EPISODE 214: Marketer of the Month Podcast with Anu Widyalankara

Hey there! Welcome to the Marketer Of The Month blog!

We recently interviewed Anu Widyalankara for our monthly podcast – ‘Marketer of the Month’! We had some amazing insightful conversations with Anu and here’s what we discussed about –

1. Discussion of advancements in global real-time and instant payment systems.

2. Examination of generative AI’s role in transforming transactional banking and payments.

3. Importance of clear communication and marketing in driving new technology adoption.

4. Strategies for incorporating market trends and insights into consulting services.

5. Emphasis on empathy for understanding client needs and delivering tailored solutions.

6. Discussion on political and economic factors affecting cross-border payments.

7. Strategies for maintaining innovation while adhering to regulatory requirements.

About our host:

Dr. Saksham Sharda is the Chief Information Officer at Outgrow.co. He specializes in data collection, analysis, filtering, and transfer by means of widgets and applets. Interactive, cultural, and trending widgets designed by him have been featured on TrendHunter, Alibaba, ProductHunt, New York Marketing Association, FactoryBerlin, Digimarcon Silicon Valley, and at The European Affiliate Summit.

About our guest:

Anu Widyalankara is a Payments Strategy and Technology Director at EY, based in London, England. With over 17 years of experience in Financial Services, she specializes in leading and delivering Payment strategy, M&A integration, and new payment product development for financial services and cross-sector payments clients. Her expertise encompasses transactional banking, Generative AI, quantum computing, CBDCs, and digital assets. 

Money Without Borders: EY’s Director of Payments Strategy & Tech Anu Widyalankara on Marketing the Instant Payments Revolution

The Intro!

Saksham Sharda: Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. I’m your host, Dr. Saksham Sharda, and I’m the creative director at Outgrow. co. And for this month we are going to interview Anu Widyalankara who is the Director of Payments Strategy and Technology at EY.

Anu Widyalankara: Great to be here. Thank you.

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The Big Questions!

Saksham Sharda: What are the most significant recent advancements in payment technology that you believe will reshape the industry?

Anu Widyalankara: Okay. So let me talk about just three of them because there are many new technologies out there in payments. I think the most important ones are real-time payments and instant payments and the advancements we’ve seen globally. We started off if I take the UK as an example, faster payments came into play in 2008. India UPI is an instant payment platform. We know SEPA is meant to go live by the end of this year. So a lot is happening across the globe around instant payments. We’ve had some challenges. We know that P 27, for example, we’re looking forward to, but it has been taken off the books now. But I think as a whole practitioners and industry are looking forward to instant payments globally. And, secondly, I think one of the biggest trends we are seeing is CBDC and the different governments and countries kind of picking up the technology on CBDC. I think it’d be interesting to see how different economies tackle the problem. We know China has already built technology around that. We know that multiple countries are quite optimistic about that and some haven’t bought into it as yet. So as a technology, I think it’d be good to see how interoperability between these technologies actually works out and how different countries will build out CBDC platforms. And then thirdly, I wanna talk about generative AI cause I think that’s a technology that’s all-encompassing and it has a massive impact on transactional banking and payments at large. It impacts your consumers on the retail banking side and it impacts SMEs and commercial banking customers as well. So generative AI has the potential to really disrupt organizations and disrupt financial services. So I think that’s a big technology that we need to keep an eye out for.

Saksham Sharda: Do you have any memorable example or a story around a successful implementation of any of these new technologies for one of your plans?

Anu Widyalankara: Yeah so this wasn’t for financial service it was for a merchant and we were looking at a slightly different technology for cross-border payments. So it’s somewhat related because you have to look at interop B2B between real-time payment platforms. We talk about cross-border payment. It’s one of the big technologies that are all being developed out there. So one of my good memories was when we were building out a cross-border payments platform for a client. And we were trying to figure out which alternate payment methods that kind of sit across different countries that we want to support in that platform. And we had to do a number of customer interviews and pieces of research. And some of the stories that we heard from customers about how they use different APMs across Europe were quite interesting. So there was one around a customer who bought some goods from a merchant in the Netherlands using IO and then they had to return that when they came back to France using Europe. And that for them was a challenge. So yeah, I think that was one of the interesting use cases that we saw.

Saksham Sharda: So you talked about gen AI in one of your three things. How do you see it particularly transforming the payment sector?

