In this episode, we discuss trends and technologies influencing and supporting the financial services industry with special guest, Nasir Zubairi, CEO of the Luxembourg House of Financial Technology (LHoFT), a public/private sector initiative to drive fintech and digitalization for Luxembourg's financial services industry.
In this episode, we discuss trends and technologies influencing and supporting the financial services industry with special guest, Nasir Zubairi, CEO of the Luxembourg House of Financial Technology (LHoFT), a public/private sector initiative to drive fintech and digitalization for Luxembourg's financial services industry.
Nasir shares with us innovations that the LHoFT has given their customers and its overall mission and purpose, Luxembourg as a global financial center, financial Inclusion and its relationship to the blockchain, how blockchain is being used in Financial Technology aka Fintech, current technologies used in Fintech and what the future holds, the emerging role of data and statistical analysis in Fintech, and if he sees AI as a promising aide here.
We also talk about how technology providers like Microsoft are playing a role in Fintech’s digital transformation, and what the emergence of the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) means for the industry.
Episode Links
The LHoFT – Luxembourg House of Financial Technology (Twitter / LinkedIn)
Banking Industry Home - Here, you’ll find various articles and papers.
Capital Markets Home - Among other things, you’ll find a great e-book on enabling the capital markets firm of the future.
Guest
Nasir Zubairi is CEO of the Luxembourg House of Financial Technology (or LHoFT), a public/private sector initiative to drive fintech and digitalization for Luxembourg's financial services industry.
Follow Nasir on Twitter or LinkedIn.
Hosts
Paul Maher is General Manager of the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
David Starr is a Principal Azure Solutions Architect in the Marketplace Onboarding, Enablement, and Growth team at Microsoft. Follow him on LinkedIn and Twitter.
David Starr:
Welcome to the Azure for Industry podcast. We're your hosts, David Starr and Paul Maher. In this podcast, you’ll hear from thought leaders across various industries, discussing technology trends and innovation sharing how Azure is helping transform business. You'll also hear directly from Microsoft thought leaders on how our products and services are meeting the industry’s continually evolving needs.
We're talking about trends and technologies that are influencing and both supporting the financial services industry. Now, before we turn to today's guest, I'll provide a really quick rundown of Microsoft's major initiatives, where we're focusing to enable innovation in banking and other FinTech areas and the overarching goal that we have, of course, is reimagining banking and capital markets, which sounds lofty and high-level.
However, there are some very tangible initiatives that go along with that. First, being managing risk across the enterprise, which is always a concern of course, especially in financial services. Modernizing payments in core systems and a lot of that is talking about lifts to the cloud and modernization of internal systems that have been there for many, many years and now, we're looking for ways to bring them up-to-date and to enable modern experiences.
So along with that, a big one, of course, is combating financial crime and Microsoft has a play here, not just in financial crime, but across security practices as well. Now we also are very invested in enabling our partners to deliver personalized customer experiences. This is whatever you can imagine and building that out on our platforms.
And this next one sounds a little bit like something you hear from all industries, but the idea of empowering employees and what does that mean? It actually means providing actionable data and insights, tools that employees need at the point of service so that they're able to serve better, the customers at the moment that they need a decision to be made.
And finally, we're focusing on enabling green technologies and financial services, that industry is no different than the others that we serve. So we're looking for ways to help financial services become more green in its day-to-day business.
And finally, we look at reimagining collaboration and productivity and we're doing so with the addition of tools like Microsoft Teams and such that you've probably heard quite a bit about of late.
So in this episode, we're joined by Nasir Zubairi and Nasir is CEO of the Luxembourg House of Financial Technology, or LHoFT as you'll hear us refer to it in the episode today, and LHoFT is a public-private sector initiative to drive FinTech and digitalization for Luxembourg and its financial services industry.
So Nasir, welcome to the program, and thank you for joining us today.
Nasir Zubairi:
Hey, David, great to be here. Thank you very much for inviting me.
Paul Maher:
Hey, it's so great to have you on the show, Nasir and so why don't we just start a little bit by, if you feel free to share a little bit about yourself and tell us a little bit more about LHoFT’s mission and purpose.
Nasir Zubairi:
Oh, sure. Thank you, Paul. I mean maybe a little bit about myself because I think this adds a little bit of context, which I find important when talking about financial technology. I've worked in financial services now for about 23 years. The majority of my time has been in traditional financial services. I've worked in banking, in capital markets, ran a trading desk in London using AI, by the way, or machine learning specifically in the FX and futures markets, and then transitioned over to setting up and building my own companies about 11 or so years ago.
That journey has led me through a multitude of countries, a multitude of businesses—some successful, some not so successful—and I most recently and now sit in Luxembourg running the Luxembourg House of Financial Technology. The LHoFT is something quite unique, I think in not just Europe, but globally and there is a true collaboration between the very actively engaged public sector, the government, with the private sector to really evolve the financial services industry with a core focus on digital. And increasingly, now with obviously Brexit coming to its head at the end of this year, it's not just about driving digitalization and financial services within Luxembourg but taking a leading role in trying to drive digitalization and FinTech for the European Union, given that Luxembourg becomes the largest financial services center in the European Union as of the 1st of January, 2021.
So a lot of our focus is working with the institutions, the traditional sector, and helping them to get to grips and really understand the value, the power, the efficiency gains, the benefits of digital—be it in-house, be it working with FinTech, be it however they want to do it—and also, supporting the plethora of FinTech firms that are based in Luxembourg and broader across the European Union to be able to achieve their goals and help to evolve the industry. Be it working with the traditional finance sector or independently looking to compete with that financial services sector and evolve it through competition.
Paul Maher:
That's great. Thank you so much for that. So just carrying on and what a great background that you talked about across the banking and capital markets, and most recently, starting your own business with LHoFT and it's always fun to get involved with the FinTech and help sort of incubate and drive new innovation.
So that leads me to the next question. If you take a step back and think about sort of financial services, all up, what are some of the trends you're seeing? I'm interested in also thinking about kind of the compare and contrast on those trends. Obviously, with everything that's going on in the world with COVID, et cetera, we're seeing obviously the need to innovate in different or new ways and so, I'd love to get your perspective on what are the trends you're seeing in financial services and perhaps, trends that have changed that either was thought to be important and perhaps aren't being driven any forward-moving forwards, given all kinds of change or perhaps new trends that have imagined as a result of kind of all-new remote everything norm that we're living through.
Nasir Zubairi:
Yeah, sure. We can subdivide this into a few little distinct areas. I think there's the technology trends in themselves, there's the business model trends, and there's a sort of behavioral needs trends from the way I look at things. So focusing maybe first on the technology trends, the technologies that are enabling some of the new business models, and the evolution of financial services.
Critically, I don't want to sort of jump on the hype cycle, but there's no other way to say it, but without any question, AI and blockchain where we're seeing a lot of the key focus now in terms of driving the financial services industry and what are those technologies enabling. Within the European Union specifically, if I first talk about that, you need to look at the state of financial services or the traditional financial services industry in the European Union.
The financial institution, specifically the banks in the European Union, have the worst KPIs of any banking sector in the world. Barring Japan, we're talking about return on equity in European banking averaging 5.9% return on tangible equity averaging less than 2%. These are horrendous pieces of data and they're only going one way. I've been monitoring this information for a number of years now. The European institutions are facing pressure from multiple angles. Obviously, increased transparency and competition on the frontend in terms of product and services, but critically is the huge burden of the tsunami of compliance that is being put onto them by the European regulatory bodies since the financial crisis in 2008/2009, which is driving massive growth in their cost base and compressing their margins and therefore, compressing their performance. They're not really able to cope with this.
We're seeing anecdotal evidence suggests say, for example, in Luxembourg that cost of compliance as a proportion of overhead of a lot of financial institutions has been going up towards close to something like 30% whereas, it used to be me maybe more around 12, 15%. So they're facing huge pressures on the cost base and this is where technology really can come in and facilitate a lot of value and ensure their future competitiveness. And so, we're seeing, from a trends perspective, in that sort of business model area, looking at RegTech technologies or technologies say, particularly using AI, data science, blockchain as well driving down the costs of compliance, regulation, reporting customer onboarding from that regulatory perspective. That is really seeing a massive surge and enhanced greatly interestingly enough, obviously by COVID-19 where the lockdown firms were no longer able to meet face-to-face with clients. How could they get a signature from a customer? How could they onboard a customer, validate their identity, et cetera and they suddenly perked up and realized oh my God, we have to use digital. This is core to our business continuity, facing this unknown.
