In this episode of the Connector Podcast, host Koen van der Hooijdonk interviews Noelia, Head of Financial Services Go‑to‑Market at ServiceNow. Noelia introduces herself and outlines ServiceNow’s scale – roughly 21,000 employees, $7 billion in revenue with a target of $16 billion by 2026 and a 25‑30 % annual growth rate. She explains how the COVID‑19 pandemic accelerated the need for automation, in‑shoring, and faster, more connected workflows for banks and fintechs. Although ServiceNow is not a regulated entity, the company embeds compliance controls into its platform, positioning itself as a de‑facto RegTech partner for heavily regulated financial institutions. The conversation then shifts to generative AI: ServiceNow’s collaborations with NVIDIA, Accenture, Endevia, Cognizant and others aim to boost compute capacity, enable code‑to‑text assistance, workflow suggestions, and conversation summarisation. These efforts are bundled under the “AI Lighthouse Project,” which co‑creates models with customers and partners. Noelia also details ServiceNow’s responsible‑AI stance, referencing the EU AI Act and a published Responsible AI policy, and discusses three key regulatory challenges for AI – speed of innovation versus regulation, scope of what to regulate, and governance responsibilities. Finally, she shares expectations for the upcoming DFS 2023 event in Belgium, highlighting open banking, embedded finance, payments, blockchain, and the importance of ecosystem collaboration, and provides contact information for organisations wishing to engage with ServiceNow.
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Welcome to the Connector Podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs, banks, and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Koen van der Hooijdonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.
Welcome to another podcast, and today it's a special one because it's the first out of a series together with Belgium fintech, and I have with me Noelia all the way from Spain, and she works for ServiceNow. Can you tell us a little bit more? What are you guys doing? And also introduce yourself.
Yes, of course. Good morning, Koen. For me, it's great pleasure to be here today in your podcast and to be talking about what ServiceNow does and who am I. Let's start with who am I, even if it's a little bit kind of a. Egoist, maybe.
Not at all.
I am the head of financial services go-to-market at ServiceNow, focused on regions like South EMEA, UK, and I am also supporting the North region. And I've been with the company for quite some time already, looking to help customers that are in the fintech space or financial space to get the best outcome of our solutions. And I work for ServiceNow. ServiceNow is a company that is quite young, but not so much. We have like 20 years in the market. And we basically—
That's not so young.
It's not so young, but if you compare us to, I don't know, other in the industry—
The dinosaurs.
The dinosaurs, then we're pretty young. And well, what we're trying to do is basically help our customers to work their work better. We are a company, you know, quite sizable at the minute. We are 20,000 employees, 20,000, 21,000 employees across the globe. And we have very, I think we have a very successful trajectory. We've been growing like fast. We are now a $7 billion company. billion company with an aspiration of becoming a $16 billion company by 2026.
Wow. Amazing.
An aggressive growth rate between the 25%, 30% year on year. So yeah, kind of, we're on a challenge and we're on a road, on a journey.
So you make me feel very small when you give all these numbers.
Well, I think it's the outcome of work and it's the outcome of a trajectory, basically, of helping customers to understand where are their challenges and how technology can help them.
So it's just one step after the ServiceNow has been, or is, a workflow automation tool. Did you see any changes after the corona crisis, so post-COVID?
Well, quite a lot. I think that with COVID and post-coronavirus, what we learned is that we couldn't depend on the things that we were doing before. I think that as a workflow company, or an enterprise software company, better said, I think that what we have realized is that Companies around ourselves, and particularly in financial services, cannot be dependent on manual work, manual tasks, and silos.
Mm-hmm.
So, what we've seen is a deliberate intention to move and to automate more so that people can be more connected and that the information is flowing better from one part of the business to another one. Just imagine what has happened with the insure and offshore. We have, for example, banks working with us that had a lot of operation that was offshore in India or other parts of the world. And all of a sudden you have to repatriate all that to continue to provide services and critical services. Like for example, you have a problem with your credit card, you have a problem with the payment and you want that to be fixed.
Mm-hmm.
Before the pandemic, probably there wasn't means to do that. After the pandemic, I think that we realize is that all this business need more, more agility, more flexibility and more speed to be able to resolve all of that. And as a consequence of that, connectivity, automation, workflowing and bringing people inshore has been kind key so that the operation could continue. Now that we're back to normal, because of the rhythm, because of the attitude, and because of the experience, we've now continued to do so. So we're not going backwards. I think that we're going forward when it means— when it comes to automation and, and the speed of communication and flow of information between different departments.
Well, talking about going forward, we're here in a podcast because of Fintech Belgium and the DFS. Obviously, the topic of the day of the event will be about regulations. I don't I don't think that ServiceNow is regulated, but how do you look at regulations? Is that for you a blessing or is it cumbersome?
Well, for us, regulation is part of our DNA. It's part of the life, particularly when you're looking at the business in financial services that is heavy, heavy regulated. We are not a regulated company, but we understand that our customers are heavy regulated and it is important for us to be able to support them where they need. So we take regulation really seriously. For us, I think it's an advantage the way that the solution is built, particularly in the particular space for financial services and how we embed controls for risk and for compliance in every single process, whether that's an IT process or it's a business process. I think it's part of why we think that we cannot be, we cannot be away from it. And at the same time, we have to embrace it to the benefit of our customers. So we took it really seriously. I think there is advantage in looking at regulation and what regulation is trying to do from a framework perspective, from the conversation and orchestration perspective, and how technology can leverage and can help a financial service institution, whether you're a fintech or a bank or an insurance company, to fulfill your obligations.
So then you become a regtech?
Kind of.
Kind of.
Kind of, yeah.