Anu Widyalankara:  So if I were to talk about the top three ways in which payments are transformed and transactional banking as a whole is being transformed because of generative AI, I think the biggest play is around efficiency. If you look at commercial banking, and transactional banking as a whole, you can see that we have a lot of overhead built into our operations. And what generative AI really does is try to build economies of generative AI into it. And you are really seamlessly trying to deliver your operations. So it could be the front office, the back office, it could be the middle office as well. One of the use cases that we see quite a lot is around payment investigations and repair. And that’s something that our clients are building out across the board. Secondly, I think one of the kind of big use cases we see is in the anti-laundering space. So for transaction monitoring, sanction screening, because of the historical data that most organizations have, it’s easy to use a generative AI technology feed in that data build, build that LLM and feed in the output of that and build out algorithms that can easily do transaction monitoring and sanction screening. So that’s another use case that we are saying. But on the customer-facing front, one of the things I’m excited about is how the technology plays into the hands of the relationship manager. Because if you look at an RMS role, at the end of the day, it’s about kind of understanding their customer and there’s a lot of data that they can have at hand when they have the right tools in front of them. So I think generative AI can again build that capability using the data that organizations have today and publicly available data. So it really brings together a number of different data points to give them that intelligence when they’re facing their clients.

Saksham Sharda: In your experience, how crucial is effective communication in driving the adoption of all these new payment technologies? And how does marketing play a role in this process?

Anu Widyalankara: I think if I were to start with generative AI, we’d see two camps of gen AI. There’s one camp that’s fearful and there’s another camp that’s hopeful. So I think it’s very important for us not to lose that connectivity between gen AI and humans. For that, you need to really understand how you bring out the potential of Gen AI and that’s where I think communication and marketing come into play. You really need to take the tooling that you’re building around gene AI and augment that to a level that anyone can understand at a human level. Stop talking about coding, stop talking about the technology outside of it. Talk about how it impacts your life and makes your life better. So that’s really important. And even when you talk about technologies like instant payments, it’s not applicable for all use cases, right? So you need to figure out which use case actually is applicable for a technology like that. So it’s important to understand at different country levels and globally, which use cases we want to drive adoption on. And that becomes an exercise of let’s collaborate, let’s work as a global incentive to drive that.

Saksham Sharda: With your background in payments strategy, how do you integrate market insights and trends into EY’s consulting services to address clients’ evolving needs over time?

Anu Widyalankara: I mean we do a lot of research on a regular basis looking at the different sectors. So EDS runs across retail banking and commercial banking. It involves smaller players, PSPs, EMIs, and FMI, and we work with a lot of fintechs as well. So it’s important to kind of work across the board and get that insight that we can as much as possible across the industry. And things change all the time. I work in the technology space quite a lot and technology is very fast-paced, especially with the developments we’ve seen recently. Gen AI reached a hundred billion customers in two months. So that in itself tells you how advanced and how adoption is growing in the market. It’s very important for us to be close to the market and understand the dynamics of it.

Saksham Sharda: So can you discuss the role of thought leadership in all of this, like in shaping EY’s approach to advising clients on all these payment technology adoptions and transformations?

Anu Widyalankara: So we work quite closely with a lot of industry experts, with industry bodies. We have a lot of experience in the industry. I’ve worked in payments for about 16-17 years. So then we bring all of that together, especially when we can see there are emerging trends in the market, like generative AI, for example, and general AI as a potential hypothetical future. I think it’s very important for us to bring together those minds and, you know, drive part leadership in the market. And especially when we’re advising clients, we need to be ahead of where they’re thinking. So it’s very important to understand what the vision is in the industry. Where is this heading? What are the possible futures that you need to address that’s the risk and that’s the opportunity that clients would want to face. So yeah, I think part leadership is very much fundamental to what we do.

Speaker 3: You mentioned before that it’s a very fast-paced generative AI in payment, but you also mentioned the transaction market international screen, right? So we know that the banking sector is very slow to innovate. In your perspective as attending your clients that are big, medium, and small, what do you think needs to happen for the people, for the gen AI process of trends to happen in the big organizations? Because so far, if you ask any bank, you know, they are not using public LLMS or they’re not necessarily adopting the technology, but they’re not at the moment to the customers the same way as a fintech. So what do you think needs to happen for this to be boosted?