The last part is looking at behaviors and needs. Change is inevitable. It's one of the few inevitabilities in life, along with death and taxes, right? And for some reason, banks don't seem to have grasped this for the past 10, 15 years. They have generally sort of been running themselves as everything's wonderful the way it is and it's not. A lot of the behavior of the consumer, of the customer has been driven in terms of its expectations and what should be happening by the enhancement and evolution of technologies and solutions and services across a variety of different industries.
Uber is one of my favorite examples. Uber is a fantastic FinTech firm. The fact that you can order a taxi, jump in, jump out without ever having to make a transaction or a payment—it's just all invisible in the background—is a fantastic user experience, right? Whereas, if you look at financial services today in its traditional sense, a lot of the effort in any transaction, the majority of the effort in a transaction, tends to actually be engaging with the financial services providers. Take getting a loan to buy a car, take getting a mortgage to buy a house, take ensuring that you can retire happy in the future to be able to continue to buy things, investing in investment funds; there's way too much friction in this process. I think consumers and businesses alike really demanding better quality through digital from their financial services providers, which is obviously, driving financial institutions to make changes to the solutions that they offer through digital as well.
Paul Maher:
That's great and I love the example of Uber. I'd never thought about it that way and that's kind of really lands the message. And so, just a follow-on question, I guess I would add then.
Perhaps for companies out there and you mentioned lots of innovation that's happening, but in particular, obviously you talked about AI and blockchain. So for people out there and for our listeners here today that perhaps are either curious or considering transformation using technology, are there any learnings that you could share with the listeners of where to get started, or how to go through the due diligence and decision-making to either understand the technologies or get buy-in from decision-makers to evaluate or adopt those technologies?
Nasir Zubairi:
Yeah, sure. It is complex dealing with big financial institutions. You're talking the last data I saw from a large infrastructure provider in the financial services industry suggests that the average procurement life cycle from the time you have a first conversation with an institution to the time your solution goes live is still around three years, which is insane given the speed at which changes occurring and competition is changing and needs to adapt are changing.
There is more focus in trying to make institutions more agile. There is a bit of give and take. There are problems internally with personal incentives, which are very hard to overcome. You're dealing with a procurement team, an IT team who are worried, potentially that if they use some level of technology to enhance their process, or the front office, or back office, middle office function, whichever one you're targeting with your technology solution, are worried about being replaced by the technology. These people tend to put up barriers and make life more complex.
The criticality to me is to show how technology is not there to replace humans, it’s there to make humans and the resources within institutions more effective and to make their jobs more rewarding. There's a great example of this. There was research carried out by a professor at the University of Boston, a guy called James Bessen, I think he’s economics and law there where he looked at all events of sort of automation, industrialization over the past 200 years in the US across a multitude of industries and found that in each and every case, those industries have categorically ended up employing more people as a result of automation.
One of the great examples in financial services is the introduction of the ATM's in the sort of 60s and 70s in the US where a lot of bank tellers thought that they would lose their jobs. The fact of the matter is that there are more bank tellers employed in the US than they ever have been before, they just do something different. They're not there to do the basic functions that a cash machine and ATM does, they're actually doing more engaging and rewarding work.
So technology is there to enable us in more effective ways, much as we've been enabled in our personal lives almost subconsciously. How many telephone numbers does a person remember anymore? When I was a kid, I remembered everyone's telephone number. We have subconsciously transitioned to allowing technology, the mobile phone, to do that job for us and our brain is – it doesn't mean we've become more stupid, it means our brain is doing different things and that's true for technology in business as well.
And so, my advice is to always look at the compatibility and the engagement and the value add to the human, the person, who will be using your technology, the department that is using your technology and show how your technology is adding value, be it helping them to increase their revenues, helping them to reduce costs, helping them to become more productive, more efficient, helping them to comply with legal requirements, whatever it may be, but include the human in that process. It's not about replacing them, it's about working with them and ensuring that they are better at what they're doing and therefore, the institution benefits.
David Starr:
Nasir, it's great to hear about technologies that enable for evolution of business and one of the things you and I discussed in a previous conversation was the notion of financial inclusion and a technology you've already mentioned that kind of went along with that was blockchain. So I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about what you see as financial inclusion and its relationship to blockchain?
Nasir Zubairi:
There is no question that technology is driving inclusiveness in the world. If you look at the data published from the World Bank and their own analysis of that data over the past sort of six, seven years with actually quite a significant increase in the number of included people in the financial service system across the world. They specifically point at technology as an enabler of that and as you say, blockchain is one of those elements, be it still relatively nascent, but an important factor, I think in driving increasing inclusiveness across the world.
One core thing that blockchain enables through some of its core factors in terms of immutability and traceability is identity. The root of financial inclusion is identity. You don't make a loan to somebody who you can't validate where their addresses or you can't validate who they are and the fundamentals of financial inclusion revolve around creating identity, creating history. I think blockchain in terms of what it can enable for say, property ownership, and records for property ownership, records for transactions that an individual commits and therefore, creating history and an identity for that person that can be utilized by financial institutions to further deliver additional financial services is going to be key going forward, but still relatively nascent.
What I also think is quite interesting is when you talk about particular markets and the developing markets where obviously, financial inclusion or financial exclusion is at its core. Because they're further behind relative to say traditional financial services in the Western world, they're able to almost leapfrog many of the traditional infrastructure technology barriers that say, we see in Europe and the US. To take on and invest in newer technologies that can, therefore, almost give them a leap above what we see in the Western world.
Be it maybe sort of slightly more on the cusp, we've seen that exactly occur in China. Right now, I don't think many people would disagree that China, in terms of its technological evolution and in financial services specifically as well, is beyond anything we see in Europe and quite honestly, probably in the US. That's because they didn't have the infrastructure burden that say, the European Union and the US have with the millions, if not billions, invested in what exists in underlies financial services today. They're able to invest now and don't have to worry about the transition from that old technology to the new technology.
So there's massive opportunities in financial inclusion in Africa, in Asia, particularly in South America, to be able to invest in these new technologies to build the latest, greatest infrastructures using blockchain, using AI to take a leap forward in many ways and to really drive accelerated inclusion of those that have thus far been excluded from the financial services.
Paul Maher:
That's great and so carrying on, I think about data at the core of a lot of things and being able to drive meaningful insights and we've talked a little bit about artificial intelligence and machine learning, of course.
Nasir, could you share a little bit about your thoughts on how things are emerging around really sort of leveraging the data more effectively and maybe driving more meaningful insights using some of the technologies or where are we today and perhaps where could we be in the future leveraging some of these technologies and perhaps being a little bit more disruptive as we think about digital transformation?
Nasir Zubairi:
Well, in financial services, it's astounding how behind, or far behind traditional financial services is. Financial institutions arguably have the most powerful data on the planet. They have decision-making data. They have data on what we spend our money on, which is the finality of that thought process upon which we have billion-dollar, gazillion-dollar institutions across the world—namely the gaffers, yourselves included if I may say, Microsoft—that have built huge business models and huge income streams off of data, but off of inferences.
Let's take Google. It's based off of searches of web pages people visit. They don't have the transaction data, so to speak, as to what we actually spend our money on. The banks have that. They've not done anything with it.
I could tell you stories of what some of the things I tried to do when I was a trader back in 2006 were working for one of the largest retail banks in the UK, I asked for the transaction data. Nameless anonymized data, so no issues with data privacy, to be able to enhance my trade decision-making. Not to get too detailed into the statistics, but if I had a large sample of data from the UK population, I could predict the financial performance of most, if not all, of the large retailers that publicly listed retailers in the UK with 99% accuracy well in advance of them publishing their results. That would give me a huge edge.
The problem is their ability of institutions to gather that data and do something useful with it because their data systems are a complete and utter mess. It's like a spaghetti junction at the backend of most institutions and we're seeing a lot of efforts to try and clean that up, but I think part of the problem is that they're working on top of the legacy systems. They're looking at a model where they're saying, “We need to transition to, be it data lakes or new data systems to centralize and be able to better utilize our data,” and they’re trying to build.
As I kind of mentioned before, trying to change existing infrastructure is an incredibly laborious, incredibly complex, and incredibly costly, and long-term process. What might be easier actually is why not build something new and then migrate everything over? I've often had this conversation with banks saying, “Why don't you basically create a complete, in parallel to your core business, sort of build an entire banking infrastructure as you think it should be on the side and then migrate all the data over rather than migrating all the systems?”
