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Modernizing Banking Tech Without Disruption FT. Mike Stawchansky, EVP & CTO At Finastra

33 min · 21 de abr de 2026
Portada del episodio Modernizing Banking Tech Without Disruption FT. Mike Stawchansky, EVP & CTO At Finastra

Descripción

Core banking modernization is not about shiny new tech. It is about upgrading systems without breaking uptime, trust, or compliance. In this episode of TechDogs Discover Dialogues, Nikhil Sonawane speaks with Mike Stawchansky, EVP and CTO at Finastra, about practical modernization playbooks, AI in mission critical banking, and how to scale reliability across global engineering teams.Mike explains why modernization starts with measurement, why compliance needs to be built into the foundation, and why incremental change using the Strangler Fig approach beats big bang rewrites for core systems.We also discuss AI in banking, where it adds value today, why it should complement core systems rather than replace them, and why production automation still requires human checks and the four eyes principle.In this episode, we cover:• How to modernize legacy banking platforms without disruption by measuring what exists first • Why non-functional requirements must be explicit before migration or re-architecture • Compliance by design and how to make it difficult to do the wrong thing in production • Why big bang rewrites are risky for core banking and why Strangler Fig works better • Where to start modernization: user journey, adoption, and what actually improves customer outcomes • The modernization mistake many teams repeat: delaying tech debt until it becomes urgent • AI in mission critical banking: where it adds value, and why it cannot replace deterministic core systems • AI governance: where to draw the line on automation and why humans must stay in the loop • How global engineering teams stay aligned on reliability, delivery standards, and ownership • Reliability culture: breaking the “throw it over the wall” model across engineering, DevOps, and support • Leadership lessons for sustaining momentum during long transformation cyclesKey takeaways:• Measure first. Modernization should preserve or improve reliability, not reduce it. • Modernize incrementally. Strangler Fig reduces risk and builds trust through small wins. • AI complements core systems. Its probabilistic nature makes deterministic banking cores difficult to replace. • Keep checks in production. Treat AI like any engineer. Use validation and the four eyes principle. • Communication is the scaling factor. Clear, explicit communication and playback prevent misalignment in global teams. About the Guest:Mike Stawchansky is EVP and Chief Technology Officer at Finastra, where he leads technology strategy with a focus on product and infrastructure modernization and cloud transformations for mission critical financial services platforms. He brings deep experience across platform engineering, reliability, and large scale modernization, with a practical operating mindset focused on measurable baselines, shared accountability, and execution at scale.🔔 Subscribe to our channel now: https://tinyurl.com/TDYTSub🔔 Subscribe to stay ahead of enterprise tech trends: https://www.techdogs.com/newsletter 🌐 Visit us at: https://www.techdogs.com

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76 episodios

episode Alert Noise To Autonomous Operations Ft. Nalin Agrawal, Director Of Solutions Engineering, Dynatrace artwork

Alert Noise To Autonomous Operations Ft. Nalin Agrawal, Director Of Solutions Engineering, Dynatrace