Anu Widyalankara: I think if you look at a technology like generative AI because it’s so all-encompassing for a mature organization it can be quite hard to implement. But if you look at how the financial services providers are responding today, a number of, actually most of the large banks are investing in generative AI technology and tools. They haven’t publicly made them available because, at the end of the day, we aren’t quite there yet with regulations and ethics version AI concerns. So once we tighten the regulations and ethical guidelines around gen AI, I think adoption will be better. And banks and other kinds of mature organizations will put the technology out there. One thing we are seeing is that they are using this technology internally, or they’ve started to prototype and they’ve started to build proof of concepts around the technology. I think secondly, it’s important to understand that fintechs don’t have legacy technology. They don’t have any legacy operations. They have a very flexible culture. So in that ecosystem, it’s very easy for them to take something like generative AI and implement it. I talk to clients quite a lot about being AI first. What that means is to take a look at, especially if you are a mature organization, take a look at what team, what operation, what product, what function is most valuable and can drive technology like generative AI and start there. Because you’re not a FinTech, you’re not going to be able to develop and implement that technology. Pick a team, a product, or a function that actually works for you and start there. For fintechs, I question them. If they weren’t AI first, I would start there cause that’s where the future is. If you are building legacy technology, you’re probably doing something wrong. So please start with Gen AI and,and build from there.

Saksham Sharda: That’s interesting. So if you had to like, concretize it, how does EY adapt its messaging to cater to the unique needs and priorities of all these stakeholders such as banks, regulators, and also technology vendors?

Anu Widyalankara: You asked me about a skill I think was most important to me in my career. I think having empathy is very important when you work with clients, especially when you work with clients that have quite varied structures, maturity, and technology, right? So it’s very important to understand who they are and understand who their customers are at the end of the day and really tailor your answer accordingly, right? So if you work with fintechs, we know that they’re going to be, you know, accelerated prototyping, the majority of their products. They don’t have a lot of legacy. So it’s easy for them to start using AI tools, and get comfortable with them. I always think about an employee as a, it’s continuing your life as a consumer and an employee. So it should be a seamless journey when used in AI. So when I come from the office, if I’m using Alexa at home and I’m asking Alexa about, you know, can you tell me what my schedule for the day is? I would expect that to be interlinked with my work schedule. And that drive, I’ve got a PowerPoint presentation in two hours. Can I use chat GPT to do that PowerPoint presentation? I’m gonna tell you the three top three things I wanna cover. It’s gonna be three sides, right? So I want to have that kind of seamlessly delivered throughout my day-to-day life. I would love to see that in action. I’m hoping that’s not too far away, but I think it’s, again, very important to understand, and be empathetic towards what’s happening.

Saksham Sharda: Well, let’s go into some lighter questions now. What does your typical day look like? You wake up in the morning and then what?

Anu Widyalankara: Oh, I feed my cat. That’s product number one.

Saksham Sharda: Love how you thought about every question, but not this one.

Anu Widyalankara: So his name is Teo. Teo gets fed every day at eight o’clock. So that’s probably number one and then I grab a tea, then wash. And either I work from home or I head to the office. But I try to do an hour’s walk every day. I miss most days if I can do it that way. And yeah I think probably eight thirty to five, six I’m at either Pine side or in the office. And head back home, Netflix, and chill I suppose. That’s what it is.

Saksham Sharda: So you do your 10,000 steps a day?

Anu Widyalankara: Oh, gosh, no, not recently anymore. I try to let’s say I do 50,000 steps a week.

Saksham Sharda: And how much of this time has been taken up by meetings?

Anu Widyalankara: So I focus a lot on relationships. So the majority of my day tends to be meetings. I like meeting people, I like understanding their problems. I like providing solutions. I need to talk, you need to meet people, I need to talk to them to do that. So a lot of it is meeting people face to face on teams and, you know, just generally connecting with them.

Saksham Sharda: What advice would you have for job seekers looking to get into this industry?

Anu Widyalankara: Keep in touch with what’s going on in the market in the regulatory space. Understand what’s going on across the globe because no country isn’t impacted by what’s going on in an adjacent country, right? So, where payments are concerned there’s a lot that we collaborate and we co-share across the globe. So understand everything that’s been built globally because that will give you that edge that you need when you go for an interview. I think secondly try to be ahead of some of these new technologies and almost kind of have a vision on how you would like to see it implemented. Like generative AI, for example. Take a guess and think of how financial services can use it and in the ways that they’re not using it today. I think that’ll give you that edge as well.