That's my cup of tea. Actually, on the website, I noticed that there is an interesting update around collaboration between NVIDIA and Accenture. Can you tell us a little bit more? Because workflow and AI, that's like a perfect mix.
Oh yeah. So that's one of the many collaborations that we're establishing. I think that for us, the way that we look at generative AI, it is, it is one of those things that we believe is going to change the conversations for a financial institution in the way they are doing their job. So the NVIDIA collaboration particularly, it is meant to be so that we can bring even more computing power to what we are doing. At the end of the day, generative AI is a lot about data, how you connect the data and how you create the data. So the more data you have, obviously the capacity that you need to be able to manipulate that and to make it, make some sort of outcome with profit, it is exponential. So that's one of the ideas. One of the investments that we're doing is this collaboration with Indivia so that they are giving us the power to compute and we are providing our customers the capacity to workflow around all of that.
Mm-hmm.
So that when you have the data and you have the capacity, you can decide. You could be We are exploring areas, for example, around code-to-text. So the system is going to be able to provide our developers suggestions on the applications they are building for them to correct, publish, or maybe change completely. We are looking at the capacity of this technology to summarize the conversations that we're having with customers so that it is easier for them to bring up all the information they need at any point given. We are looking at the capacity of these kind of technologies to even suggest what kind of workflow you should be building. Like, you know, I don't— I want to create a workflow that helps me with payment operations, for example. So the system to suggest based on best practices and based on the learning, what should be the necessary steps and the necessary tasks between each of those steps. That's what we're looking at. And that's why for us it's so important, this collaboration with, with Endevia. It's not the only one. We've also signed up with Cognizant and other partners for what we talk about.
Also about AI?
also about AI, everything AI and generative AI. We're calling it the AI Lighthouse Project, where we are looking at companies and we are looking at financial institutions that also want to be part of the initiative, whereby, well, we are all bringing to the table what we do best. We have these partners like NVIDIA for computation capacity, but we also want our customers to be in the journey with us.
Mm-hmm.
To collaborate, to create new use cases, to see, you know, where we are going with this technology. Because at the end of the day, what we are really looking to is how we can best serve that kind of ecosystem and universe. It's one of many. We've been very serious about AI and what we're doing. We have our own models and but we're also exploring how we can build new models with the help of our customers in kind of co-creation type of mode and with these providers that obviously are helping us to, to expand the capacity of the platform.
Well, taking it back a little bit then, back to the regulation part and AI, that there's a lot to do about that. AI for good, for example. How does your company look at that?
Well, obviously we take very seriously anything that has to do with regulation and the perception of AI is good or bad for a business. I think that there is also a big conversation about, particularly in this space with banks and so on and so forth, what's going to happen with my data. Right? If I am giving data to the bank and the bank is using this type of technologies, is my data going to be safe? Is it going to be used for a good use? And so on and so forth. I think that one of the things that we've done is to publish our responsibility AI Act on how we go about it with transparency, how we use the data when we are looking at AI. And also the other thing that we do, as we have done with other regulations, is what's happening in the different markets and how we can abide to the regulation. So we're quite close to the AI Act. Act here in the EU and what it means for us. And I think it's just a— I think it's a learning journey for many of us when it comes to regulation and AI.
I agree.
Because, yeah, I think that there's 3 things that we have to look at when we are looking at regulation and AI. The first one is speed. Yeah, AI seems to be faster than regulation is coming. So how can we collaborate with these institutions, regulation authorities and supervisory authorities, to gain flexibility and speed? On what we're trying to do. Second thing is, what do you want to regulate? Because it's not the same to regulate, for example, for a video game that you should be regulating for a chatbot that is providing you help with your bank account.
Completely different ballgame.
Exactly. And the third one is, who is going to regulate all that? Is it going to be just the supervisory authority? Should it be some sort of hybrid responsibility between software companies working on AI together with the governments, together with the supervisory authorities? I think there's a combo there. That is not yet solved. We're all on a journey. But I think it's quite interesting how we are looking at it from a EU perspective. There's kind of a framework, and based on that framework and the risk that it should expose you to when using AI, I think it's very clear how the framework will ask us to act and to put the remediation or to give the explanations behind the kind of technology we're using.
We're almost to the end. So I was wondering, DFS is coming in December, a large event here in Belgium. What are you expecting from the event?
I think we're expecting a lot. We're expecting a lot of collaboration. We're expecting a lot of inspiration and see where the fintech business is going. I think that we're all talking a lot about open banking, open finance. We're also talking about embedded finance, the world of payments. So I think that we are looking to connect, to collaborate, to embrace new ideas and to, well, to support as well, because at the end of the day, we are an ecosystem. And I think that is benefiting in partnering with companies like ServiceNow to explore and expand what we can do with those kind of capacities. We're all about integration and bringing in new technologies like blockchain or anything that is new around payments or embedded finance and how we can leverage that new innovation that is coming to the market. So high expectations about all of that.
That's good. We all have. But that leads me nicely into my last question. You talk about ecosystems, but ecosystems only exist if there's more people. So how can people actually enter the ecosystem? How can people contact ServiceNow?
Well, one thing is quite easy. They can come to our website, www.servicenow.com, and they can contact our colleagues here in Belgium, my colleague, Gerd Swielands at servicenow.com. We'll be very happy to support our customers. And I think we are there. We're in many forums. There's lots of information out there. There's lots of nice videos and podcasts like this. So I think that if people hear that, we're just asking them to approach us and to have a conversation about how we can help them with more seamless conversations with their customers.
Noelia, thank you so much for joining me in this podcast. Thank you also to the listeners, and I wish you a very good day, and stay tuned for more news and more updates around DFS in December 2023. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Koen.
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