There are many different components that go into creating and running a successful business, and one of the most critical components is understanding your customers and their journey.

Understanding what customers want and being empathetic toward their needs and grievances leads to increased loyalty and increased word-of-mouth advertising, helping businesses stay strong in uncertain economic times. American financial company Discover Financial Inc. knows this better than most, working hard to understand its customers’ journeys and aligning its products to fit these journeys.

“When you truly are able to iteratively and quickly understand the customer, you can then line up our product teams to those journeys,” said Angel Diaz (pictured), vice president of technology capabilities and innovation at Discover Financial Services. “When you have that thread going from the customer journey through a six-to-eight-person team through a particular microservice that they’re implementing on the cloud, then you can move quickly and then take advantage of that vertical scalability. We do that specifically for our customers.”

Diaz spoke with theCUBE industry analysts John Furrier and Rob Strechay at Open Source Summit NA, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Discover Financial harnesses open source to support customer journeys, the Discover Technology Academy and how artificial intelligence will affect open source in the future.

The future of FinOS is open source and AI

One of the many initiatives Discover Financial Services has taken on to increase its customer satisfaction is creating the Discover Technology Academy. DTA is an in-house platform that Diaz calls the company’s “watering hole,” with more than 10,000 engineers, product owners and business partners contributing content to the learning academy, which supplies its employees with the necessary skills and knowledge to better serve their customers.

“It’s not just a place to throw the ideas in and agree on the ideas. It’s also a place where we teach,” Diaz said. “We have a Dojo team that goes in pairs and helps the teams get better at what they do. Whether it’s refining a backlog or doing performance tuning.”

When it comes to using open-source software, fintech companies are no different from any other industry, with a majority of their software being open sourced-based.

“We’re like any other company; we’re using open-source space. And, for end users, when you have the ability to get together as a community of practice, you use the technology a specific way,” Diaz said. “Cloud Native Computing Foundation, or wherever your technology is, that technology can be built to serve you better and, ultimately, your customer’s better. I think the primary kind of usage of the benefit of our involvement in FinOs is around being explicit on how we are using it and how we can help evolve.”

AI has gained serious momentum in the past few months, now being used in most industries as the technology increasingly becomes available. The conversation ended with the trio discussing how AI is going to affect open-source technologies and how open-source users should prepare for it.

“I’m really excited about AI in the app dev world. AI in pipelines, AI in code consumption, those types of things,” Diaz said. “That ability to be able to do your job smarter, faster, better together is very, very exciting. Because just like open source, it’s a democratization of knowledge.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Open Source Summit NA:

Photo: SiliconANGLE