Case study: Citi, high stakes, low code in financial services

As the world’s largest financial institutions try to keep up with the breakneck pace of digital transformation, they’re being weighed down by legacy systems and outdated tech. The pandemic only exacerbated the problem and many companies turned to low/no code platforms as the solution. In this talk, Stephen Murphy, CEO of Genesis, will be joined by Katya Chupryna, Vice President, Citigroup to discuss how this technology is changing the technological landscape of finance, highlighting the unique needs of the financial market and outlining both the benefits and potential pitfalls when deploying low code in high stakes environments.

Transcription:

00;00;09;15 - 00;00;41;29
Penny Crosman

Greetings. Welcome to this session on high stakes low code in financial services. I'm Penny Crossman. Tech editor at American Banker. And I'm here with two very highly qualified expert panelists. We have Katja Chu Perna, who leads Strategic Investments and incubation within Citigroup Sprint Group, which runs Strategic Investment and Incubation of FinTechs. And this group covers the credit portion of its market business.

00;00;42;28 - 00;01;09;28
Penny Crosman

Kate, years past, employers include UBS Wachovia and Thinking. And we also have Stephen Murphy, who is CEO of Genesis, which is a provider of low code knows code software Stephen previously worked at Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch and HSBC. Welcome, Stephen and Kate, you. Thank you for coming. So, Kate, you can you tell us a little bit more about the work that you and your group do at Citi?

00;01;10;08 - 00;01;32;25
Katya Chupryna

Absolutely. Thank you for having us. So as you already mentioned earlier, the strategic investment and incubation on behalf of Sprint, Sprint is the only, to my knowledge, our group was in any of the banks that actually specifically concentrates on the credit markets. And they were founded about two and a half years ago, mostly because of the problem of lack of electrification was in the credit markets.

00;01;33;06 - 00;02;03;29
Katya Chupryna

So we wanted to partner up with our business and essentially find companies that are leaders, innovators doing something different that we can partner with in the long term. And in some cases, like the Genesis, actual partnership ends up resulting in a an investment strategic investment. We're not the venture capital ALM. So although our performance is measured in financial performance of our portfolio, companies, just like any receiver actually think about themselves as much more strategic.

00;02;03;29 - 00;02;25;20
Katya Chupryna

So we have never invested in a company that did not end up using within our business. And we have multiple modes of engagement with our portfolio companies. So for example, we can be a vendor, they can be somebody who can be provided with balance sheets to warehouse lines. We can have an originator client relationship with them. The number of ways to engage with our group.

00;02;26;08 - 00;03;08;27
Katya Chupryna

But we have made investments into over a dozen companies now. I'm happy to say that those companies pretty much every single one, has become a unicorn within the first 12 to 24 months. We had three IPO so far and hoping to see some more. And our kind of big focus right now is on solving problems not just for credit markets, but also broader kind of Citigroup and broader financial industry and looking for companies that can be applicable across the entire scale of different issues, different problems, different verticals where people actually do want to innovate And I'm very happy to be here with Steven, who has been our portfolio company for the last 14 months now.00;03;08;28 - 00;03;10;13
Katya Chupryna

So thank you for having me.



00;03;11;14 - 00;03;22;13
Penny Crosman

Great. And Steven, tell us a little bit more about Genesis. What I know you work with some financial services companies. What are some of the types of engagements you've been doing?

00;03;23;20 - 00;03;42;04
Stephen Murphy

And I catch your mentions. Penny, thanks for having us. It's a pleasure. So what we do is we provide what's called a log called No Code Platform. Book, specifically, it's been built for the financial markets. And that's very important to understand. You're going to hear there is a lot of a lot of speak with an industry of low code, no code a lot of code.

00;03;42;04 - 00;04;02;24
Stephen Murphy

No code is really is a real application development tool, is allowing people to do software much quicker than they could do if they were going to build in that from scratch. Or other tools that might be available. And low code, no code, especially the last three or four years, it was really as evolved a lot. But they've only been brilliant business process management type use cases.

