Fintech South 2024: Stephen Walsh with Keeper Solutions

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by Kennesaw State University’s Executive MBA program, the accelerated degree program for working professionals looking to advance their career and enhance their leadership skills. And now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, broadcasting live from Fintech South 2024 at the Woodruff Arts Center. So excited to be talking to our next guest, Stephen Walsh with Keeper Solutions. Welcome.

Stephen Walsh: Well, thanks for having me. Great to be here.

Lee Kantor: Well, I’m excited to learn what you’re up to. Tell us a little bit about Keeper Solutions. How are you serving folks?

Stephen Walsh: Sure. Well Keeper Solutions is a software design development and AI company and we help our clients to to create great fintech products on both sides of the Atlantic. And in fact, we’re we’ve been working with a native company of Atlanta called moment since there were three people. And we’ve helped them to evolve into a $300 million company. So we love doing business here in Georgia.

Lee Kantor: So what is it exactly that Keeper Solutions helps with?

Stephen Walsh: Well, it’s really around, uh, designing products, working with our clients to help them to clarify, you know what what the use cases are to develop the UX and to prepare them to go into product development. And then we help them right through that, uh, developing the back end, the front end for complex financial products, which are able to scale to very high volumes.

Lee Kantor: So what was the genesis of your company? How did you get this thing started? What was what was the initial thinking? Sure.

Stephen Walsh: Well, my own background is in core banking systems. I started off my career with Mrs.. And I’ve been working around the the industry. Later I was working with Perot Systems. So I learned about global service delivery and outsourcing. And, you know, I wanted to set up my own operation. I thought that, you know, bringing a focus just on financial software, but with, you know, outsourcing of software development and design would be good. And it turns out it turns out it is. There’s a lot of companies out there that are providing development services but are across different sectors, but we’re just focused on fintech and financial software.

Lee Kantor: So where do you see the opportunity in leveraging AI for fintechs?

Stephen Walsh: Yeah. Well great question. I suppose with the with the explosion of Gen AI over the last couple of years, over a year ago, Keeper Solutions set up an AI lab. We felt we needed to be using these new technologies and experimenting with them So we’ve really been we’ve put a number of our team into an AI lab. We’ve been engaging with clients, and we’ve been creating proof of concepts where we’re we’re using different use cases and different technologies to, to, to create things that are useful. And we’ve incorporated that into our AI design sprint. So um, so I suppose that’s one side of it. The second area that we’ve seen is that that fintechs want to gain more productivity with the help of AI. And in the software space, that often means that they’re looking at using tools like GitHub’s copilot. So we’ve done research into that. And what we found from that is that companies can can use it to, you know, to develop software, but they have to be careful that they’re they’re not, you know, losing quality in the software. But we really found that software development time for things like unit testing, code refactoring and documentation could be reduced substantially like 70% or more, and allow allowing the kind of development teams to focus on higher value activities like creating new code, new algorithms.

Lee Kantor: And you’re not seeing those kind of hallucinations you’re seeing.

Stephen Walsh: Well, look, that’s the you know, that’s the thing with with with GitHub. The, the kind of the problem that we see is that the software, you know, if you just select the code that they’re suggesting and press tap, the risk is that it will start propagating variables right across the code and that you kind of get bad, um, bad software architecture resulting from this. So you just need to understand the risks, mitigate them. Um, we also we also like using prompt libraries so that you get consistency of how the software developers say call down a unit test or how they document a piece, a piece of code. Um so it’s like with any of these eyes, you need you need guardrails, you need good methodology. And then you’re in a position to leverage the technology properly.

Lee Kantor: So it’s a tool that still needs kind of human, uh, paying attention. It’s not just the plug and play and you’re done.

Stephen Walsh: No, no, we’re not seeing software developers going away anytime soon, so they’re very much needed, um, to, to be, you know, to be guiding the whole process. And I think also in terms of, say, product people for helping to to gather the requirements that the business needs and the product that we’re seeing. Llms are very helpful on documenting that so that you could you could get your backlog groomed better before it goes into development and do do so more efficiently now with the use of Llms.

Lee Kantor: So who is your ideal client prospect like what does that profile look like?

Stephen Walsh: Yeah. Well, you know, we’ve we’ve been sponsoring the innovation challenge this year and last year. Um, and you know, one of our, one of our best clients has graduated through the Innovation challenge in 2020. That’s moment there were artists I then um, so we, you know, we like to stay close to companies where they’re, you know, where they’ve really got their idea formed, where they’re about to get the seed funding. And it’s really seed stage companies that we can we can help to, you know, design, develop and deploy and scale their products. And those companies, then, you know, they do their series A and we help them on the entire journey. So we’re not just working with startups, we’re working with scale ups and we’re also working with some corporates. But we just confine our sphere of activity to financial software or fintech.

Lee Kantor: So what do you need more of right now? How can we help you?

Stephen Walsh: Well, I just wanted to get the word out that, you know, we’re here. Um, Tommy Marshall is our is our man on the ground here in Atlanta. And he’s a great ambassador for the brand. Um, we’re, you know, we’re. Yeah. We just wanted to get the word out there, and we want to be talking to companies that are ambitious to to get their products to the market quickly, to have a partner that can be committed to them and that can help them to scale out. Um, we have created over 1.6 billion of shareholder value over the last decade with our clients, and we want to we want to do some more of that.

Lee Kantor: So if somebody wants to learn more and connect with somebody on the team, what’s the website?

Stephen Walsh: Well, it’s keepers Solutions.com. Or you can reach out to me, Steven Walsh on LinkedIn Keeper Solutions. So we’re looking forward to continuing the conversation.

Lee Kantor: Well, Steven, thank you so much for sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

Stephen Walsh: Thank you very much. It’s an absolute pleasure.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor back in a few. At Fintech South 2024.