Banking Perspectives: Partnering for success – How Moody’s collaboration drives innovation

In the Banking Perspectives blog series, we invite senior leaders from across Moody’s Banking to share their insights on technology at Moody’s and the wider banking industry. 

In the previous edition, Omar Akkor, Senior Director Manager for Banking Product Strategy at Moody’s, walked us through the Moody’s GenAI development process. In this blog, Omar discusses how we collaborate with partners to deliver innovation to our customers.
 

Q: What is Moody’s approach to partnerships in the innovation space?

O: Partnerships are important to help us innovate. We cannot do everything on our own, and we don't want to reengineer the wheel when something already exists. We know our strengths, but also recognize the added value our partners bring that can help us expand the ecosystem of our solutions.

When we have a challenge and we start to think about possible solutions, it’s important to scan the industry to evaluate what partners’ components we can adopt to help us accelerate our own solutions.  
 

Q: What are the ways that Moody’s work with partners?

O: Through partnerships, we can either take a final product, integrate some components into our solutions, or embark into a collaboration to co-develop something that is more specific to our needs and those of our customers.

For example, we work with partners that have industry-agnostic technology. We embrace their niche expertise and tailor it to the financial services industry.

So, partnerships are very important to help us grow and get a headstart. That’s how we've worked on our GenAI solutions. At Moody's, we didn't develop our own LLMs. We have built partnerships to ensure that we could deploy our partners’ technology into a secure environment that will be leveraged by our internal and external end users.
 

Q: One challenge of partnerships can be the alignment of goals and expectations.  If Moody’s goal is to create a solution from which our customers can benefit, what's in it for our partners? How do we align with their goals? 

O: It's a win-win for both. The more users and use cases Moody’s has, the more customers will benefit from our partners’ technology. If we use our partners’ technology, such as components of their technology or some of their tools, these are going to be indirectly or directly used by our customers as well. Ultimately, the more business we generate, the more business our partners also generate.

In the next edition of the Banking Perspectives, we sit down with Mehna Raissi, Managing Director and Head of Americas Regional Commercial Team for Banking solutions, to discuss the development of Moody’s GenAI assistants.