00;04;03;16 - 00;04;25;19
Stephen Murphy

Whereas what we generally do is we're very much more about high performance, high performance, event driven architecture, transactional processing, low latency, data distribution. So what we call that we call that is from a next generation low code, no code. And why do I say that? I say that because it means the type of use cases and the type of engagements we doing is very different to what the norm used to be.

00;04;25;24 - 00;04;57;11
Stephen Murphy

And the norm used to be very much. You would either buy a vendor product off the shelf or you build from scratch. And what we're seeing in what our thesis was that we have the Genesis low code, no platform, no place to get to buy, to build. So you get the best of both worlds So it's a and engagements may be anything from end user computing spreadsheet replacements, where clients have a major operational risk, an operational cost all the way through to new electronic platforms, innovating, like you mentioned in an innovator in the financial markets industry like credit.

00;04;57;23 - 00;05;19;14
Stephen Murphy

So you've got a very broad set of use cases. We're very interactive. My clients, we have a number of clients now. We're actually want to build on the Genesis platform themselves, and that's that's great. Because we've got this whole new chapter in the genesis of the Genesis Developer Community and Genesis Academy. So the engagement is very flexible. We re clients can build on the platform selves.

00;05;19;15 - 00;05;29;08
Stephen Murphy

We can build on the platform for our clients. And it covers a very broad perspective, everything from spreadsheet replacements all the way through to a highly complex electrification of something like the credit markets.

00;05;29;20 - 00;05;41;09
Penny Crosman

Create an end. Katja, what kind of appeals to you about the idea of low code, no code software and where might it make sense in a bank like Citigroup.

00;05;43;05 - 00;06;10;28
Katya Chupryna

So the plans for the original we came up is actually quite different where we see it's sitting kind of in the long term. Where Genesis originally came up was because we wanted to build a trading venue. That city incubated internally was actually part of that incubation team. And essentially the reason why we incubated this was because nobody in the market has really attempted to build something to solve the secondary trading problem in the long market and other structure credits eventually.

00;06;11;08 - 00;06;29;13
Katya Chupryna

So we decided to build a platform ourselves and we started looking around like, who can build a pool source? Right. One of the problems that you'll see banks running into and this is not just banks, actual all financial institutions and to some extent in the broader market is a shortage of developers. There's a constant shortfall of very talented development talent.

00;06;29;24 - 00;06;53;17
Katya Chupryna

There was constantly people transitioning, moving in, moving out. You need continuity, continue to on specific projects to bring it to life. Building a consortium, a special trading venue which is super regulated super complex, lots of requirements. You know, this is much more sophisticated than a lot of the kind of traditional infrastructure was in financial services. So it's very complicated.

00;06;53;17 - 00;07;19;11
Katya Chupryna

So we need a team that can really back us. Amit first went the very traditional route, which is reach out all the big development and consulting companies see what they can offer and see if we can work with them. And what was unique, I think, about our position is on one side, we do have the experts, so we have people within the business who know everything and they think there is to know about the seal market, how it trades, what are the problems, what clients care about.

00;07;19;22 - 00;07;43;17
Katya Chupryna

But on the other hand, we do not actually have that internal capability to develop something that's meant to be spun out. It's not meant it was in statistics knowledge forever, but instead of meant to be backed by a number of banks, a number of bisect clients and kind of exist as its own entity. So the very attractive thing about what Genesis brought to us was on one side, you have a company that can be your partner for the long term.

00;07;43;17 - 00;08;06;05
Katya Chupryna

So you can you know, you can come up with one, two, three year contract where they'll be building everything for the company but on the other hand, it's a very nimble company that's technology first. So the cost of very, very different of the timelines are very different. You know, we got our MVP completely from just an idea on a piece of paper to actually something that we were able to show all the banks.
00;08;06;06 - 00;08;22;05
Katya Chupryna

And I'm very happy to say that at this stage you have a lot of banks joining this consortium, but we got it all there in probably months if we were to build this from scratch ourselves. And I'm not personally not a technologist, but I do work with technology a lot. But I just know that it would have been months if not years.