I hope to see more sort of firms looking at this, but right now, they're really nowhere, but the power and value that they could add with data is stupendous, really. In terms of better understanding customers, in terms of better designing their products for their customers in a more timely fashion and more needs-based fashion, to better service us as customers when we most need it, rather than almost acting like they're at 50,000 feet and with little to no understanding of us as their customers. And that's where I see the real power of data is the ability to analyze and to better predict and to better service customers. Today, I still think there are massive opportunities and a huge gap for financial institutions in being able to do that. They're working on it, but I think there could be better ways of doing that.
Paul Maher:
Yeah. So picking up on – I guess, I love your analogy of spaghetti junction and clearly, there's an opportunity to do more.
So with that, David, perhaps you could share some thoughts on perhaps some of the technologies that we have at Microsoft and how we're helping around everything from the data wrangling, data margin piece to then thinking about how do we drive some of those meaningful insights using technologies that we talked about such as artificial intelligence and machine learning.
David Starr:
Sure and there are more technologies than that at play. Microsoft understands me and Nasir are talking about when we have a focus on data and data-driven decision-making particularly in the large, at scale and so, to support that, I'll just mention a few technologies that Microsoft invested in. One being Azure Data Lake, which has features in it to help us with the analytics of our data such that we don't build ourselves a data swamp—as many people refer to—just dropping all of our data into a data lake, but instead to create a data lake that actually enables meaningful insights.
And we can expose those back out through Power BI, our analytics, visualization, and analytics package and I say package because there's also the notion of embedded AI so that as institutions rebuild and reimagine their experiences, there's the ability to embed Power BI inside their applications such that we're enabling that point of service that we've talked about before, being a data-driven experience.
So Power BI is a really big one for us and then coming up a new analytic service is Azure Synapse, relatively new, and it's really a reimagination, or a reimagining, I should say—I think that's a real word—of the data warehouse and how we derive the insights through analytics of that data warehouse in very quick to real-time. So Azure Synapse is something that if you are looking at data at scale, this is definitely a place you should be looking at on Azure.
And then finally, Microsoft has invested quite a bit over the last year or two in our machine learning capabilities and our tooling to allow machine learning experiences for those institutions looking to modernize some of the data that they are processing coming out of things like Azure Data Lake and out of Synapse. Then we mentioned AI, there are so many AI technologies that Microsoft is looking at right now, including not just training models, but also things like AI on the edge wherein we'll find AI on devices that help people make decisions, which could be as simple as your phone. We have a lot of technology supporting these ideas that Nasir is talking about so excited about all of those and the ability to bring them to companies to enable that transition.
And now let's take a moment out to listen to this very important message.
Commercial:
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And with that, Nasir, I'm going to turn our attention to a little bit of a focus on how technology providers like Microsoft are playing a role in FinTech, digital transformation, a few of the enabling technologies, but those, as you've mentioned, are somewhat distant for many organizations. So how are technology providers enabling that transition?
Nasir Zubairi:
Without any question, the cloud is core. Every FinTech I know given starting from a low base in terms of capital without second thought develops solutions in the cloud and obviously, Microsoft, as well as some of your competitors, are core to that infrastructure that they require. The problem sometimes rears its head later on in that, we still see this dichotomy of traditional financial institutions being able to accept and utilize SaaS services, but I think that gap is of the evolution and of thinking, I think from those traditional finance providers is moving forward and they're becoming more accepting. However, there are still many questions asked.
If I could give you a little anecdote, I remember talking at a conference, I think about two years ago about cloud services and how it's absolutely critical for financial institutions to be accepting of solutions on the cloud, but also, to move their own solutions, internal solutions, and infrastructure onto the cloud. This wizened old man in the front row of the audience stuck his hand up and said, “How can we trust these big tech providers? I don't trust them.” I said to him, “How could you not trust them?” The talent pool in terms of technology resources within the financial institutions is declining rapidly. Nobody wants to work in banking anymore.
When I left university 25 years ago, everyone from my university at the London School of Economics wanted to go into banking. I keep in good contact with that university and being in the majority of that side resources, they told me that literally nobody now looks at banking as their career aspiration. They all want to go and work in tech.
Let's take this down to the actual developer level. Developers don't choose to go and work in banks and for a multitude of reasons, one is with regulation being what it is, it's incredibly restrictive in terms of the scope a person has in terms of their job and what they can do. So work tends to be very narrow and within a silo, but secondly and straightforwardly, banks don't pay enough money anymore. The big techs, you guys, and others pay more to get the best talent.