In this episode of TechDogs [https://www.techdogs.com/] Discover Dialogues [https://www.techdogs.com/inspire/discover-dialogues], host Vikramsinh Ghatge sits down with Nalin Agrawal, Director of Solutions Engineering at Dynatrace, to unpack why traditional monitoring no longer works and what it takes to build observability that actually drives business outcomes. From taming alert storms to enabling autonomous AI-driven operations, this conversation goes deep into the infrastructure challenges defining modern enterprise IT.Nalin brings a perspective shaped across 25 years: beginning as an IIT faculty member during the dot-com boom, moving into telephonic technical support, and then spending over a decade in pre-sales consulting, where explaining complex systems in plain business language became his defining skill. Today, working across 50+ enterprise organizations in India, he sits at the intersection of architecture and business outcomes, making his insights both technically grounded and commercially sharp.Core Insight:The central argument Nalin makes is that AI-driven observability is not a single technology, it is a layered system of intelligence. The first layer baselines what normal looks like; the second, causal AI, identifies the root cause when something breaks; the third predicts failure before it occurs; and the fourth, increasingly common in mature enterprises, triggers autonomous action through AI agents without human intervention. Most enterprises are still stuck at layer one, watching dashboards. The ones pulling ahead have moved to layers three and four.In this episode, we cover:• How the biggest challenges for engineering teams today: skill gaps, geopolitical threats, speed-to-market pressure, are driving the shift toward intelligent observability• Why manual dashboard reviews and threshold-based alerting have become operationally unviable in cloud-native, microservices environments• How organizations can unify logs, metrics, and traces across legacy and modern systems to create a reliable single source of truth• The three-stage AI model in observability: causal (root cause) → predictive (prevent failure) → autonomous (self-healing operations)Key Takeaway:The enterprises winning in cloud-native operations are not the ones with the most monitoring tools, they are the ones that connected their observability data to action. Nalin's core argument is that the maturity journey runs from reactive alerting, through causal analysis and prediction, to genuinely autonomous operations. The organizations investing now in the foundational data layer: unified, context-rich, AI-ready, are the ones that will run agentic workflows confidently while competitors are still triaging dashboards.About the Guest:Nalin Agrawal is the Director of Solutions Engineering at Dynatrace, where he partners with enterprise organizations across India to design and execute observability-driven strategies at scale. His 25-year career spans IIT faculty teaching, technical support, pre-sales consulting, and solutions leadership across BFSI, e-commerce, and digital platform sectors. Known for his ability to translate deep technical complexity into clear business value, what he calls the pre-sales mindset, Nalin helps CXOs move from fragmented monitoring to unified, AI-powered operational intelligence. He is currently working with a growing cohort of enterprises piloting autonomous operations with human-in-the-loop oversight before moving to fully agentic execution.🔔 Subscribe to our channel now: https://tinyurl.com/TDYTSub🔔 Subscribe to stay ahead of enterprise tech trends: https://www.techdogs.com/newsletter 🌐 Visit us at: https://www.techdogs.com

29 de may de 202652 min
episode Beyond the Balance Sheet: How CFOs Are Shaping the Future of Business artwork

Beyond the Balance Sheet: How CFOs Are Shaping the Future of Business

In this episode of TechDogs Discover Dialogues [https://www.techdogs.com/inspire/discover-dialogues] Fireside Chat, host Vikramsinh Ghatge sits down with Dan Owens, Chief Financial Officer at Maxio; Jerod Sands, Chief Financial Officer at Parameter; and Vivek Dalmia, Chief Financial Officer at MoveInSync, for a practical CFO roundtable on how finance leadership is evolving beyond the balance sheet.Today’s CFO is no longer limited to reporting, compliance, and financial control. The role has expanded into capital allocation, AI adoption, business transformation, risk management, operational efficiency, and long-term value creation. The conversation explores how finance leaders are balancing the pressure to invest in growth with the need to protect margins, manage cash flow, and build financial resilience.The panel explores where AI is already creating measurable value and where expectations are still ahead of reality. Jerod explains that AI ROI is becoming clear in high-volume, rules-based processes such as order management, but that judgment-heavy areas like forecasting still require a strong “trust but verify” approach. Another key theme is efficiency. The panel reframes efficiency beyond cost-cutting. For CFOs, efficiency now means operating leverage, faster decision-making, better visibility, stronger workflows, and the ability to remove friction across teams. The episode closes with a broader reflection on the evolving CFO mandate. CFOs are becoming more strategic, more operational, and more technology-aware. Yet the panel agrees that this influence is only credible when the fundamentals remain strong: accurate reporting, controls, compliance, transparency, and the courage to challenge assumptions when the numbers do not support the story.In this episode, we cover:• Why “growth at all costs” has given way to disciplined capital allocation• How CFOs are balancing growth, margins, cash flow, and resilience• Where AI is creating real ROI in finance and business operations• Why AI in finance still requires trust, verification, and human oversight• How automation is changing forecasting, order management, dashboards, and FP&A• Why shadow AI, fraud, data privacy, and governance are becoming major CFO concerns• How finance leaders are redefining efficiency through operating leverage and decision speed• Why the modern CFO must be both strategic and deeply grounded in control• How CFOs can lead transformation without losing sight of compliance and resilienceKey Takeaway:The CFO role is no longer confined to managing numbers after the fact. Today’s finance leaders are shaping where capital goes, how AI is adopted, how risk is managed, and how businesses grow with discipline. The CFOs who will define the next phase of business will not choose between strategy and control. They will master both.About the Guests:Dan Owens is the Chief Financial Officer at Maxio, where he leads financial strategy and operations with deep experience across public companies, private equity-backed technology businesses, financial planning, M&A, revenue operations, and scalable growth systems.Jerod Sands is the Chief Financial Officer at Parameter, where he leads financial strategy, operational planning, and growth initiatives. His experience spans private equity-backed, venture-backed, and public companies, with a focus on disciplined scaling and operational efficiency.Vivek Dalmia is the Chief Financial Officer at MoveInSync, where he leads financial strategy, planning, governance, compliance, capital efficiency, and data-driven decision-making for sustainable growth.