00;08;22;13 - 00;08;41;04
Katya Chupryna

So that's that's the ultimate attraction of low code, is you can have a reliable team that you can actually partner with for a period of time. The cost component is always important, especially if you're trying to bring something new to market where the budget budget is limited. But in the specific case, you know, you need to prove that something has true market interest.

00;08;41;17 - 00;09;00;21
Katya Chupryna

And then thirdly is just the time that it takes to build something in low code and how quickly you can iterate, how quickly you can build on top of with, how quickly can roll up new protocols, new products, you name it. So is the speed, the cost and ultimately the flexibility and reliability of the team that makes slow code a better fit.

00;09;00;21 - 00;09;20;08
Katya Chupryna

Maybe not for all projects, but for projects like this Project Octopus and a lot of other internal work they're doing at City right now. It's kind of perfect timing product market set because we have this big problem of not having enough developers. But on the other hand, we have so many ideas, we have so many projects, you have so many interested people.

00;09;20;08 - 00;09;23;00
Katya Chupryna

So that was a really lucky time for us.

00;09;23;01 - 00;09;46;13
Penny Crosman

I guess so so just in very simplistic terms, what would this platform do? Would it actually would a company group, a package of loans together, slice them up and then post the tranches on the platform for others to buy and sell or my way off the mark there.

00;09;47;10 - 00;10;07;05
Katya Chupryna

You're closed. So it's a secondary trading platform. So somebody has already collected the loan structure to close and now they're just trading secondary market. If you think it's done today, you'll essentially pick up the phone or send a message to somebody saying, Okay, we'll have this auction and this in this time. If you guys want to participate, give us a call back.

00;10;07;05 - 00;10;25;14
Katya Chupryna

And this takes the book, which is a specific protocol, but what is the competition? And so market, that's what takes about 3 hours. And those 3 hours I see Trader Sexual sits right next to the trading floor. They spend 3 hours actually was one or two phones in their hand just kind of reacting to what clients wants, what the feedback is.

00;10;25;25 - 00;10;48;19
Katya Chupryna

This is something that just moves that entire process into a simple automated kind of platform. Whatever you want to call it, where the feedback is automatic, the participation is very clear. There was a lot of transparency, and we've tried that, by the way, we tried this before at City as a single dealer platform national launched in July of 2019.

00;10;48;28 - 00;11;23;09
Katya Chupryna

And the clients uptake from it was just unbelievable. I think we saw maybe 50% more 50% more bids coming from clients just as a result of the platform. And that was single dealer, that was just city and city clients that wasn't all the banks, but we saw 50% more bids coming in and probably 25% more volume which shows you that the market just like it was equities market just like those affects market just like with some other liquid markets futures for example people want to trade electronically because it just it's simpler, it's cleaner, it's more transparent, it's faster.

00;11;23;16 - 00;11;33;12
Katya Chupryna

Some of the back office middle office issues get solved. So this is the platform to kind of fills the entire gap that's just between kind of modern technology and you using your phone as a trader.

00;11;33;28 - 00;11;52;03
Penny Crosman

So Stephen, to what extent can Genesis provide the building blocks to create a platform like this? Can you kind of describe how your technology can be used to build a trading platform? Of this kind?

00;11;52;20 - 00;12;27;02
Stephen Murphy

Of course. Of course. I think it's it's a great segway actually to talk about the kind of Genesis low code platform versus other long code. No code transforms I just want to pick up on some things. As you mentioned, I think the general thesis of Locarno Credit first was there's a lack of engineering capacity in the industry globally and what they meant, what was then the platform's focus was actually building a tool that cities and developers and you'll probably hear more this time, citizens developers can use to build and generally they're building peripheral systems and building core code systems.

