Financial organizations have been recently transforming from places with long histories and light technology into an industry that is much more customer-friendly, keeping pace with innovations such as banking apps on smartphones.

“Being digital first means that the whole value chain is digital,” said Luis Uguina (pictured, right), chief digital officer at Australian bank Macquarie Group Ltd. As recognition of the bank’s forward-thinking digital outlook, Macquarie was honored at Red Hat Summit 2017 with an innovation award.

Uguina and Rajay Rai (pictured, left), head of digital engineering at Macquarie, spoke to Stu Miniman (@stu) and Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile live streaming studio, during the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Massachusetts. (* Disclosure below.)

In addition to the changing digital face of banking, they discussed open source and digital strategy.

Moving at the speed of open source

Ten years ago, the banking industry was leery to use open source; they felt it was an untrusted and untested technology, Uguina and Rai explained. But now there’s a new culture in banking, where organizations realize they need to be faster and ready to deliver rapid services to their clients.

Uguina believes that the only way to do this is by using open source. He also said Macquarie is hosting meetups with other banks, sharing information among their peers.

“The businesses come up with ideas, and [they’re] coming in really fast, so how do you double down on [the] winners?” Rai asked.

He explained that from an engineering and business perspective, what’s really important is for an organization to have a platform for execution. That platform is not something you can buy off the shelf; instead, it is ensuring that an organization has the right mix of technology, people, processes and culture. This way, there’s a certain amount of responsible autonomy in selecting the technology and software that an organization wants to use.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Red Hat Summit 2017. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsors some Red Hat Summit segments on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE