Power and profit: The future of interconnected, resilient global infrastructure

How can resilient energy, banking, and telecoms survive the next major disruption? Join CGI experts to explore the "citizen supply chain" and the future of cross-industry resilience.

In this episode of Energy Transition Talks, Peter Warren, Charley Wark, and Andy Schmidt examine the interconnected network of essential services we rely on daily. We discuss why power, payments, connectivity, and trust must recover together when systems fail.

Key Topics Covered:

• The Future of Energy: Virtual power plants (VPPs), vehicle-to-grid (V2G) tech, and DERs.
• Finance & Tech: Real-time systems, embedded finance, and digital identity.
• Strategy: Data sovereignty and coordinated ecosystems for utilities leaders.

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Transcript

Charley Wark 0:06

Hello, everyone out there. My name is Charlie Rourke, and I am head of the global commercial industries at CGI. So this is the part two of a two-part uh podcast that I'm recording with my global industry leader and head of banking, Andy Schmidt. Hi, Andy.

Andy Schmidt 0:27

Hey Charlie.

Charley Wark 0:28

And our global industry leading head of energy and utility, Peter Warren. Hi, Peter.

Peter Warren 0:34

Hey, Charlie, good to see you again.

Defining The Citizen Supply Chain

Why Supply Chain Control Matters

Charley Wark 0:37

Thank you for joining the second part. In the last uh episode, in the first episode, go back and listen to that if you haven't already. In the first part, we talked about what all industries can learn from Formula One in terms of staying to the edge of what's uh regulatory allowed when you're developing your competitive edge. And we ended by talking about how the industries can cooperate and collaborate to strengthen the supply chain that are feeding our societies in where we live today. So before we kick off in this episode, I would like to just explain briefly what we at CGI call the citizen supply chain. So if you in a normal kind of circumstance, when you talk about a supply chain, you think about one company, what you need from the beginning of developing a product to making it, manufacturing it, and then later sell it and also deliver it out to an end customer. But at CGI, we um we when we were working on mapping the supply chain for for all industries that we are serving, we started thinking about what if we instead put the citizen in the center of the supply chain and draw up and map out what we need in order to uphold the everyday life and comfort of being a citizen in the societies where we live. And we call this the citizen supply chain. As very quickly, you will realize that it's not just one industry supply chain, one company supply chain, or even a government supply chain. You actually need a web of supply chains, supply chain ecosystem to uphold the everyday comforts that we have. Uh and banking and energy utility are definitely staples in this citizen supply chain. So, with that said, I would like for us to talk a little bit about, you know, in this world when we have a little bit of uh geopolitical uncertainties, uh, and I will turn to you first, Peter. How critical do you think it is to control your own digital and physical supply chain in today's day and age to be able to feel safe and secure?

Peter Warren 3:01

Yeah, it's a it's a great question, Charlie. Thank you. And it's I mentioned it in the first uh part of this, is that you wake up in the morning and you expect your lights to work. You wake up in the morning and you expect your car's gasoline to function and that you can refill it. Anytime there's a disruption to that, whether it's uh geopolitical or otherwise caused, is actually you feel very personal. It disrupts your entire day. So even you being able to go to work and do whatever it is that you do Monday to Friday um can't happen because this these things are not going on the way they or they make it much more difficult. Think of the disruption that COVID caused and so on. Looking back to that period of time when we had a global disruption, people looked to these core services to continue to function, yet they were under the same constraints and difficulties as everyone else. Um, and there was a real push at that time to having a look at it, and this has continued and only accelerated now with the world of AI, to optimize and improve those processes, to not accept the status quo, to enable employees to work digitally and more remotely. Younger employees demand that tools are on the iPhone or whatever tablet they're going to be using. And so these shifts have only continued to accelerate that for the normal part of our day to work, new tools, new services, new functions, high bandwidth internet, all these things have to happen at once for us to be able to go to bed at night and not have yet another headache, including my fact that I expect my bank to be there, I expect it to be working the way I expect it, I expect my money to be there, I expect the stock market to run. Um, and in the guise of national security and the things moving forward as countries move forward, energy flexibility, and I'll touch base on that a bit further, but being able to do things in new innovative ways is no longer just one part of the supply chain or the ecosystem. It's really affecting all of it. And banks are a key element of that as well.