00;12;27;02 - 00;13;05;16
Stephen Murphy

They're building workflows around other systems. And that was great by the way, the system developers BPM types use cases and did create more, more capacity on planet Earth. Our thesis was slightly different. There was a lack of engineering capacity we thought to ourselves, if we can get like Mattia mentioned, if we can give our clients engineers the tools to build real core systems and really be able to address fundamental legacy infrastructure problems, which again, Germany based on performance, resilience, etc., that would be a game changer because that would give developers even more capacity and there's more developers being produced from universities, schools self-teaching everything.

00;13;05;24 - 00;13;25;23
Stephen Murphy

So that just why do I say that on our faces was we we wanted to bring the A.G., I use his F1 engineering to an engineer and to do the type of use cases and that specific use case. The cashier mentioned that the consortium trading platform you need F1 engineering, but guess what you want? You don't want to hire a whole bunch of F1 engineers.

00;13;25;23 - 00;13;47;09
Stephen Murphy

They don't need to be the cost of F1 engineering, etc. So what the Genesis platform has and what we've built is a number of technical building blocks for every type of use case that we saw in the industry when we sat where Kasey was at. So when we saw everything from an equity type trading system all the way through to client on board, in what type of technical building blocks would we need to be able to support it?

00;13;47;20 - 00;14;04;05
Stephen Murphy

And that's been the journey for the last eight plus years of Genesis. It's a we start, we started to build this platform with these little things for them, like Lego bricks, these building blocks, every type of use case, and then just a little bit of code or configuration. And we also have no code tools can bring that building blocks of life.

00;14;04;17 - 00;14;24;10
Stephen Murphy

And what we've seen is there's got over 50 of these building blocks and I would say probably for the space project, only about 20 flavors of those building blocks bring octopus to life. So it's really the, the secret, the magic, the magic sauce is the technical building block library and platform and how that gets orchestrated within Genesis.

00;14;25;12 - 00;14;44;11
Katya Chupryna

And if, if I might add to this, I think the very interesting thing about trading platforms versus any type of infrastructure and obviously we're building a lot of other things with Genesis, but the unique thing about trading platforms is if you look across different asset classes, different products, you actually have a lot of the same logic, a lot of the same protocols.

00;14;44;23 - 00;15;08;19
Katya Chupryna

Certain definitions might be a little bit different, but the bid ask by so you know, onboarded clients like all of this has a lot of the same logic. And if you're starting from building blocks, starting from complete scratch, that that's exactly what delivers your products so much quicker and also lets you over time identify certain things that can be improved and make them just as streamlined as possible.

00;15;08;19 - 00;15;34;05
Katya Chupryna

So, you know, if, for example, they're building something written up for sale on market and we decide to go into CMBS or agency market, we'll be able to use already improved building block from our previous experience. And that's very unique to trading venues and investors into other trading venues outside of kind of the low loan space but one thing that I noticed is it takes some of them a year or two years, three years to roll out new protocol.

00;15;34;11 - 00;15;42;27
Katya Chupryna

And was Genesis really adding new protocol every month? Or so? So it's really it's just a completely different speed of scale.

00;15;43;05 - 00;16;01;00
Penny Crosman

So in a way, are you both saying that Genesis has already built the basic building blocks for a trading platform like this and you're able to just kind of customize it for the specific CLO consortium? Stephen.

00;16;01;27 - 00;16;38;15
Stephen Murphy

Yeah, I think that that's I think did you think about these technical building blocks? But I just want to talk about the extent extensibility of overall is that it's everything from like a consulting type trading platform all the way through to wealth management, client onboarding so we've got these technical building blocks which we have can be used and built for a variety of different use cases, highly regulated, low latency, high performance transactional processing for a siloed learning trading consortium all the way through to clean onboarding, which is not high transactional throughput, but might have a little complexity about the types of things that need to be captured.

00;16;38;27 - 00;16;59;20
Stephen Murphy

So when you can think of the Genesis platform, you got a variety of technical blocks. It orchestrate skill process. Building blocks have also been built for a highly regulated industry. So for instance, the way we log information, the way we audit data, the way we audit, what events did a user choice form or another system try to perform those are fundamentally being built into all of these building blocks.