27 de may de 202653 min
episode From Infrastructure To Insight: Redesigning Leadership Ft. Abhishek Mehrotra, CHRO At Yubi artwork

From Infrastructure To Insight: Redesigning Leadership Ft. Abhishek Mehrotra, CHRO At Yubi

In this episode of TechDogs Discover Dialogues [https://www.techdogs.com/inspire/discover-dialogues], host Vikramsinh Ghatge sits down with Abhishek Mehrotra, Chief Human Resources Officer at Yubi, to explore how HR is fundamentally evolving, from a backend support function to a strategic decision engine. This conversation cuts through the noise around AI in HR and gets to what it actually means for leaders, teams, and the future of work.Organizations today are investing heavily in HR technology, yet most still treat it as operational infrastructure rather than a source of strategic intelligence. The real opportunity, and the real gap, lies in reimagining people systems as proactive decision-making platforms. As AI becomes embedded in hiring, performance, and workforce planning, the question isn't whether to adopt it, but how to do so without losing the human judgment that makes organizations sustainable.Abhishek brings over 25 years of people leadership across technology, telecom, social media, and fintech to this conversation. Having navigated transformations at global enterprises and fast-scaling platforms alike, his perspective spans both the architectural and the deeply human dimensions of organizational change. What makes his viewpoint distinctive is the rare combination of data-driven discipline and empathetic leadership philosophy, and the conviction that HR must own business outcomes, not just enable them.Here is a core insight that reframes how most organizations approach AI adoption in HR: Abhishek argues that rather than launching company-wide skilling programs and waiting for training to drive adoption, organizations should start by creating internal champions, and build success stories that others naturally want to replicate. Adoption, in his model, is pulled by curiosity and proof, not pushed by mandates.For most HR leaders, this reordering is significant. It means democratizing access to AI tools across all functions, not just engineering, and trusting that on-the-job experimentation will outperform structured classroom training. The shift from "training first, then adoption" to "access first, then learning" fundamentally changes how organizations build AI fluency at scale.In this episode, we cover:• How Abhishek's 25-year journey, from executing people processes to architecting people intelligence, shaped his view of HR's strategic role• Why HR is no longer an enabler but a co-pilot with skin in the game for business outcomes• How AI is being embedded in hiring, performance management, and workforce planning, and what the human in the loop actually does now• Why roles are converging across functions and what a skills-based talent strategy looks like in practice• How the challenges of building a 0–100 organization differ fundamentally from scaling a 1,000-to-5,000 one• How to think about role reconstruction, reimagining team structures for a world where AI handles the what and how• Why leaders must be hands-on AI users themselves before they can credibly lead transformation• How psychological safety, system literacy, and human-centric resilience define leadership in an AI-first era• What budding HR professionals should do today to future-proof their careers, starting with their own daily workflows Key Takeaway:The most important shift in HR leadership isn't about adopting the right tools, it's about owning the right outcomes. Abhishek's core argument is that HR becomes a decision system when its leaders stop waiting for a seat at the table and start earning one by demonstrating measurable business impact. As AI accelerates the convergence of roles, compresses time-to-market, and reshapes the skills landscape, organizations that pair algorithmic intelligence with human judgment, curiosity, critical thinking, emotional🔔 Subscribe to our channel now: https://tinyurl.com/TDYTSub🔔 Subscribe to stay ahead of enterprise tech trends: https://www.techdogs.com/newsletter 🌐 Visit us at: https://www.techdogs.com

14 de may de 202641 min
episode Securing The Future Of AI Ft. Sandip Wadje, MD, Global Head Of Emerging Tech, BNP Paribas artwork

Securing The Future Of AI Ft. Sandip Wadje, MD, Global Head Of Emerging Tech, BNP Paribas