Banking As Critical Infrastructure

Charley Wark 4:58

Yeah, I would say uh anything that would stop us more drastically than being out of energy, power when you wake up in the morning would be to try to get on the bus and not be able to pay for the bus ride or or go to dry it, try and buy milk and and not have your card function and so forth. So it's probably the second most uh critical industry to uphold the citizen supply chain, would you say, Andy?

Andy Schmidt 5:25

Absolutely. I mean, because we've largely moved away from cash and barter hasn't been a thing for for some time, we're focusing on digital money. So whether it's your mobile wallet, whether it's your credit card, uh, whether it's a a transaction that you initiate online, and having the confidence, having the trust in your in your financial institution that A, the funds are there if they're supposed to be there, and that they're going to get from you to where they need to be safely, uh securely, and quickly is what keeps uh is what keeps our industries running. So energy and utility knowing that the that the funds uh that the funds are there to uh to pay for their suppliers, pay their employees, the for their customers to actually make their payments on a monthly basis to for that energy delivery. Um those are those are all things that banking is is helping ensure by taking you know more of a trusted infrastructure approach to the services that we provide.

The Future Grid And Buying Comfort

Charley Wark 6:21

One of the pleasures of of my job at CGI is that I get to listen to all the ongoing challenges that we have in in all of the industries that we cover. But we also have something super fun that we do once a year. It's called Voice of Our Clients when we go out and interview our clients about what their concerns are currently, what's going on right now, what's their priorities for the next year, etc. And uh as added bonus to this, I also have you guys to predict what's gonna happen in the future. We're talking right now and three years from now, and that type of horizon. But then we also ask you guys to stretch your imagination and go a little bit bonkers and say what's gonna happen in 10 years in the future of banking, in the future of energy and utility. And I thought that I would take the opportunity to tease our audience a little bit by letting you guys share some of this industry foresights that you have been working on. And Peter, I I think that, or when I listen to you describe what's gonna happen in about 10 years from now, type of time frame, and you actually stretch even further in your foresight because you never followed the rules that we put on you. What what if you would describe what you believe, what will it be like, let's say 20 years from now then, uh or 30 years from now?

Peter Warren 7:52

Yeah, it it happens to be our 50th anniversary at CGI for those that uh are following us. So we kind of looked at uh the past where things have come, but for us it's all about driving the future and where things are gonna go. And we see these trends happening in pockets. So everything I'm about to say isn't something really out of my brain. It's actually happening in real time in various parts. It just hasn't become at scale. But the reality is, and we talked a little bit about this before, is that new technology always consumes old. So the drive towards electrification, I think, will continue to happen. We see it happening with all sorts of folks. Yes, EV sales have backed off a little bit in some places, but other places they've risen up. Now, part of that was geopolitical, part of that's been a lot of different components. Uh, the price of lithium has dropped dramatically, but at the same time, solid-state batteries and sodium batteries are coming on and being more reliable. Um, there's a company in the UK selling home-based sodium batteries. Things are changing. New technology is moving forward. So move if you jump ahead, I won't specify a time. The the concept of moving energy across the planet will change. If we actually get to the point where we have superconductor uh technology like the stuff that's already being installed in China between cities, you're gonna be able to balance electrical grids a lot differently. Solar electricity at night will be a practicality because you'll be able to get it from a sunnier part of the planet. Your battery technology will be there and so on. So things are gonna move forward. So the concept of buying energy may change as well. From the concept of buying electrons or units of gas or whatever it is that you're gonna get to buying the outcome. I want comfort. I will pay you for comfort. If in the banking industry I'm gonna pay you for resilience and security and being reliable with my stuff, in the energy industry, perhaps I pay you to be comfortable. And we see that already happening with certain companies that have a history of both energy and also manufacturing buildings actually designing neighborhoods with people. Now they're not selling it that way, but if you think about it, I don't want to own units of electricity. I want a backed up resilient system. So if that includes solar on my roof and a battery, uh maybe in a community that I share, that's what I want. And I don't really care how you do that, I just want that. So just charge me that. And we're starting to get that as we talk about Durham's or distributed energy resource management in my industry. We talk about that when we talk about uh vehicle to grid technologies and uh so on and um virtual power plants. Uh, people in my industry will know what those are. We're getting there. It's just hasn't hit the tipping point, but it will get there.