00;16;59;20 - 00;17;23;23
Stephen Murphy

So we very much had a financial markets focus and knowing that that's about performance, speed, resilience, scalability, and guess what makes it so that's all the way. There's certain things, characteristics which are built into that platform and is one of the things you mentioned is that we've also got not just the technical building blocks, we also have business functional building blocks and some of those business functional building blocks made as already has an effect trade.

00;17;23;23 - 00;17;49;02
Stephen Murphy

What's the definition of an asset trade? Or else already supports fixed the fixed messaging protocol, which is obviously widely used within it was in our industry. So what you've got is you've got this great technology platform with these technical building blocks for the S1 engineering all the way through to normal engineering, and you've got that built for our industry where industry specific there as well, like predefined data schemas like fixed messaging standards, integration to legacy vendors.

00;17;49;10 - 00;18;15;29
Stephen Murphy

So in many cases we will sit next to a legacy vendor technology and work in parallel, but give the client the ability to innovate at speed. So the type of use case is one, just what we have different categories of use cases, electronic platforms is one of them, but there's everything from end user computing, spreadsheet replacements, legacy innovation, where we sit next to a legacy vendor technology or in-house technology and give them that speed and time to market.

00;18;16;08 - 00;18;42;06
Stephen Murphy

And we also do build new instructions for clients, which we then can we sell to other clients as part of our application marketplace. So electronic platforms is what is one, one typical theme of use case, but there's a whole variety. And as you mentioned, there's a number of patients we've had at City and they've been an amazing partner for us of of showing how Expand Extensible the platform is across a variety of different types of use cases.

00;18;43;26 - 00;18;51;18
Penny Crosman

In K2, you mentioned that this is this. Well, first of all, why is it called Project Octopus? Is there a story there? Yes.

00;18;52;06 - 00;19;11;03
Katya Chupryna

I wish I could disclose that, but I can right now. It is a project name though, so we are hoping to have something else announce in short order around actual naming of this platform. But for now it is just known as Project Octopus. It's something that we just saved. The documents was a name and it took off and people for some reason remembered it.

00;19;11;03 - 00;19;13;19
Katya Chupryna

So it is it is what it is for now.

00;19;14;08 - 00;19;32;00
Penny Crosman

And you mentioned that this is a consortium and I understand if you can't give specific names of other participants, but you tell us a little bit about how this consortium came together and was there some big challenge that all these banks were trying to solve?

00;19;34;05 - 00;19;54;09
Katya Chupryna

Yeah, absolutely. So the challenge the oldest banks we're trying to solve is the market challenge that I've discussed previously, which is the low loan market is trading extremely inefficiently in the second on the secondary side. So the problem that they're trying to solve is essentially how do we take this market that hasn't really changed how it's trading for decades and bring it into 21st century.

00;19;55;14 - 00;20;19;27
Katya Chupryna

All the other dealers have some sort of this problem. Now, the reason we're the reason why we decided it's going to start small and build bigger is because we wanted to test clients interest in adopting electronic parts from the space. So that's why we build that first stage. See only kind of one auction platform. And that that was, that was almost two years ago now and we saw the traction.

00;20;19;27 - 00;20;43;26
Katya Chupryna

But the hardest thing about consortiums and participating, quite a few of those those two states is from the idea time to the time when you actually have some control in the market. It can take years. Unlike FinTech startups, which are very nimble, can build and kind of think about things later. Everything has to be predefined. You know, there's a lot of guardrails, a lot of regulatory pressures.

00;20;44;08 - 00;21;02;22
Katya Chupryna

So the biggest obstacle is the consortium is actually line up everything so you can release the product at the same time when you can get all the legal approvals and new confirmation of a single out. So what we've done in this case, the partnered with Bank of America, which is public because announce who the other partners are yet.

