benefits on their time as they're ready. And then once we have all of that data, what we do is we put it into a observability or ELK stack. From there you can do a whole bunch of AI queries. From there, you can really start training the models and give you a lot of insights on your data that you'd never had before.

Dave Vellante

>> Okay, cool. Enterprise search has always been the killer use case in my mind. How about you Steven? Where are you guys?

>> So it comes to mind is we're AWS, we're utilizing for call center our call center connect software. And some of the things we're talking about and thinking about doing is really utilizing AI in there. And when we have our chats and all that type of sessions, call summaries, and things like that, anything we can do to make the customer experience better is really the key. Because as a customer, and I'm a customer, you're all customers, we don't want to be doing more time than we need to. We want to have the right answers right away, and we don't want to be bogged down or sitting waiting for somebody to answer a call. So those are the types of things. And the other thing I just want to mention was, hey, fraud is my area. And I can tell you that that is a really key factor. So anything we can utilize to capture more fraud, we're in. And we are really focused on that. So that is utilizing AI, agentic AI, and all that, we're going to do everything we can.

Dave Vellante

>> Let me ask you a question about that. Because fraud detection has gotten so much better over the last 10 or 15 years. You used to have to look through your statements, and you'd catch something six months down the road and it was just way stressful. Now you still get some false positives, but it's like near real time.

Glenn Finch

>> Yeah, it is.

Dave Vellante

>> Now of course there's other fraud, there's fraud in healthcare, there's other types of fraud in financial services. So it's not just the swiping of the card. Maybe that's now the trivial use case, but the industry has done a great job there. How are you thinking about attacking other areas, or there are new areas that we should know about? Any examples that you can share that you're going after?

>> There's tremendous number of areas, and I'd love to talk about all the details, but I don't want to let anybody know what I'm doing.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah. Okay, I get it. Those are all those patents you got. You keep it close to the vest.

>> 37.

Glenn Finch

>> He can tell us-

>> I could tell you-...

Glenn Finch

>> but he'd have to kill us....

>> but I'd have to kill you. That's right.

John Glooch

>> .

Glenn Finch

>> But I will tell you this, when we think of fraud, by default we think of our credit card. That's actually not, I mean don't get me wrong, fraud in credit card's big, but that's not the biggest area. Checking inside branches, I got to tell you, I had gotten knee deep, and I have a couple of my teammates knee deep into fraud, and working with our fraud partners who have been doing it for a long time. It's been really eye-opening. So we're really making a headway in there. And you'd be surprised of all the things, like mules. Mules, I don't know if you've heard that.

Dave Vellante

>> There's an article in the Journal today.

Glenn Finch

>> Today, yeah.

>> Oh, I didn't even know that.

Glenn Finch

>> I saw that.

Dave Vellante

>> It's about-

Dave Vellante

>> I didn't catch it....

Dave Vellante

>> about money laundering. Mules basically going in. And they were, I'll tell you a quick story, they were surveilling this individual. You read the article.

Glenn Finch

>> I did. Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> And then the detective went in, or whatever it was, FBI, and said, "Was that deposit that was just made more than 10,000." And the teller said, "Yeah, it was more like 500,000."

Glenn Finch

>> 100,000.

Dave Vellante

>> 100,000. And then this individual was going on to the next one and the next one. So yeah. And they're washing checks.

John Glooch

>> Yeah, they're washing checks. They're breaking into your mailboxes and they're washing checks, reprinting checks. They're doing it, look, you got to give them credit where the credit's due. They're very good at being thieves. But at the other side of it is we're going to catch them. And that's really the key. Catch them. Client experience, again. Nobody wants to be caught on the other side. So that's our focus know, and we're really learning.

Dave Vellante

>> The adversary is exceedingly capable, I often say. Okay. So I want to partner up with somebody who is also exceedingly capable. I get IBM, you guys have launched Consulting Advantage. Mohamad loves to talk about that. It's an awesome program. You got AWS. They've got the infrastructure covered. So how do you guys all work together? Maybe you could sort of take us through some examples that have high business impact.

Glenn Finch

>> Yeah. So I'm just going to focus on the front, the middle, and the back for a minute, and I'm going to touch each one of those.

Dave Vellante

>> That's like the whole cow.

Glenn Finch

>> Yeah, right. I'm going to start in the back, since Steve was just there, this whole concept of security and fraud. And you said you were at Think last week, one of the things that IBM announced last week is that you can now run generative AI models on the mainframe. Well, most all the data for fraud sits on the mainframe. And we've spent all of our lives taking the data, moving it off, scoring it, moving it back, and waiting. Well now you can run gen AI models right next to the data. So we're constantly thinking through that. And there's, in our own security operation space, the security operations control centers, we've built generative AI agents that'll drive 60 or 70% efficiency there. I'll go to the front, which is where you started around the whole customer experience. What you describe in an intelligence search is almost a generative user experience where I know Steve, I know what his needs are, and I'm going to talk to him from the very beginning differently when I touch him in web and mobile than I ever have. So in fraud, you're looking at 30, 40, 50, 60% productivity in security and in the fraud. If you take two or three or four or five points out of fraud, that's awesome. On the front end, you mentioned digital virtual agents, things like that. There you're looking at 50, 60, 70, 80% efficiency. Call summary, you're dealing with let's say 20% of the talk time, those things. So all those business benefits are accreting. And in the middle, what agentic AI gives us the ability to do, and you mentioned Consulting Advantage, inside of Consulting Advantage is 2,500 agents and assistants, 1.6 million digital workers deployed to do a lot of things in the middle, front, and the back. So that in the middle, back to claims, if I'm not taking 90% of the cycle time out of a claim and 70% of the cost out of a claim, I haven't leveraged everything that I already possess. And so the way we work is we bring those pre-built generative AI, generative UI assets, we drop them in AWS in Consulting Advantage, and we work together to pick the best one. I didn't even talk about code because everybody would expect us to talk about code. I was talking about business problems and business processes. But of course the code, 30, 40, 50%, the ability to drive efficiency regardless of code type. So we're really bullish. And clients seem to love it when we show up together, when AWS and IBM show up together because they don't feel like they have to split the baby. And we're going to use these three things from AWS, these two things from IBM. So that's kind of a .

Dave Vellante

>> True hybrid model.

Glenn Finch

>> It is.

Dave Vellante

>> The AI story is interesting because it's integrated. We talked to a lot of folks down here. I was telling you guys about our NYSE studio, and we've been talking to a lot of banks and they're all hybrid. Insurance companies, a lot of them say, we got a claim system that runs on-prem and we're happy with that. And we do a ton of stuff with AWS in the cloud, I presume similar, right?

John Glooch

>> Yeah. And actually, so on the front end, one thing I would highlight, and you probably know this, Glenn, the IBM and AWS partnership for our proof of good health capability. So it's important because we have 22 million customers that we serve on the benefits platform. And it's really their first entree into Prudential. So the old saying is you never blow a chance to make a first impression. This is the first impression. So we built a new customer site using all AWS services of DynamoDB, ECS, SQS, you can't do anything without S3 these days, and really gave a modern look and feel to our customers. It just resonated with them. And then you throw in something like AWS Bedrock so that they can actually guide themselves through that process because it could be a little unnerving. It's how you protect yourself and your family, which is what we're in the business of doing. And with that search capability, they can navigate, find what they need, the information that they need, the education that they need, again on their time.

Dave Vellante

>> So that's the front end.

John Glooch

>> That's the front end.

Dave Vellante

>> And in the back end, are you a Z customer or-

John Glooch

>> Yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> So on the back end, the reason, so where I was going was a lot of the banks that we're talking to saying, "Yeah, we're building out our own AI stack." You guys may be as well. But this stack doesn't exist. We have to cobble together the skills. Z, it's the integrated package.

