Five episodes and eight guest speakers later, we have officially wrapped up our first Financial Services podcast series.  Over the past five weeks, Cisco's Conversations & Coffee Podcast channel has focused exclusively on financial services. Each week co-hosts Danny Vicente and Garry Senna welcomed new guests and dove into a different aspect of the industry.

In the first episode, "The Future of Financial Services", Philip Farah, Head of Digital Transformation Services at World Wide Technology (WWT), and Al Slamecka, Cisco Global Financial Services BDM, joined our co-hosts on the show. Philip and Al dove into the accelerated digital transformation occurring in our industry as a result of 2020's disruptive nature. While signs of economic green shoots are appearing, our speakers debated the possible impacts that may linger "post-COVID" and what the next twelve months may bring.

In the next episode, "The Customer Journey of Financial Services", our podcast hosts welcomed Brad Tyson, Cisco Australia Financial Services Lead, and Tom Filep, Cisco Americas Financial Services Lead, and focused their lens on the complex and ever-changing customer journey. Financial institutions are now expected to be able to accommodate fully physical, fully virtual, or hybrid customer journeys. In this session, our guests discussed the challenges these expectations are creating and how institutions can equip themselves to be agile to customer desires.

Installment three, "Security, Compliance, and Risk Management in FSI", focused on the increased operational risks that financial institutions are facing now that hybrid work is the new normal. Mathew Mulamootil Varghese, Cisco Asia-Pacific Financial Services Systems Engineer, and Brian Velazquez, Cisco Global Financial Services Business Solutions Architect, explored the vitality of security and risk management in an expanding financial services landscape where trust is paramount.

The fourth podcast in the series, "Automation Orchestration Cloud Discussion", takes these complex topics and explains them in a straight-forward, financial services context.  In a highly regulated industry where the 'shift to cloud' accelerated significantly in 2020, automation and orchestration can deliver much-needed operational visibility and efficiency to financial services firms with the right organizational support, a challenge Dave Malik, Cisco Fellow and Chief Architect, addressed head-on.

In our fifth and final episode, "Financial Services Wrap Up" our hosts were joined by Heidi Surdyk, Cisco Global Financial Services Marketing Lead, and returning guest, Al Slamecka, to discuss how each of the elements in the previous four episodes connect and to wrap up the series with a few predictions of what the future of financial services holds.

All five episodes are available to listen to on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube under "Conversations & Coffee" as well as on cisco.com. Once you have watched the five-part financial services podcast, if there is anything else you would like us to expand on or if you have ideas for future topics you would like to hear our financial experts discuss, please leave us a comment. While this series is over, Conversations & Coffee are certainly not done discussing financial services.

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visit our Financial Servies site to understand Cisco's place in the industry.