00;21;02;22 - 00;21;28;22
Katya Chupryna

But Bank of America was our first first dealer kind of joint venture participant and the engaged genesis together switch over to me. Genesis introduced it to Bank of America and engage them together and said, Okay, let's, let's build something and show banks instead of something on paper. Let's show them something that's life, like something that we can just launch that has full technology, start build out old architecture thoughts through.

00;21;29;05 - 00;21;56;19
Katya Chupryna

And I think that was one of the reasons why Project Octopus just gained kind of traction in two years. We probably built something that would normally take five years in a more traditional setting. But it was because we had a product to show we actually had the demo to show our last demo. We had 450 clients, which if you think about Kilo Market, that's pretty much my clients, although not many people actually solicited loans, but we had we had something to actually deliver.

00;21;56;19 - 00;22;16;03
Katya Chupryna

And I think that's what excited all the banks. They didn't have to go and engage with consultants and start thinking how to build this. We gave them a ready to invest, ready to participate in a platform and program and start. Oh, sure. So that's that. That was our engagement. But you know, this is just one way of building consortium.

00;22;16;03 - 00;22;33;22
Katya Chupryna

I think every single one of them is different The trick about my job, you know, because the one side invest in companies that are kind of ready to go and then dependent on the other side, that's this incubator, you know, bring something to market the hardest thing about this is balance because incubation can take a couple of years.

00;22;33;22 - 00;22;59;27
Katya Chupryna

It's extremely work. And that's it's like running your own company at the very beginning right and the investments, they still need a lot of support, handholding. We obviously only invest strategically. So we need to make sure these companies are implemented within cities infrastructure, for example, even sometimes like our portfolio companies, which is not a great power over Steven and Genesis of City Align I have a lot of portfolio companies.

00;22;59;27 - 00;23;24;17
Katya Chupryna

A lot of those portfolio companies need help, whether it's building a specific part of their platform or replacing some of their legacy technology. So, you know, it's seeing where each company fits with the whole kind of infrastructure environment, both internally and externally to create the most kind of successful set of partnerships. So it's, you know, this consortium was interesting, but there are a lot of other ways of building it.

00;23;24;17 - 00;23;31;27
Katya Chupryna

But one thing that I'm very excited about is thanks to Genesis Russell able to develop to deliver something to the market quickly.

00;23;32;07 - 00;23;41;08
Penny Crosman

And are all of the banks involved contributing engineering and development work, or is sitting pretty much doing that in-house?

00;23;42;13 - 00;24;02;11
Katya Chupryna

Not actual cities not doing that either. So for the very first part of the platform before the genesis, before this was a joint venture we built in-house. For the second part, our traders and to some extent our technology came out with the specs. But Steven and his team actually have built the entire platform. That's why I'm saying it's as built outside of city infrastructure.

00;24;02;11 - 00;24;24;10
Katya Chupryna

It's completely kind of stand alone as a company because we wanted to build it this way. We want to be an adult in other cases, like elimination projects for much The idea is to essentially license Genesis platform and over time teach city developers to use the platform to build things themselves. And this is more for the internal use cases.

00;24;25;07 - 00;24;48;14
Katya Chupryna

But for project the octopus, there is you know, there is very minimal involvement from technology teams about the banks. It's a lot of involvement from business just to put the specs together and define, you know, how does this product trade in which protocol and why. And then relying on Stephen's teams kind of expertize and knowing how to build the best and fastest tech to execute on the position.

00;24;49;13 - 00;24;59;28
Penny Crosman

So you you've kind of outsourced this to Genesis at this point that they're doing. They're doing all the work. And Stephen, how many people are involved in this at this point?

00;25;00;29 - 00;25;26;06
Stephen Murphy

Yes, great question. I think it's just to clarify what you said, actually. So as the Project Octopus has completely outsourced to us, but also strategically within Citibank, there's a major push around that you U.S. and use computing elimination, and that's more of a hybrid that's closer. We're training the city development team to actually use this great platform, tooling themselves across a variety of completely different use cases to a consortium trading platform.