Saksham Sharda: So speaking of the global nature of the industry, what are the biggest challenges in improving cross-border payments and how can they be addressed in the current state?

Anu Widyalankara: I think the biggest challenge is the political landscape, where cross-border payments are concerned. I think if you look at how politics and general economics have moved in the last decade or so, especially post-pandemic, there’s a lot of protectionism across the globe. I think that is a bottleneck for cross-border payments to become more efficient. I spoke about instant payments before, and there are a lot of developments that are happening at the moment across the globe to have interoperability between critical national infrastructures that are delivering real-time payments, but there’s a lot of collaboration that needs to go into that. But we know that there are different economies. I take China, a communist country compared to the USA, which is more capitalist, we’ll have a very different approach when it comes to cross-border payments. So I think we need to figure out what is more important. Is it more important for us to be global citizens, be able to move across the globe, and be as globally active as possible? Or do we need to kind of be siloed in our own countries and just understand who we are in that remit? I think it’s more important to be a global citizen. I think it’s more, it helps with technology, it helps with innovation when you, I think that the biggest challenge is in individual countries understanding how they develop cross-border payments and putting their politics aside.

Saksham Sharda: And so how is EY helping clients navigate these challenges? I know you mentioned ideal Euros earlier, but Yeah. How’s general AI, what’s the AI approach here?

Anu Widyalankara: I mean we advise a lot of regulators as well. And I think because we understand different market dynamics, we are a global organization and we understand a lot of the market dynamics in different countries and we are close to regulators as well. I think it helps the discussion, it helps us bring people together, bring countries together, and collaborate across the board. A lot of these technologies that we wanna build, the technology itself, it’s the same across the globe, right? It doesn’t change if I wanna build out instant payments, the technology, the rails that sit behind that, that doesn’t change when I look at China or the USA or the UK or Canada. It’s very similar. So I think it’s making them all understand that there’s a lot of mutuality across the board and bringing people together to collaborate.

Saksham Sharda: How do evolving regulations impact payment strategies and how can organizations stay compliant while innovating at the same time?

Anu Widyalankara: So I think it’s very important to have an open, continuous, honest dialogue with the regulator. And if you look at the majority of the mature banks, actually all of the mature banks, they have that open dialogue. So any challenges they’ve got with the regulations that they have to implement, they will be open and honest about. If you look at operations resilience as one of the big regulations we have to implement, the majority of the banks started that conversation early on with the regulators, the PSR, the FCA, with the Bank of England. And it’s important to be open and honest about what you can do and what you can’t do. And I think the UK is pretty good at that in most instances. So I think it’s very important regardless of how big or small or how mature your organization is to be connected to the regulator and be proactive about that dialogue.

Saksham Sharda: And so how does EY support its clients in balancing such innovation with regulatory requirements?

Anu Widyalankara: So we usually act as the mediator between regulators and our clients. Because I mean, we have former regulators in EY who understand the world regulatory landscape in the UK and why Europe and even globally, and they can advise and they can help that conversation. So it’s, I’m an innovator at heart, so I’m always a fan of, let’s first think about how we develop the technology, understand the challenges of it, and then go to the regulator and be honest about it. Because regulators want to innovate, right? They don’t want to be the hindrance of innovation, but you need to time it correctly so that you are preventing human harm because there are some technologies, like generative AI is a good example, right? You need to figure out what that pivot is like, and what is the tipping point at which you are going to cause human harm because there isn’t a right control in place. So I think, yes, please do innovate, but make sure at the right point when you are not certain about where you’re heading, get the right people into the room and have that conversation because that’s the thing that’s gonna differentiate you from other players.

Saksham Sharda: So the last question for you is a personal one. What would you be doing in your life, if not this?

Anu Widyalankara: Oh gosh. I’ll be a music producer for sure.

Let’s Conclude!

Saksham Sharda: Thanks, everyone for joining us for this month’s episode of Outgrow’s Marketer of the Month. That was Anu Widyalankara who is the Director of Payments Strategy and Technology at EY.

Anu Widyalankara: Pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Saksham Sharda: Check out the website for more details and we’ll see you once again next month with another marketer of the month.