Bhavesh Vaghela: Welcome to Ops Game changers, the podcast that shines a light on the crucial role that operations teams have in driving business performance and improving staff and customers experience. My name is Bhavesh, I’m the CMO at ActiveOps, and in each episode I hone in on one KPI or a challenge that the business has solved. We delve into how they went about doing this and explore the outcomes achieved. Now, one of the key areas of many transformational programs is driving operational efficiency. But what does that really mean? And how can it support your transformational goals? Now, to answer this, we’re delighted to be joined by Richard Anton. Richard’s, the Chief Customer and Client Officer over at CIBC Mellon, and previously the COO to learn about how operational excellence, what it means to CIBC Mellon and how it supports the CIBC Mellon’s client experience. Now, before we jump into that topic. Let’s welcome Richard to the podcast so Richard, welcome to Ops game changers.
Richard Anton: Thank you very much, Bhavesh. I’m very excited to be here today and looking forward to having a nice conversation about a topic that’s near and dear to me.
Bhavesh: I bet I bet. Well, listen, thank you so much for joining us before we jump into this, Richard. Perhaps you can tell us a little bit more about yourself, and how you’ve ended up as Chief Customer Officer at CIBC Mellon. What’s your career looked like?
Richard: Yeah. So, my career has been an interesting journey. I always used to say that I’m an Ops person through and through. I’ve always been an operations guy. I grew up in the world of operations, started at it straight out of school, and I really grew up through to the different elements of our organisation that had operations. So, whether it was accounting, custody, different components of it, and I got a chance to learn a little bit more of the industry. So, I joined CIBC Mellon coming up to 11 years ago as the COO, and my remit was really running the operations, and a lot of times people think an Operations person sits behind the desk and just pounding out work, and is only focused on numbers and little elements like that. I am not like that. Well, I do have those components and obviously those are important. But I’ve always felt that an important element of an operations leader to be able to do your job successfully is you actually have to be able to speak to your clients. You have to be engaging with the clients. You have to hear the voice of the client, and what it means. It was only then that I was able to really understand how we were delivering the service and what it meant ultimately to the client. So, you know throughout my career I would say I was a very much client facing operations leader. Hence the transition about a year ago, when our CEO Mal Cullen asked me to take on a different role in the organisation and lead the overall client coverage teams across our company. So, it was a very exciting chapter for me it was a different time, a different chance to look at and have discussions with clients. I’m now having more strategic commercial discussions, but I can now also have a good discussion with a client who’s going through an operations transformation. And I can actually connect with them. I’ve been there. I’ve done that, and I have the ability to engage with them on a different level. So that’s been very exciting.
Bhavesh: Oh, that’s fantastic! So, talking about your clients, maybe you could tell us a little bit about what is CIBC Mellon? And what do you guys do? And the organisation itself.
Richard: Sure not a problem. So you know, I’m actually quite excited about telling you this, because this is just hot off the press and we just recently closed the market. We just surpassed 3 trillion dollars in assets here in the Canadian marketplace.
Bhavesh: Oh, wow!
Richard: Something we’re very proud of. Ultimately, what we do is we deliver services to the institutional investors here in the Canadian marketplace. We are a custodial bank. We provide accounting custody record keeping services to the Canadian consumers, both asset managers, asset owners. So ultimately all the wealth that’s coming across the Canadian market, whether it’s through investors, whether it’s through pensioners. We’re delivering those behind the scenes services dealing with some of the largest institutions here in the Canadian marketplace. And it’s something that we’re quite proud of. We’ve had a tremendous amount of success over the last 10 plus years, growing our business, really shaping the financial services, environment, and in our business, scale is everything. So being able to top that 3 trillion marker is something that we’re quite proud of.
Bhavesh: Well, that’s amazing. That’s amazing. So you know, I guess when we kind of delve into it, then. So let’s go into the topic of operations, operational excellence. And you know you’ve got that both sides of it. That exceptional customer experience is really important for your organisation. So what does operational excellence mean to CIBC Mellon, what does that mean for you guys?
Richard: Yeah, it’s it’s a great question. And you know, I’m gonna unpack it a little bit, because I don’t think there’s one simple answer to say this is how you define operational excellence. It’s almost a component of multiple items, you know. I think people think operational excellence is a drive to completely eliminate manual, completely drive to a fully autonomous environment that’s full straight through. Now, that could be the North Star environment that you’re trying to go towards. But to me I look at operational is the drive to continuously improve and adapt your operating models to build out proper efficiencies and productivities along the way. And you know that’s where understanding what people do and how you manage your business on a day to day basis, understanding where your bottlenecks, where are there opportunities to leverage new and emerging technologies to drive, you know, more efficiencies, change behaviours across the marketplace. So that’s where our journey has really led us on operational. And it’s that continuous focus on improving ultimately our deliverables, that we drive for our clients and also for employees. And I think, no matter what we do. I think that’s the most important element is we have to have a lens on both sides of that ledger. How is this benefiting, and how is this improving the lives of our employees? But also is it adding continuous value and benefits to our clients, whether it’s through more straight through de-risking, our business, supporting our clients, giving something to our clients in a faster model. So I think when you unpack all of that, it’s that continuous journey that you’re looking at, and all the different components that drive operational excellence.
Bhavesh: Yeah, it’s a really interesting observation, you know that whole idea between customer and the employee. Right? I mean, as you said, right up front. Your North Star may be this fully autonomous operational environment, and maybe we will get there at some point in the in the future right? With all the advancements that are going on right now. But that human element is still critical, and will continue to be critical for a long period of time. So, if we kind of almost paint the before picture right? The journey that you’ve been on. What was it like before? What was that trigger point that said, okay, right? We’ve got to look at this. We’ve got to think differently. What was the thing that changed it and got you on that journey?
Richard: I well, I know it very well, because I will never forget it. It was early on in in my time here at CIBC Mellon, and I remember walking out of my office. And do you remember, you don’t see them a lot anymore, but back in the olden days we had a lot of those boxes of paper? I remember walking the floors, and I saw these boxes everywhere and it got to a point where I saw I looked over at one of the employees desks, and he literally made an office out of boxes, and it was piled so high that I thought, this is a problem, because now we have an HR issue that this box might fall on this employee. So, I was getting nervous, and it dawned on me that I cannot believe how much paper utilisation we still have in this organisation. So that actually started and prompted the journey of okay, we needed to find a vision of how do we continue to drive operational excellence in this organisation and change, how we are doing it. And part of it was understanding what we were doing and why we were doing it. And you know, that was the challenge not having a consistent framework of what everyone needed to be doing and how everyone was doing it consistently. So you know, we? That’s how we started that process. We started to look at everyone’s roles, started to break down everyone’s roles into individual components, start to identify why you were doing this, and it was really eye opening, how much activity we were doing and a lot of it was redundant. And when you asked people why you were doing something you got my pet peeve that I hear so often, which is well, that’s just the way we’ve always done things. And so it was a chance, and this is what I’ve always loved about operations. It was a chance to break apart the models and test some hypothesis and theories that we had and really change. So, we graduated into setting up various goals and objectives we wanted. I can tell you. The first one was a paperless environment that we wanted. So, we looked at every element within our operating model that drove paper. And we slowly started to figure out what technologies it could bring in, what needed to change to make this happen. So that started the process, and it started to evolve. And as we started to get success. And I think that’s a big component here. We started to get success, not just with the employees but with our customers. They started to see what we were doing and there was a genuine level of excitement. And I will say this, when I joined the organisation we were an organisation. That change wasn’t readily acceptable. People were happy doing what they were doing, you know. And so, having these successes really was a cultural shift in our organisation and it was very exciting to see people coming out and saying, I have an idea what about this and challenging the status quo, and I think that’s prompted our journey and really started to get us focused on how we measure? How do we define success? And where do we continue to evolve this.
Bhavesh: And I think you’re absolutely right. I think you need those kind of early wins right, the early successes to go forward. And it is a cultural change. And actually, it’s probably a cultural change constantly, because with new technologies coming in and the way operations is evolving as well as things like fundamental backup things are collapsing the way we normally think about things. But you know these things are never smooth, are they? So, you know, you’ve got these early initial wins, and you’re starting to see excitement both internally and to a certain degree it’s impacting the I would imagine the experience your customers are getting from the output, but you know there are bumps along the road. So, what did what did you discover? What were the things that you look back and go. Well, actually, man, that was a tough period.
Richard: Yeah. And it’s true, because there are bumps. And to say that it’s always perfectly smooth and anytime you put change in place, people are fully accepting is not accurate, and there were multiple bumps. And fist let me start off on the employee side, and then I’ll get to the client side, because there’s two different components there that that I did see. You know, when you heard me talk about defining operational excellence, you may have noticed something that I did not say was cost, so cost becomes a byproduct of the outcome of driving a true, efficient operating model. But it should. It should not necessarily always be the driver. I think if it becomes a driver, it leads to behaviours that I don’t believe are sustainable. You know, people then, are only focused on short term financial objectives versus what makes sense for the longer term viable operating model. So, I think that’s one of the lessons that I did learn early on, we did put costs, front and centre. We wanted to see how we can drive a different cost model. And even when we started to shift away from making cost the number one area, the employees always felt it was a cost driver. They always felt that we were trying to drive a costing environment, and it was only a financial thing never really cared about truly being operationally efficient. It was just a race to deliver financial results. And so, we spent a lot of time trying to move away from that, shifting away from it being a cost driven foundation to truly thinking differently we started to recognise and reward ideas versus costs. We started to. We started to celebrate these ideas, whether they were successful or not. And I think that’s critical. It’s important to recognise when people come forward with these ideas, celebrate them. Let’s recognise when something was tried versus just delivering a financial result. And I think that’s when we started to see a shift. I think the other employee element that people were worried about is when you start thinking about operational efficiencies. It comes back down to productivity, and people think productivity is how they’re going to get measured as an employee. There’s so many variables that go into productivity, and sure there are
very prescriptive items at how long it takes you. But there’s also variables that go into those elements. And unfortunately, I will say, is, people started to abuse how they were looking at productivity, and they started using them as performance measurement tools, and that really went against every principle about what we were trying to do. I really didn’t care whether you were at X percent versus, Sally was at X percent. What was more important, and what really was the key catalyst here is what was your continuous improvement, and how were you were looking to move forward on that. But people ended up measuring against each other. And that was something that was a difficult period, because we really had to shift away that mindset and bring it back to what we were trying to deliver and come away with that. Let me move to the client side, because there was one element on the client side that was really interesting to see. As you’re going through a journey of operational excellence, you start changing the model, you start having different levels of engagement with your customers. I think one of the challenges we had with customers is, if you were not clear on your communication, the value ultimately that you were delivering the clients in some cases had a perception that we were just shifting work from ourselves to them. And that’s a real challenge, because we weren’t shifting. We were actually delivering more value and we’re trying to do it in a more digital way. Today’s environment, when you’re manual, you create risks, you create challenges. So, to create a different environment, it really helped them. And I always go back to the banking experience. I don’t have to get in my car drive to the bank, deposit my money at, or line up, and then deposit my money at the teller. I can just do it right on my phone. That first inclination was well, the banks are really getting away from me engaging with them. It made my life easier once I started to see the value, and I think that was the key is we needed to have a very clear communication plan.
Bhavesh: Yeah. And you know, I think you’ve there’s so much you’ve said there, which I’d like to kind of unpack a little bit if you wouldn’t mind. So one of the things you originally said started off in that. When you start talking there, you talked about that cost focus and then shifting it, you know, over a period of time into, so we say, value focused in that context. I’m curious therefore, when you were presenting this transformational program to your senior execs the board under a cost banner, which, by the way, is not uncommon. A lot of people do that right. It’s all very cost driven and it wasn’t materially changing or changing the pace that you wanted to and then you had to re-shift it. Did that cause problems for getting the rest of the business to buy into what you were trying to do?
Richard: No. Well, listen, I would say this, so I had a I had a vision of what the cost overlay. And yes, that that was one of the primary drivers, and I will say we were able to deliver on that. So that was successful.
Bhavesh: But that was still successful. Yeah, okay.
Richard: That was successful. So, I would say we were able to deliver on that the problem was there becomes that point of in the early stages you do get very good, strong, successful improvements, especially when you’re starting off from ground zero, which there’s not a lot of…
Bhavesh: There’s only one way, that’s up
Richard: Yes, it has. It goes very quickly. So you get you get some good ramp up so. But then we had to figure out, how do we continue to sustain this over the longer term? So, the challenge wasn’t in the early stages and selling a business model, it was in the latter stages of how are you going to continue to deliver the same results that you did in your stages? And I think that was a real challenge, because it’s very hard to constantly evolve to that level.
Bhavesh: Okay.
Richard: Unless you are making continuous also investment in the right level of technology. And in our business, you got to remember a lot of organisations like this are somewhat reluctant to change too dramatically. You heard me start off today talk about 3 trillion. There’s a reason clients have trusted us with 3 trillion. We cannot fail, we cannot break, and so we have to be very careful of how we proceed along that continuum and deliver so managing that cost model. But it was for me, I shifted the conversation away from cost to productivity. Here’s how we’re getting better. Here’s how we’re growing our business and doing it much more efficiently and consciously delivering ultimately for the results. Now those financial levers were still somewhat there, but now I shifted it to how we were improving the overall business models, and how that ultimately delivered down to either unit cost, model, more productivity or better profit margins all of those components.
Bhavesh: So that suggests Richard that in order to be able to articulate that one of the things that I hear a lot from Ops people around the world is, you know, how do I demonstrate my value to my senior execs? And so forth, data becomes a critical part of that. So, you know, you went from manual paper into paperless. And then more digital and transformative in that way has the importance of data across your operational environment become more and more important to not only do that continuous improvement, but also be able to demonstrate the improvements you’re making?
Richard: It’s the fundamental single biggest element, I would say, having the data and having the data that translates into the right level of insights is absolutely critical. You know I don’t. I don’t, especially in operations. We do what we do every day. We deliver the results. Data and insights are absolutely critical to telling the story of how successful the organisation is continuously, whether it’s how successful we are from delivering to the client, whether it’s SLAs, KPIs, those different measurements, whether it’s how successful we are delivering it in an efficient manner. There’s so many data points that we can extract and then turn into valuable insights and how we are measuring the organisation. It’s sometimes it can be overwhelming, because in an operational role there is a lot of data, there’s a lot of information, and it’s how you’re able to unpack all of that and deliver it into a cohesive story back to the stakeholders, back to your board, your shareholders, or whoever you’re needing to showcase what you’ve done and delivered. So, I think the and there’s different elements. You want to have certain data points that delivering to your shareholders certain data points you’re delivering to your employees. You want them to feel that this journey you’re on is exciting to them, and how it’s helped deliver to them. So, it’s that has been one challenging, because getting the access to the data is not always easy. It’s not always just a feed that comes in some of this data you have to extrapolate on a manual basis, you know. And over time we’ve been able to automate a lot of the data extracts. Look at how we get some of that. But it and it’s also inventorying the data. What information do you really have available. So we’ve been able to leverage a lot of different technology tools to bring it forward. And you know, I will say, that’s been one of the key successes we’ve had with ActiveOps is having the ability to look at our business at different models. And then that data point that ActiveOps has been able to open up. I can now see it in a visual form. If I didn’t have that in a visual form, it would have just been intuitive. My gut saying, I think it’s this. I can see it. I can see the trends. I can see how our business is really operating. And it’s really, it’s really changed the dynamics of our organisation.
Bhavesh: That’s fantastic. I think the thing about all this, though, is, and I think you mentioned it right up front. There’s no single silver bullet for operational excellence. There’s a number of factors, right? You’ve described the kind of process element from, you know, paperless manual into a paperless environment. So, there’s technology around that, and how you change the cultural element of employees and people. And as equally as important is the data transformation that needs to go along to support the broader things that you’re trying to do. And perhaps we can go back a little bit in terms of from an employee perspective you mentioned earlier on there’s this, there’s a mindset shift required in any of these transformation programs from going from we’ve always done it that way syndrome to different ways of doing what is the before picture? What’s it like now? Being an employee of the operational environment in CIBC Mellon.
Richard: Oh, it’s incredibly exciting. It’s incredibly exciting you, the level of ideas that come forward, the excitement that people see now, the buy-in that you get when you showcase new technologies and the level of discussion that you get. You know, it’s incredible to just sit around a table with some of the employees and talk about ideas or share new perspectives and watching them just start coming up with thoughts and game planning. I remember a while ago I went up to one of my operations teams and I caught them in the middle of doing exactly that. I sat from a distance, and I was just watching and witnessing a group of individuals around a whiteboard and just redesigning an entire process. And the way they were challenging each other the way. They were engaging with each other, throwing out really radical ideas, and some of them made my eyes wide open, thinking he’s going to do that? But at the same time, I loved it because they were pushing the boundaries of, they were pushing what we were capable of to the next level, and not only that, but what really was fascinating out of it was hearing them talk. Something else happened. They weren’t just redesigning a process, they started to think about what else we can do.
Bhavesh: Yeah.
Richard: Which was fascinating to see. So, they weren’t just fixing an A to B model. They were saying, well, what if we start doing A to over here and down here. We could do this, and maybe we can generate something new for the clients, or they were thinking of from a different lens, that was just fascinating to see. And I can tell you right now, ten years ago, people would never have had that. People would have looked at me like I was a crazy person, saying, I need this paper. What are you talking about?
Bhavesh: This is how I’ve always done it
Richard: So, watching that cultural shift, watching that level of excitement that’s coming through employees is just one of the greatest things that I can say, from a cultural standpoint, has just been really front and centre.
Bhavesh: Oh, that’s really amazing to hear. And you know you hear so many kind of business gurus, leadership gurus, that talk about the fact that you know get your employees motivated and right, and everything else will kind of work itself out in terms of the customer experience as a result of it. So, I’m you know, I think one of if I’m thinking of the audience of our podcast. I think they’d want me to ask you that continuous improvement step by step you’ve talked about the first wave of improvement. Then it’s the challenge of keeping that going and making sure that you’re deriving that if you look back at the journey you’ve been on. What would you say are there tips that you would give other Ops folks? What are the two or three things you would say, do these things to keep that continuous improvement going?
Richard: Yeah. So, I would say, you know, first of all, make sure you have a lens across the full spectrum. And what I mean by that, I think we’ve talked about it a few times today is whether you have shareholders, employees, clients, whoever you have continuously focus around the whole lens. And during that journey the lens might shift a little bit. It might be very shareholder focused. So, you have a higher focus, maybe on cost for a period of time. It might be employee focus, so, you’re trying to drive the cultural engagement. It might be client focused, and it might be driving whether it’s new sources of revenue, changing the client experience for the better, which also then drives potential future growth and opportunities so changing that shift. Don’t be afraid to constantly change and shift along them. You don’t always have to satisfy all three at the exact same time. The other thing I would probably recommend is, don’t be afraid to pause and reset. Okay. So, when I when I went through the journey the first time of this operational excellence. I talked to you a little bit about the behaviours that started to happen inside of the mindsets. So, we went to some very positive to all of a sudden negatives that started to come out. I could have easily just tried to stop it and squash, and had people move on. But I realised at the time that maybe sometimes the best answer is to hit the pause button. Pause, reframe, refocus, and come back stronger. So ,it’s okay to do that. Don’t feel that you always have to just constantly be doing this, and I think that pause and reset button that we went through was actually quite positive, not just for the organisation, the employees all across the spectrum we were able to reshape and really have the honest discussion. What went well, what didn’t go well, why, it didn’t go well and how do we change when you’re in the middle of it? It’s very hard to change that sometimes. So I would encourage people that go into. Don’t be stubborn and just feel like you have to keep going through.
Bhavesh: Good.