00;25;26;28 - 00;25;44;13
Stephen Murphy

I feel like I think we're now 150 people in the company. I think everyone is super aware of octopus everyone's. So you touched it at some point. Initially we only had and I think this is really excited about Citi and Bank of America, the initial P.O.S. and MVP we had that bit with just four people in the team.

00;25;44;26 - 00;26;11;07
Stephen Murphy

So it gives you a real understanding. Once, once, once a project manager really engage with Citi and Bank of America with it's three other developers working on the platform and that was proving itself of of how low code no charge on the Genesis platform could really accelerate. And give that you give that time to market. Since then, we love being part of all of the engagements where we the platforms being demoed to all of our potential clients of dealers on the platform as well.

00;26;11;20 - 00;26;20;23
Stephen Murphy

So we've had a lot of people kind of touched the project. So some points I'd say now there's really a whole team of around eight people right now who are living and breathing everything everything else us.

00;26;21;06 - 00;26;31;00
Penny Crosman

So that's, that's the low code part is that you don't need that many engineers to, to actually create a new product based on correct.

00;26;31;15 - 00;26;48;15
Stephen Murphy

I think I think it was actually really interesting the first time Kathy and I met, I was in a Citibank offices in New York, and we brainstormed an idea together and it was very much whiteboard and it wasn't like a requirement specification. And within a week for just one developer, we went back and said kind of, is this what you're really thinking about?

00;26;48;29 - 00;27;06;08
Stephen Murphy

Just where it wasn't obviously it was that it was just a certain piece of functionality. And I think that's when Catcher in the team there were like, wow, we there was no hard core. There was no it wasn't a concept requirements. But these guys brainstormed and just from brainstorming one week later, we had real screens, real workflows there and said, or do you think this is what you're thinking about?

00;27;06;08 - 00;27;29;19
Stephen Murphy

I'm just very agile with what Agile is used a lot I think when you can truly be have that iterative feedback and development and fail quick and fail fast, I think that's what really helped make partnership between ourselves and City and also Kickstart the whole consortium idea. So yeah, that that speed and time to market everything you need to iteratively do it in an application.

00;27;30;01 - 00;27;39;15
Penny Crosman

Do you have any engagements where you just give the bank or the company the software and they build it, they build the actual application themselves?

00;27;39;27 - 00;27;55;12
Stephen Murphy

Yes, we do. Yes, for this we have a number of clients and that's going to be part actually of our 20, 21 journey. And so what we've just recently tried to do something called the Genesis Academy so we would come up with that very much. Self-Service developers can start learning how to use the platform themselves, how to engineer on the platform.

00;27;55;22 - 00;28;17;19
Stephen Murphy

So we've seen a lot of traction where our clients like Cascio says. He says, This is amazing. It's great you're building a speed. I want my developers, I want my engineers to build on that speed. I want them to have the tools that you have. So he's been part of that journey. The show has been major validation with a number of top global clients who are becoming what we call platform developer clients, and it's been a great learning process for us.

00;28;18;03 - 00;28;38;25
Stephen Murphy

Creating a Genesis Academy, really trying to develop a community around Genesis and really thinking about how we kind of get there, get we get that bottom up developers really buying into the technologies themselves. So yes, we've got a number of clients. It's got some really big news happening in the next three, three to four months. And you'll hear more about the Genesis Academy and Genesis Developer Community as we're pushing.

00;28;39;06 - 00;28;51;26
Penny Crosman

All right, Katie, do you have any advice for choosing or working with a low code? No code software company for others in the audience who might be just thinking about this?

00;28;53;12 - 00;29;12;09
Katya Chupryna

I think Project Octopus was actually an amazing way to get Genesis who at the time was still an early stage company, but in the traditional definitions definition of that. But it was a great way to introduce them to the ecosystem of participants. So, you know, some of the big banks, we never had to prove this exposure to low code.