Glenn Finch

>> It is.

Dave Vellante

>> It always has been. That's what the mainframe has always been. Which is kind of interesting to see. Now, of course it's Z, it's a lot of transactions. It doesn't cover the whole world. But it does cover a big chunk of that world of a high value transaction.

Glenn Finch

>> It can. And last week, they did cite the benefit of generative AI running on a Z series for fraud specifically. Because you can look and see things in transactions when you're at the event level that you could never do before. Now I'm not suggesting it's the AI stack for everything. But I just found it interesting because, I mean, in our lifetimes, all of us with relatively salt and pepper hair, we remember when the Z came out and you could only run COBOL on it. Now that it's running general AI models, I'm like, this is pretty cool. But it does suggest a radically different paradigm in thinking about AI, gen AI, and all that stuff. And it is, it's going to be hybrid.

Dave Vellante

>> Anything you'd add to this conversation?

>> No, I'm ready to say, hey, how come you didn't tell me about this?

Glenn Finch

>> I'm in deep trouble now.

>> No. But I mean when I think, I think, look, as he mentioned gray hair, I start thinking contact switching and all kinds of other things. And I'm like, well, first thing that pops in my head is, okay, how many GPUs? What's the quality? And if we can do it faster, that's the key. The key is to catch them quickly, catch them as fast as you can. Because the more power we have, the less moving around of the data, that's really how you win. And we're in a game where they are learning faster and testing the gates all the time. All the time. So anything we can do to chop it down and get a little bit faster, it's a big win.

Dave Vellante

>> Maybe even, I don't know if you can give me specific numbers, but just even generally, what are the economics of being able to do it faster? I mean, if you can reduce that latency, you're printing money, right?

>> So I'll say this, I'll say what I can say, how's that? We have been working on this for the last year with our partners. And we've made some tremendous strides as a team. I don't want to ever think, oh, the data guys did it. No, this is a team effort. And we've definitely hit some major goals, and I'm really excited about that. We're very focused on customer experience. And to be able to reduce fraud, and now focus heavily on customer experience, that's where... We're going to get customers by default. And we're going to expand our existing customer base. We're going to expand the customer base, bring in the new products, identify products that customers aren't even aware of, and utilize gen AI to identify where can we help the customer better?

Dave Vellante

>> Okay. So we have IBM here. Imagine an imaginary AWS person right here. What's the one thing that these guys could do, and I'll start with you, John, to make your life better?

John Glooch

>> Yeah, I think you mentioned partnerships, right? And it's so incredibly important that partnership. And I'd be interested to hear how you think about it too, Steve. You cannot invest enough time and energy in that partnership. So really the better educated our partners are on our business and what we're trying to achieve, and the better that we can educate our business partners on the technology that's available to them, the better use cases that our business is going to come to us with, the more complex technology problems we'll be able to solve. And what that really does is it creates a workplace that is energizing, constantly learning, and we have very engaged employees. And when I say employees, not just Prudential employees, but also IBM and AWS. So I'm proud of what you guys have done, and we do innovation jams. And we don't do status reports with the account team. We talk about what we're trying to achieve, where are we in that transformation, and then what technology should we be thinking about?

Dave Vellante

>> So you get more leverage one plus one equals three type of thing. Are you trying to strategically reduce the number of suppliers that you have, or are you purposefully keeping the guys in the lower left of the magic quadrant, just keeping them around just to see if these guys are keeping up?

John Glooch

>> Yeah, I think now it's such a global workforce, and we're a global company, so we need the best global talent that we can find. And through partners or through our own employee base, and the market's tough, the competition for talent's tough. And granted, it ebbs and flows, but we'll take the best talent where we can get still him.

Dave Vellante

>> Still tight. Talent is still tight. Now despite, you hear a lot of layoffs and agents replacing humans, but maybe that's not the type of talent that you're looking for. AI talents .