Richard: Pause and reset. It’s okay. It’s not going to hurt along that journey. This isn’t a race, and I think that’s the other thing that, I would say is don’t get stuck in short term. Have your vision around the long term of where you’re going. Focus on what you’re trying to achieve from a cultural shift and make that paramount. This isn’t about every day getting a singular win. It’s not about meeting financial only one year short term quarterly financial targets and goals. This is about a long-term vision, and changing the culture, the environment. Make it something that every employee says over and over again, whether you’re talking in a conversation make continuous improvement, operational excellence, something that every employee is talking about versus what’s my financial target this year, what’s my productivity number? I think if you shift that dialogue and make it a mindset, you’ll start to see that behaviour really come out front and centre.
Bhavesh: And it becomes part of the DNA. Doesn’t it? Part of the ethos of people that work in within your organisation? I mean if I flip that question on the other side, then Rich, is there something that you remember doing that you think, oh, man, that I shouldn’t have done that! Anything that you feel that during that journey you look back. Oh, man, that I should never have gone down that path.
Richard: Yeah, you know what I I’m sure there’s multiple ones like that. And yeah, there are. I think I became too rigid. You know we had expectations that we had teams required today. Whether they were these daily huddles that we were looking to do. I expected them to be done in a certain way. You had to follow a prescriptive model. It was almost robotic like, and I wanted everyone to operate the same way, and I was very excited. And maybe it’s the operations in me that I like structure. I like control, but I probably should have allowed a little bit more of creativity and element of you know you own it, you control it. You manage accordingly how your people and how your employees set works. You know them better than I do. So, figure out what works for your team, what aligns to your team. So, I would say, that’s an area that I probably should have let go a little bit earlier is let them be a little more creative. Let them let them be part of the solutioning a little bit earlier on. That rigidness I could see that it put people too uncomfortable sometimes, and I realised that I did realise it early. And I said, okay, you guys adapt accordingly. But I probably made a few mistakes along that way.
Bhavesh: Oh, no, it’s great that you share that. I think that the reality, though it’s the balance, isn’t it, between the two? Right? Because you know clearly to run a transformational program like you have at CIBC Mellon takes strong leadership to drive that at the front end. But you’ve got to be able to bring your teams along with you in that journey. So, I mean, there’s some really great insights that you’ve shared shared there. So, I think I’ve got a couple more questions for you. Richard one is I guess the answer is obvious. But what’s next? Right? I mean, it’s always continuous improvement. But what’s next? What are you next looking at?
Richard: Oh, so I’m going to go back to something that you said earlier around data. And digital, I think that’s the next evolution of this is how we can leverage some of these incredible technologies that are coming to the forefront to really continuous change the operating models, you know, I haven’t even said the word AI through this entire podcast which is shocking in today’s day and age.
Bhavesh: That was my next question, by the way.
Richard: There you go. But see, that’s where I think is what’s next is, how do you continue to leverage some of these tools to change the models, to change the client experience, to change the employee experience across the way. And I think that’s where it’s been very excited. We’ve been actually leveraging various technologies, various organisations to bring in tools working with them. And it’s really changed our ability to how we look at our business differently. I will say, about a year ago we introduced a new technology partner into the organisation, and when we were starting the journey with them, it was really designed around a specific process. We saw some of the capabilities that they had, including some of the AI capabilities that were embedded into it. It was very exciting. As we were going through the process, what was even more excited was it opened up the element that something that we never had thought of was we were trying to fix a process. And all of a sudden, we identified a service opportunity. So, we went from an internally focused model to something that all of a sudden we could turn to an external revenue generating client requirement, and where we were seeing the industry was real challenge, where we believe all of a sudden we could now be at the forefront to help our clients out. And I think that’s where it’s very exciting is some of this technology has opened up capabilities that we never could have imagined. And it’s completely changing the operating model so very excited about continuing this evolution of working with technology partners and vendors like yourselves, on how we can continue to evolve our business models.
Bhavesh: And you know you’ve touched a little bit on the AI question. But you know so the AI question I always ask everybody that I, you know all the guests on the podcast is, you know, if you can, if you can rub that crystal ball a little bit and kind of glimpse into the future over the next 5 to 10 years. What do you think operations are going to look like?
Richard: Dramatically different.
Bhavesh: Yeah, you would think so right.
