Banking transformation special: The agentic AI panel

**Tony Clark** (0:03)
This is the London Fintech Podcast, bringing you practical insights and approaches, stories and inspiration from the innovators who are building the new world of financial services.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:14)
It's our last session, at least on that stage. It is called Panel Podcast, meaning it's going to be recorded and stay forever.
Exactly. With that lovely note, the name of the panel is The Dantic Bank, What's Really Working. It's a really interesting topic and really up-to-date topic. That's why we have full room. Tony, over to you. Enjoy it.

**Tony Clark** (0:42)
Thank you.
Panel Podcast or Podcast Panel. It's the first for me, probably the same for the folks that are taking part as well. We'll see how this goes. Just to introduce Tony Clark, I'm founder and CEO of Nextwave Consulting. I also host something called the London Fintech Podcast, which, a quick show of hands, anyone heard of the London Fintech Podcast? No. Look at that, about half the room. Okay. So a few more future subscribers out there, but at least we're getting out there. So I'll tell you a little bit about the podcast in a moment. I also want to give you an AI statistic to kick things off as well. But firstly, just to acknowledge, I've got Stuart here from Standard Chartered. I've got Marc Barnard from Close Brothers, and we've got James from Salesforce.
And our challenge is to try and make this a bit podcasty, which is going to be a bit difficult, because a really good friend of mine, who actually does a bit of proper journalism and anchor work for one of the big channels, said make it like a conversation in the pub, which is going to be a bit difficult because we're all lined up in front of you and we have no drinks.
Anyway, we're going to see how we go. So the Gentic Bank, what's really working? So I thought, well, I'll tell you a podcast story, or maybe I'll have an AI statistic, and there's a little bit of both. Just if you bear with me, humanly 60 seconds, the podcast, really excited to be here collaborating with Banking Transformation Summit and LFP, as I like to call it, London Fintech Podcast, has actually been running for 10 years. I'm a bit of an accidental podcaster, so we've got 260 episodes, but I can't take the credit for the first decade essentially, because I really took over the microphone only about 18 months ago. But at the same time, we took the podcast onto video, and we set up a YouTube channel and we put videos on Spotify, and we now have 183,000 subscribers and starting to get noticed, which is really interesting, and it does lead to things like this. So we issued a show special before the conference a week ago. We've had 25,000 views on that. Some of you, I hope, may be here, because you saw that, I don't know. I'm doing a similar thing with Money 2020 in a couple of weeks' time. So the pod's gathering a bit of momentum, and a conversation around that is an entirely different conversation. So I won't go there.
But in terms of AI, the statistic that struck me last week was Anthropics' announcement that their quarter on quarter revenues were up 8,000%. So that's ATX uptake, and 80% of that's coming from institutional uptake. So we're seeing it all around the conference. I've walked around, I've seen amazing presentations from 11 labs, from Salesforce, from Lloyd's Bank, from NatWest, from all the folks here. 175 firms represented at Banking Transformation Summit, and some amazing conversations. The content that struck me is super rich, and there's a really strong focus on the practicalities of transformation, the human elements in all of that as well. So a real quality event, and pleased to be taking part. So that's kind of my intro, and now we're going to try and do this as a conversation, so hence we're not passing a microphone around, but we'll see how we go. So perhaps if someone can jump in, just tell us a bit about what you cover at your firm and how you're using AR. I'm going to see who's looking at me first. Marc, why aren't you going?

**Marc Barnard-Naulls** (3:52)
I wasn't looking.
So my name is Marc Barnard-Naulls. I work for Close Brothers, and Close Brothers has been really present in the news due to motor commission's complaints, and the fact that the organization is having to rapidly evolve, and our CEO went to market and said, we are rolling AI out at pace, and a consequence or an outcome of that is also we're reducing our colleague footprint by 20%. So we are really living that dynamic of, you know, we need to get AI into the organization to deliver real value, real benefit, really quickly. I guess that's my...