Charley Wark 10:43

Very interesting. So, Andy, um, will there be banks in 10, 20 years from now?

Disaster Response Through Industry Cooperation

Andy Schmidt 10:51

Of course there will. No, there will be banks 10, 20 years from now. They're just gonna look different than the way they look uh today. There will still be plenty of branches and there will still be plenty of touch points. But where the banks are really gonna be focusing is reinventing the concept of trust and reinventing the concept of identity. And so we're going to be moving beyond applications and accounts towards more autonomous financial ecosystems. And the goal is going to be a mix of AI, digital currency, even decentralized infrastructure to run things in real time and to be able to help businesses make decisions in real time about say about resource and liquidity management optimization and to help you focus on the running of the business, not the running of the numbers behind the business. But you know, along with that, you know, the embedded finance is going to be a key part of it running really silently beneath healthcare, real estate, global commerce, and and it's going to be increasingly mobile. We've seen that even last year in the Voice of Our Client, where uh where the younger generations are demanding that services be mobile first, indeed even mobile only. We're developing solutions to enable that, to enable you to authenticate over a mobile device, to uh confirm that it's you so that you can make that you know make that signature, uh, execute that document and keep your financial future moving forward. At the same time, you know, as we're as we're looking to uh as we're looking to move beyond core or really get uh get core to truly real time, that level of data and that level of data sovereignty is is what's gonna be uh is what's gonna be important as we as we um as we focus on being confident on where our funds are, where our information is, and that we'll be able to manage those services, uh leverage those services, even if there is an outage. So when you look at you know identity as a service, when you look at banking as a service, payments as a service, um, and being able to manage outages, um, manage and look, many outages are are just you know facts of facts of technology or facts of nature. Something happens, and so you just need to be able to react to it. But getting those services back up and running in moments instead of hours or moments instead of days is what's going to keep that trust, going to maintain that resilience, that confidence in the markets, and make it so that so that it's that so that the financial services is just a seamless part of your life, um, and you know, ever present, ever enabling, ever coordinating, but seamless and almost invisible in terms of in terms of the the manners in which you have to interact with it.

Final Takeaway And Thanks

Peter Warren 13:34

And I I I totally see this is that you know, we've talked about this, Andy and I, uh about the fact that when a disaster happens, uh natural disaster, a hurricane, a tornado, whatever. One of the things that people have, and you charlie you talked about this, is access to money, access to cash, access to systems. So if everything's down, the banks deploy ATMs out there and put them into the fields. Well, guess what? We have work crews going out there and doing things, repairing lines, power lines, uh, helping with the gas network, whatever happens to be disrupted. And there's an opportunity here, going back to the citizen side of this, is looking beyond ourselves, cooperating. Perhaps the banks reach out to the utilities and say, hey, if you're rolling somebody out there, take one of the ATMs you have and deploy it, or or can you get power to me here and cooperate? And we see this as something that goes on between the telecom industry because how do you bring up today's electricity without the telecom working, and how do you bring up today's telecom without the electricity working? But there's an opportunity in other industries moving forward here. And although we are talking just banking, the insurance industry being an active part of this, mitigating risk, understanding how to move forward instead of something that we look at once a year, either our financial things or our insurance things, actively having the banking industry and the insurance industry being part of the energy industry, talking about risk, mitigation, covering me where I'm exposed, and maybe lowering my costs someplace where I don't have the same risk. Something I see moving forward in the future.

Charley Wark 15:00

And I think that, Peter, was a really good place to actually end this podcast. And seeing that cooperation, collaboration, building resilient citizen supply chain is something not just part of the future, but it's actually happening already here and now. So by that, I would like to thank Andy and Peter for being a part of this uh podcast, and uh we will hear you soon again, somewhere out there.

Peter Warren 15:30

Thanks, Riley. Thanks, Andy. Thanks all.

Charley Wark 15:33

Thank you.