In this episode of TechDogs Discover Dialogues [https://www.techdogs.com/inspire/discover-dialogues], host Vikramsinh Ghatge sits down with Sandip Wadje, Managing Director and Global Head of Emerging Technology Operational Risks & Intelligence at BNP Paribas, to explore how enterprises can securely embrace AI and emerging technologies while navigating an increasingly complex risk landscape. From overlooked vulnerabilities in agentic systems to the fragmented global regulatory environment, this conversation cuts through the hype and gets to what actually matters for leaders on the front lines of innovation.AI adoption is accelerating faster than most governance frameworks can keep pace with. Organizations are deploying generative and agentic models at scale yet the foundational questions around accountability, data quality, and output-level risk remain largely unresolved. One of the sharpest insights in this conversation: Sandip argues that organizations rushing into high-impact AI use cases; fraud detection, security operations, without addressing the basics first are setting themselves up for failure. His recommendation is to start with summarization, which accounts for roughly 50 60% of corporate knowledge work, build ROI there, and only then move into higher-complexity applications. This sequenced approach: summarize, write, reason, reframes AI adoption as a disciplined business case rather than a technology experiment.For enterprises already stretched across multiple emerging technology domains, this reordering of priorities is significant. Fixing data quality, cleaning up access permissions, and establishing output-level accountability before scaling AI is not just risk management; it is the foundation that makes AI ROI sustainable.In this episode, we cover:• How Sandip's career, from government officer to global risk leader, mirrors the evolution of technology itself• Why emerging technology is defined by the absence of regulatory clarity, and what that means for AI governance• The most underestimated risks in quantum computing, digital assets, robotics, and autonomous AI systems• Why the 'run the bank vs. change the bank' model is reaching an inflection point in large institutions• How organizations should sequence AI adoption: summarize first, then write, then reason• Why starting from AI output failures not model guardrails is the right approach to risk management• The compensatory control mindset: using existing security infrastructure before chasing new tools• Why global regulations are fragmented and what prescriptive, harmonized guidance should look likeKey Takeaway:The biggest risk in AI adoption is not moving too slowly it is deploying AI on a foundation that was never designed to support it. Sandip's core argument is that organizations must address data quality, access permissions, and output accountability before scaling AI into high-stakes domains. As agentic systems grow more autonomous and quantum computing edges closer to practical disruption, the institutions that build this disciplined foundation now will be far better positioned to lead, not just survive the next wave of technological change.About the Guest:Sandip Wadje is the Managing Director and Global Head of Emerging Technology Operational Risks & Intelligence at BNP Paribas, where he leads the firm's strategic approach to identifying, assessing, and mitigating risks across AI, cloud, digital assets, and quantum technologies. His background spans more than two decades, beginning as a Class 1 government officer in India's Ministry of IT before transitioning through KPMG, Deloitte, JP Morgan, and Risk IQ into his current global leadership role. What distinguishes Sandip is his ability to bridge deep technical expertise with board-level risk strategy, having operated across both the practitioner and advisory sides of some of the world's most complex financial systems.🔔 Subscribe to our channel now: https://tinyurl.com/TDYTSub🌐 Visit us at: https://www.techdogs.com

7 de may de 202646 min
episode The Evolving Role Of HR: Leading People, Culture And Change artwork

The Evolving Role Of HR: Leading People, Culture And Change

The role of HR is evolving faster than ever before, and AI is at the center of that transformation. In this exclusive TechDogs Discover Dialogues HR Roundtable, we bring together three senior HR leaders to discuss how organizations can balance people, performance, technology, and the future of work in an AI-driven world. Featuring: Nancy Hauge Chief People Experience Officer, Automation Anywhere Lisa Sherwell Chief People Officer, SUSE Arpit Shelat Director - Human Resources, Genesys India As AI reshapes how businesses operate, HR leaders are being asked bigger questions than ever before: How do you stay people-first while driving business performance? Can AI make HR more human? How should companies build future-ready workforces? Is work-life balance outdated? What do employees expect from modern workplaces today? This conversation explores how HR is moving beyond traditional functions and becoming one of the most strategic drivers of business transformation. From AI-powered employee experiences to internal mobility, hybrid roles, workforce personalization, and leadership transformation, this roundtable dives deep into what the future of HR really looks like. Whether you're a CHRO, HR leader, business executive, founder, talent leader, or someone curious about the future of work, this episode is packed with actionable insights. Key Takeaways: ✔ Why people-first companies often outperform others ✔ How AI is improving employee experience ✔ Why HR must become more strategic ✔ The future of workforce planning✔ Why internal mobility matters more than ever ✔ How Gen Z is reshaping workplace expectations ✔ Why work-life balance may need redefinition Subscribe to TechDogs for more conversations with global leaders shaping the future of business, technology, leadership, and innovation.🔔 Subscribe to our channel now: https://tinyurl.com/TDYTSub🔔 Subscribe to stay ahead of enterprise tech trends: https://www.techdogs.com/newsletter 🌐 Visit us at: https://www.techdogs.com

29 de abr de 202659 min