John Glooch

>> It all comes down to talent.

Dave Vellante

>> I mean, you see the acquisitions that companies are making. I mean, I was talking to Frank Slootman a couple of years ago. And I'm like, "That's a lot of money for this company or that company." He goes, "Look, we're buying talent." And so you saw that with Databricks yesterday. All right. How about you, Steven, AWS and IBM, what's the one thing they could do to make your life easier?

Glenn Finch

>> I'm going to create a new one. PPP, we always say. People, process, and partnership. I'll use the P for partnership.

Glenn Finch

>> I like that.

Glenn Finch

>> And I got to get a patent first.

Glenn Finch

>> That's right.

John Glooch

>> What's that, 87?

Glenn Finch

>> the number.

>> 86.

John Glooch

>> 86. Right. I lost track.

Dave Vellante

>> But seriously, I always look for partnership. The way I've been working for the last, I don't know, for as long as I know you, it's all about partnership. And I mean I ran other divisions of different companies, and if I don't have a partner, if I got somebody coming in just to get me money, forget it, they can walk out. I have no time for that. It's all about partnership. And as long as we're partners. And partnering together is a blessing. Because now I know they've got the interest of us. It's a team effort. And it really is. I try to look at my partners as teammates. And it's all about success. We deliver together. And transparency. That's probably the other thing. I'm very big in transparency.

Dave Vellante

>> I mean, so often we love to talk tech. We all do. We love tech. We're in the business. But people are always saying, it's so true, it's the people and process, and it's the trust that you can build over time that really makes the difference for your business. Final thoughts. Steven, I'll give you the last word. We'll go around the table.

Glenn Finch

>> No. First of all, thank you. Thank you for the partnership, and AWS partnership as well. And I just look forward to really having a great rest of the year because we're midway, virtually midway. And get more patents for Truist. But no, it's about just making our clients happy. Because a client who's happy is going to be a better client. And that's really the key. And I think we're all clients.

John Glooch

>> Yeah, lifetime value, both ways.

Dave Vellante

>> John.

John Glooch

>> Yeah. Well Steve, it was great to meet you and get to know you over these past couple of days. So thank you.

Glenn Finch

>> Yeah, sure.

John Glooch

>> And same Glenn. And thanks for the opportunity to tell our story of a Prudential Group Insurance transformation. I mean, we're really proud of it. When we set out in 2022, it was fixing that foundation. Made a ton of progress, improving our AOI. We've done that. So now it's really about how do we really use technology to fuel that next wave of business growth. So we're incredibly excited about it. We couldn't do it alone. So I'm just really happy for the opportunity.

Dave Vellante

>> We would love to have you down to our Broad and Wall Street studio and then track the progress. And you guys are welcome anytime. Glenn, bring us home.

Glenn Finch

>> Yeah. So the cool part is, I don't have to say much because these guys just talked about how they're changing how work gets done. And that's literally the way I started is that that's what we could only hope for to be working with clients who want to do that. Who want a different outcome, not a different piece of technology. Because that's what consulting is all about. So it's an honor to be with you guys today. It's been a lot of fun too, which is awesome. And just thanks to the partnership. And thank you to the imaginary AWS colleague .

Dave Vellante

>> Thank you.

Glenn Finch

>> David, by the way, you make this so easy.

Dave Vellante

>> Thank you.

Glenn Finch

>> So thank you for being-

Dave Vellante

>> Guys, this was a lot of fun for me too.

Glenn Finch

>> Yeah. Yeah, it's cool.

Dave Vellante

>> I really appreciate it.

>> It was fun for us.

Dave Vellante

>> And again, I mean it, I hope to have you guys back, and I know I'll have you back. And thank you for watching. This wraps up our live portion of the programming, but we'll have a lot more on-demand coverage at thecube.net. So check that out. Check all the news at siliconangle.com and thecuberesearch.com as well. My name is Dave Vellante. For Scott Hebner, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time on theCUBE.