Stu Bradley was the keynote speaker last week at Banking Exchange’s Fly-In Event at the University of Chicago Booth Business School.

In front of bankers that represented more than $1 Trillion in assets and included Chicago’s largest financial institutions, Bradley talked technology, risk, big data, AI and building an internal infrastructure that will last for financial Institutions.

Bradley stated,  “One of the most frequent conversations I’m having is about the current disconnect between business and IT. Technologies have been acquired and deployed in silos, each with very specific business objectives in mind. This has led to cumbersome integration between capabilities that’s not only difficult to manage. It’s actually preventing IT partners from providing the agility the business needs to operate in today’s market. I foresee a Great IT Rationalization on the horizon, where IT shops streamline and consolidate their complex IT infrastructures with common components and solutions that can drive more than one business objective. The cloud will be used as a lever for modernization.”

He also addressed questions from bankers that focused on how to address risk. He said,  “The risks faced by financial institutions are more interconnected than ever before. Financial institutions can no longer afford to model risk in silos. The ability to holistically look at the impact of liquidity, credit, market, and interest rate risks on the balance sheet and conduct stress testing, simulation, and forecasting is critical in today’s environment. This new regime calls for integrated balance sheet management.”

He also talked about what it will take to maintain and grow customers. Bradley explained,  “Enterprise customer decisioning is one major area where financial institutions are investing to break historical silos. The ability to make decisions across the entire customer lifecycle — across risk, fraud, and marketing — on a single architecture can help provide that differentiated customer experience, one that sets your organization apart from the next. This isn’t achieved overnight, but rapid progress is being made…starting with customers’ digital onboarding journey.”

With most of the financial institutions in the room being more than $100 billion in assets, the audience was concerned about costs of fraud and questioned if smaller banks could keep up with the costs. Bradley explained that no matter the size, banks will not to think through their competitive advantage. He said,  “The cost of fraud prevention and financial crimes compliance as a percentage of the financial institution’s asset size is not linear. The relative burden for smaller financial institutions is often much greater. As smaller firms have built their brands on customer relationships, they must think differently to maintain that advantage — differently about how they leverage data and AI ecosystems to achieve the outcomes their customers expect, while managing their relative ability to invest in new technology.”

After Bradley addressed the crowd, he sat on a panel with data scientists from Discover Financial Services and Synchrony Bank. Banking Exchange will be hosting this event again in Chicago in April of 2025.