00;29;13;08 - 00;29;41;04
Katya Chupryna

I feel like for a lot of a lot of institutions, it's still a matter of seeing. Is believing and seeing this done for you for a specific project is ultimately what makes a local developer become really helpful and really interesting. But the other thing that's always on top of my mind, and that was the project also for Genesis is their specials and the reason why they were able to meet was myself and Brian visually, who was my partner in this project Octopus Consortium.

00;29;41;12 - 00;30;02;05
Katya Chupryna

The reason why we could do this day one and was that we have something to look at is because they understood what trading us. They understood what institutional clients kind of expect to see. You know, how things work with a lot of companies, and I see this across the board in every vertical invest, the companies that were specialist and the companies that there want to be everything to everyone.

00;30;02;17 - 00;30;29;24
Katya Chupryna

And I think for financial services, technology, you also do want to be specialized because there are just so many little quirks and specific things that just don't exist in other in other sectors. So I think specialization was extremely potent. I think the flexibility that Genesis has been giving to their clients, you know, in case an octopus, we want somebody completely separately developed, it was our sticking to this, but was a city we actually want to develop using the platform.

00;30;30;02 - 00;30;48;12
Katya Chupryna

That flexibility really helped us to take the first use case, get get in front of people, get it successful, but ultimately bring it to completely new use cases, which at the time of my first investment, I didn't consider that that would be on the table. Don't even know that those were the problems in Steven.

00;30;49;07 - 00;31;07;17
Penny Crosman

What from the projects that you've seen, what do you think makes the difference between a low code? No, no code project that really comes to fruition in in a positive way and one that falls apart or takes a long time or doesn't meet expectations?

00;31;08;13 - 00;31;29;17
Stephen Murphy

Yeah, I think I think some of the reasons that it's a great question, I think some of the some of the reasons with Locarno the one thing that one good thing is there's a lot of buzz around low code. No code one bad thing is there's a lot of buzz around low code. I think the the what areas right now is to the initial Conoco platform so very much built for across the industry and for a certain type of these case.

00;31;29;27 - 00;31;57;02
Stephen Murphy

I think what we've what we're finding what we're hearing from our industry that will catch the mentioned is you need specialization if you want to go. I would say a core systems systems of record systems that are fundamental to the working of our clients could be a hedge fund, asset management bank, the broker dealer clearinghouse, stock exchange. All of these firms are using us for these applications that are being built very core applications and not they don't sit around core systems.

00;31;57;15 - 00;32;19;22
Stephen Murphy

So I would say right now that they're the points that you mentioned are really key when you if we any of the audience is really think about choosing low code, no code in the financial markets, you've got to be asking yourself you cannot build a core system on this and might be I sold my legacy infrastructure. Am I able to build a new consortium trading platform at this speed?

00;32;20;16 - 00;32;36;10
Stephen Murphy

I think everything you're going to hear a lot more about and some challenges of low code. No coding industry is in a highly regulated industry the way you do integration testing, the way you do deployments, the way that has to be done in a very in a certain way because the right later and or in turn operational risk.

00;32;36;23 - 00;33;05;03
Stephen Murphy

We'll look at this and say we've got these broad defined processes about how to deploy applications which are mission critical applications to the bank or hedge fund or any financial institution. What we've seen is we know that we've been that we've seen that. So the way that the platform is being developed, not just these building blocks of what they can do, but actually how you develop those blocks, how you deploy the platform, we've made it very flexible to get to work in the highly regulated markets of the financial markets.

00;33;05;03 - 00;33;22;13
Stephen Murphy

I think what you're going to see as well is some of these cross-industry generic, low code non-core platforms. Some of them are very much a black box and whereas we are very open in terms of how you can use the platform, how it works, and how you can actually deploy it into production infrastructure Okay.

00;33;22;13 - 00;33;27;07
Penny Crosman

Well, unfortunately, we're out of time. Katja and Stephen, thank you so much for joining us today.

00;33;28;14 - 00;33;29;02

Katya Chupryna
Thank you, Bonnie.

00;33;29;28 - 00;33;32;03
Stephen Murphy

Thank you very much for taking some time to catch up for joining us on.