Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Don Mal, CEO of Vena Solutions (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of functionality trends, what’s changing?

Don Mal: As artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies have become more available to software companies, you can have AI and machine learning integrated into analytics-type functionality to get to important data faster.

Sramana Mitra: Do you have this in deployment?

Don Mal: This is something that we have in our roadmap.

Sramana Mitra: Could you provide a couple of use cases of what’s in your roadmap? What data are you trying to connect to achieve levels of accuracy in your forecasting or budgeting?

Don Mal: The first place we look at is actual data. As you know, we’re in the world of finance. When we’re looking at measuring corporate performance, we want to look at the best-quality actual data of how a company is performing.

If you take your consolidated financial information, that’s the first place that we would look at that. Machine learning and AI can help there too. You really want to make sure that even the actual data is coming at a place that has been through trend analysis, and machine learning technology will have already vetted any anomalies. You’re really looking at the cleanest data possible. That’s the first place.

Then when you look at data that’s out there that’s going to help you do your forecasting, that might come from your sales team. It might come from other departments. It has more subjectivity. You would apply machine learning or AI to look for trends and to get to a more qualitative set of data.

You’ve got very good clean information. You’ve got AI-assisted data that is potentially more variable in nature and you can start to use that as a better set of data for planning.

Sramana Mitra: What is the roadmap in terms of timeline of when all this starts hitting the market?

Don Mal: Within the next 12 to 24 months is when you’ll start to see more of this. AI and machine learning has been a hot trend for the last several years. A lot of it has been viewed in unrealistic ways even in terms of its potential. Now that companies are looking at real ways of leveraging that technology to help form a future roadmap, it’s in a better place now.

Sramana Mitra: Is that true about other people in the market? Is there anybody who is ahead of you in terms of having a product in the market that does have a lot of AI already, even if it’s in a different segment?

Don Mal: We track our competitors. The notion that you can use AI or machine learning to get to a better-quality dataset is fairly public knowledge. How people do it is probably going to be the differentiator in terms of how they bring it to market.

I wouldn’t be surprised if other vendors are thinking about it. I just know that we have made that an item that we want to tackle. Consumerization would be the more near-term roadmap that we will be releasing as we speak. 

Sramana Mitra: Do you want to add anything else to this conversation?

Don Mal: No, I think those are the main areas. We do talk to our customers a lot. They’re the ones that help us shape these trends. Consumerization and AI are very much customer-driven.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: Don Mal, CEO of Vena Solutions
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