Richard: Dramatically different. Like, listen, I think I had a vision 30 years ago when I started that I thought you know, we didn’t need a lot of people doing the work that we do. We could have gone straight through processing. But I’ve kind of thrown a lot of that thought mentality out. At the end of the day. I still think this is a people business. I think it’s we still need people to be able to drive a client engagement client experience. I’m going to fundamentally say, that is extremely important at everything we do. But it’s going to it’s going to radically change the type of roles, types of jobs and organisations. We’re going to see a dramatic shift. I think people always think AI is going to eliminate 50% of a workforce. 75%. No, it’s not. I don’t believe it is. I think it’s going to dramatically change that workforce where there’s a lot of activities and tasks that are instead of doing it this way. You’re now going to have to do different roles, different analytical elements, different insights, different engagements. So, I think the way AI is going to change it, it’s going to change the way people work dramatically. It’s going to avoid having people do mundane, redundant tasks and have people more analytically thinking and engaging with insights. And it’s also going to change that that element of how we bring it all the way through to the client lens.
Bhavesh: No, I think you’re absolutely spot on. I think it’s a, you know, there is that fear, fear, or opportunity depend which way you look at it of no more people in operations. But the reality is very, very different, and, as you say, the structure and the makeup of those teams will be very, very different in the future, and that’s the most realistic. I mean, you can never completely foresee what’s going to happen. But what we do know is the rate of change is going to be much faster than we’ve ever seen before. So, before we close off, Richard, I’m going to ask you one final question, if I may, what is your proudest moment in this journey?
Richard: Okay, my proudest moment. It’s going to be an interesting one, and I might give you the context afterwards. But so, when I started in the organisation, as I as I told you, I came into an organisation that was very allergic to change is how I’m going to phrase it. Change was not something they were used to. It was not something they were comfortable with, and it created a lot of anxiety. So, I had an employee in the organisation, and you know, unfortunately, she finally retired about four years ago. It was a very sad day, but she finally said, I’m done, Rich, but she was with us for 57 years.
Bhavesh: Oh, wow!
Richard: Remarkable. I will never forget this but 57 years, and the reason I’m bringing her up is because every Friday afternoon, around 2 o’clock in the afternoon she would come into my office, and she would just sit down and we would sit back, and we would just talk, just general talk, just general discussion about nothing and everything. It was sports, it was life, it was work, it was anything that she wanted to go on, and we would just get engaged in about 25 min, half an hour talk, and then she’d go. Thank you very much, and she’d go back to work and just enjoy her day. You know there was one day she came into my office and she said, I remember this very well, she said Rich, I just wanted to let you know I’ve been here for 53 years, so this was a little earlier on. And she said this was, going to be the year I was going to come into your office and tell you I’m retiring. But all this stuff that’s happening Rich, everything that’s changing and everything that’s going on. This is fun! You got me for another 2 more years. Got up and left, and I smiled, and it hit me there. And the reason that I say that’s the proudest moment. If I could make someone who’s been here for 53 years buy into the change, see the value in the change, be excited about the change, we’ve done something right as an organisation, and that meant everything to me that we were doing this the right way, and we were on the right path to success.
Bhavesh: Wow! That’s a great story, Rich. Thank you so much for sharing that. And I think you’re right. That idea of those moments in time, right? That and the changes that you’ve made within people and within your organisation. So, I want to just thank you for giving us some of your time today and sharing what has been a fascinating journey that you’ve been on, and being so transparent and open about some of the pros and cons of things that you’ve learned for, you know, other listeners in similar situations, and I think the whole idea of operational excellence is one of those
terms that everybody bangs out. You know we’ve got to be better at operational excellence is what we need, and it means different things to different people. And I mean, you’ve very clearly articulated what it’s meant for CIBC Mellon and the journey that you’ve been on, and I think it’s been a fascinating story. So, thank you so much for sharing that with us. And you’re more than welcome to come onto podcast anytime to talk onto your next wave of operational excellence. But thank you very much. So, listen to everybody else listening. What a great story! Right? What a great bunch of learnings that we can take from what Richard has shared with us, so do check in again for future episodes, and all the fascinating insights that you hear from people who are actually doing this on the ground. So, thank you very much, and goodbye, for now.
