In some industries, certain things never change. While the financial-services sector is transforming with technology, it’s not without frequent check-ins with its old, ball-and-chain risk management departments. How can these companies innovate when moving fast and breaking stuff might carry too high a price?

“We are in this cycle where, I think, there’s $38 trillion … getting transferred from one generation to another,” said Nitin Gupta (pictured, center), partner and solutions lead — financial services — at Amazon Web Services Inc.

The finance industry could use a technology platform that enables it to quickly adapt to the current situation, according to Gupta. Data, machine learning, artificial intelligence all sound great. But financial companies must leverage them with risk-averse clients and shareholders in mind.

Gupta spoke with Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent event in Las Vegas. Joining Gupta were Shail Jain (pictured, left), data business group leader for North America at Accenture LLP, and Sumedh Mehta (pictured, right), chief information officer of Putnam Investments. They discussed how financial services is working around risk to digitally transform. (* Disclosure below.)

Self-serve data catalog with guardrails makes it safe to innovate

At Putnam, there is a desire to meet new market demands for tech-enhanced finance. But there is also an absolute need to keep testing and iterating within guardrails, according to Mehta.

“This is where we want to learn about the two pizza teams and how you can do things faster … which means business partners working with technology, co-located in small teams, being completely empowered to deliver solutions,” he said. 

This requires a cultural shift that DIY tech — with governance — can aid and abet. Jain recommends platforms that allow for self-service and data-cataloging.

“You have a place where you can go and find all the data sets that are available; what is the quality? What is the veracity of data? Then be able to take a piece of that and try some experiments with it — I think that would enable the cultural change much faster,” he said. 

Putnam was an early adopter of Accenture’s Data Lighthouse on AWS for analytics at speed and scale. So far, the investment insights derived from Putnam’s digital platform seem to be paying off where it counts.

“Last year’s letter from our CEO, Rob Reynolds, said that Putnam now has more … four- and five-star funds, according to Morningstar, than we’ve had as a percent of total funds ever before,” Mehta said. “We had inflows when the rest of the industry were having outflows.” 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS re:Invent event. (* Disclosure: Accenture LLP sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Accenture nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE