AI’s Financial Services Shift

Q1. Could you start by giving us a brief overview of your professional background, particularly focusing on your expertise in the industry?

Over the last 20 years, I have moved through various roles within the IT ecosystem and have seen many transformations up close. Through my current role as Sales Director, I focus on the EU Financial Services Industry. My background predominantly comes from a Digital Foundation perspective, and I have seen many seismic shifts from client-server architectures and basement server rooms to state-of-the-art hosted datacenters, to public cloud, to hybrid cloud, to GPU-enabled AI clouds in recent years.

Over the years, one constant source of excitement that has kept me going is the systematic simplification of the consumption of digital foundation technologies. Over the years, it has consistently become more automated and programmatic. This has resulted in it becoming less of an obscure black box and bringing it much closer to actual consumers by removing layers and processes, thus providing more direct business value.

Q2. Looking ahead, which parts of the digital foundation value chain are structurally positioned for margin expansion or consolidation—and which are facing irreversible margin erosion? What changed?

The digital foundation value chain has changed significantly…