So going back to my point to the question that this man asked, how can you not trust the likes of Microsoft and the others? How can you actually trust your own technology anymore? So I'm hoping that we'll see a massive transition and accelerated transition to using third-party technology providers, which is where I see greater acceptance of the technology solutions that can be offered and as core to the development of the financial services arena, be it FinTech has already adopted that, but we need to see more of this occurring in the traditional finance area.
Paul Maher:
Thank you for that. It's very, very insightful, Nasir.
So let me close things out. It's been a fantastic conversation and I know we were talking about this a little earlier around the Central Bank Digital Currency. I'd love to get your report about the CBDC and I know most recently you've been doing some stuff with the press talking about it. So can you give us a quick what it is and your thoughts about its importance?
Nasir Zubairi:
CBDC some people, the layman will look back and say, “Hang on a second. Money is digital.” Most people pay with credit cards or pay online. Yeah, money is digital today. CBDC is more about the underlying infrastructure and concept of money and specifically, around the process of creation of money relative to cash in circulation and also, the administration of that money and how it's transferred around various accounts, how it’s transferred into intranation and internation.
Look, CBDC has the potential to offer faster, cheaper, more efficient transactions and transfer of money across the world. But there are critically some major issues that need to be considered that haven't been fully, I think, conceptualized yet, be it that many governments, including the ECB, I also know that the Fed in the US is also looking with a great deal of scrutiny as to the potential for CBDC, some factors that haven't been considered and that is the infrastructure costs.
Somebody needs to build the technology, somebody needs to manage that technology, and the technology itself has a cost. We will need huge scale in terms of infrastructure, servers, be it cloud, be it dedicated, whatever it may be, and then, critically given that it is money, is cybersecurity. We live in a world that is an arms race between hackers and those trying to protect systems and infrastructure, but the criticality of protecting money is at the top of the tree.
So where is this all going to happen? Where is this all going to come from? Again, I'm quite a simple guy, I think we need to look at who has the capabilities and that's where technology providers, particularly large-scale technology providers who have the means and the resources and the skillset to be able to develop, deliver, manage these kinds of projects, will come to the fore.
So I think has kind of be a huge opportunity for the likes potentially of Microsoft as well as other large-scale technology providers to get involved in these projects. But bear in mind and think anything is going to really become real or come to fruition in the next at least for another five to 10 years. This is changing the basis of money. Likewise, it could lead to a step-change in terms of financial services on the whole.
David Starr:
That's a fascinating discussion in and of itself and I would love to spend more time talking about it. Unfortunately, we kind of need to close out our conversation today. But CBDC is something that I'll keep my eyes on, as I'm sure many other financial institutions and thought leaders such as yourselves are doing so very interesting CBDC.
Now as we commonly do, we'll be able to post some links in our show notes up on the website that goes along with the show and let people learn a bit more about you and your team's work. First of all, we'll link of course, to the LHoFT’s website itself, which is lhoft.com. So it's got a silent H in it, it's not L-HoFT but LHoFT pronounced that way and we'll also link up the LHoFT’s social handles for both Twitter and LinkedIn and yours as well, Nasir, your personal ones for LinkedIn and Twitter where you dispense your wisdom and share some pretty interesting articles. I was taking a look at your LinkedIn profile earlier this morning and got wrapped up in some of the things that you'd shared, lost track of time.
Finally, in terms of Microsoft and places, you can go to learn more about Microsoft initiatives in financial services, there's our banking industry homepage where you'll find articles and papers written by thought leaders and experts in the field, and our capital markets homepage, where right now there's a great e-book on enabling the capital markets firm of the future going along with the entire conversation we've had today and lastly, there's our financial services blog where thought leaders at Microsoft dispense articles about various things across the entire financial services spectrum.
With that, I would just like to thank you again last year for appearing on the show. It's been an absolute pleasure of a conversation today.
Nasir Zubairi:
Thank you, both Paul and David for having me on the show. I hope my ramblings were of value, but I very much appreciate your time.
David Starr:
Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Azure for Industry podcast, the show that explores how industry experts are transforming our world with Azure. For show notes, topic recommendations, or other feedback, reach out to us at industrypodcastatmicrosoft.com.