Earlier this year, Talan group launched their new tagline: The future is a playfield. Feeling inspired, Talan Consulting UK decided to embrace this new baseline, and on the 4th July 2018 hosted The Future Forum in partnership with Denodo.
The “Future Forum” is about innovation…
For us, this new slogan is all about innovation – pushing the limits of technology and harnessing new ideas to make our clients lives that much easier. With this is mind, this special evening at our London HQ in the heart of Kings Cross was centred around three workshops:
- Artificial Intelligence
- Blockchain
- Data Virtualisation, by Denodo
…Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence,Data virtualisation…
Using Blockchain technology, we specially developed the “Talan FutureCoin” App for the evening, which allowed attendees to win and trade coins which could be converted into prizes – everything from a weekend in Paris, to a Drone, to VR Escape Room Experience was up for grabs. The attendees were actively involved and engaged throughout every step of the evening.
The workshop topics were selected so that we could show how with innovative technologies we can use our expertise to offer a solution to problems.
The Artificial Intelligence topics covered the challenges and opportunities banks have to apply Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with specific examples and use cases where the industry is benefiting from AI.
The Blockchain workshop coveredthe fundamentals of Blockchain and the disruption Blockchain has brought and will bring in future.
For Simon Grabinar, a Data Architect at ICBC Standard, the Blockchain Workshop in particular was “interesting, relevant and substantial” as it discussed how banks can leverage Talan's Agile Blockchain approach to start small and scale to deliver solutions that resolve the business' challenges.
Finally, the Data Virtualisation workshop by Denodo, covered their Data Virtualisation product and how it can reduce the implementation time & cost to deliver Data Lakes for analytics purposes.
As Nicolas Poisson, who works in Financial Planning Analysis at Société Générale, said “these presentations showed us the potential of the new technologies.”
…and fun !
Around the open bar and food, there were Oculus Rift VR Headsets which guests enjoyed and allowed them to experience the future of entertainment as they flew through space, jumped off buildings, danced with lightsabers, mixed potions, and fought in Robot Wars.
The workshops were designed to be interactive & fun, and showed practical, real solutions that will innovate the way they work.
Ariane Ollier, Regulatory Change Manager at Santander GCB, certainly thought so, saying that the evening was the “Perfect session to better understand how new technologies could impact our business.”
Our clients left the Future Forum enthused, it was a “Great session to inspire into action!” according to Matt Sandoe, Chief of Staff at BNPP, and we are confident that we proved to our attendees that the future really is a playfield.