Tomi Popoola has built a reputation for combining deep technical expertise with clear, practical thinking on how organisations can use technology to improve outcomes for both people and businesses.
Her background spans cloud engineering, AI, financial technology and operational leadership, giving her a broad understanding of how modern systems function behind the scenes.
As a Diversity & Inclusion speaker, she is equally focused on the human side of progress. Tomi champions fair access to technology, greater representation in technical fields and the importance of building systems that work for everyone – not only those already established within the industry.
In this exclusive interview with the London Keynote Speakers Agency, she explains how AI has reshaped the financial sector, what businesses should consider before adopting new tools and why cloud computing has become the backbone of modern innovation.
Q1. From your perspective, how has artificial intelligence been reshaping the financial sector over recent decades?
Tomi Popoola: “I’ll say it’s shaped it for the past few decades and it’s made huge progress, right. So when you think about artificial intelligence and machine learning at the same time, right, you would see the huge leaps that the financial sector has made and how it’s grown.
“So examples could be fraud detection, right. So you find small businesses are able to, you know, do fraud detection… a lot earlier, so helping one, the end users, but also their businesses as well.
“But then another thing is access. So access is a huge thing because previously, without AI and ML, you wouldn’t find that people, you know, say in undeserved countries have more access, say to certain financial services. So it’s provided access.
“When you think about like credit scoring, right, we typically used to like traditional data credit scoring or the traditional methods, but then now we have alternative brought in because of new data, um, new data sets being brought in, you know, new perspectives to look at.
“But then also you can look at tailored financial decisions. So both financial decisions as well as financial services and solutions for people, right. Because now that we have more access to data, now that we’re using machine learning, artificial intelligence can easily tailor certain solutions to people.
“And because of this, when you’re increasing your customer base, you’re increasing the innovation of the financial sector, but then also making sure that, you know, the limits are endless and the possibilities are endless.
“So I’ll say it has shaped it from where it started. It’s currently shaping it, but there’s still a huge…there’s a huge growth aspect out there that is yet to be tapped into. And being able to leverage AI, you know, in the perfect way for certain scenarios would definitely help this, as it already has been helping.”
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Q2. What should organisations consider when looking to harness AI’s technological advantages in a meaningful way?
Tomi Popoola: “So what I’ll say is that in terms of harnessing the benefits, you need to think about your business, right. You need to think about the benefit it can bring to your business and your end users. So if you don’t think about it that way, it could be very counterintuitive otherwise.
“So first of all, what does your business lack? And then how can you make your business more efficient? But then also, how can you turn that into, say, return customers, customer satisfaction, but then also increasing and improving your ROI, right?
“So an example of this could be, say, you’re a business that, you know, deals with customers. So you’re a B2C business, right? What you can think of is, okay, my customers could possibly have questions, or they could need to, say, speak to certain agents or customer service, right?
“Then you could build a pre-programmed chatbot. So a pre-programmed chatbot could have different, you know, answers to your FAQs, right, or different, you know, say, recently asked questions or disputes that you could help solve.
“And then what that does…it’s a two-way thing. So from an internal perspective, that actually could reduce, you know, your operational administrative overhead, you know, the number of people being sent to, say, actual agents or human agents.
“But then also from your customer’s perspective, is that that could increase the customer satisfaction, making that process more efficient and then wanting to actually come back to use your service, buy your service, you know, depending on what that looks like. So again, it could cut their waiting time and solve those disputes.
“So that’s just one example, right. Another could be personalised experiences, better decision-making. So when it comes to lending, things like that. So I think one thing when it comes to, you know, businesses can harness the technical benefits is actually looking at data being power when used correctly…”
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Q3. In your view, how has the rise of cloud computing transformed the pace and scale of technological innovation?
Tomi Popoola: “Oh, I think this is one question that I love, right, because when you actually think about innovation, and you think of creativity, you actually think about the cloud a lot more than what people would say.
“Because prior to the cloud, we had, um, on-premise data centres. And what this meant was that it was very, very hard for small businesses to actually survive because you need your servers, you need your databases, so you’re going to have to go and buy these things basically, which could be very expensive, and you can easily start to incur technical debt.
“Now with the cloud, what that does is that it virtualises all of this, right, and you’re basically paying for the service as you’re using it. So, this allows for more innovation a lot quicker.
“So one, you have small businesses that can easily pay for this pay-as-you-go subscription, you know, for, say, their technological users. But then, also you have quick learning and quick innovation without technical debt.
“So take generative AI as an example, right? So the cloud has provided access to generative AI. So you can easily scale generative AI. You can build LLMs, or you can build models, you can scale them, you can deploy them, and this allows for a lot of quick growth, but then also for market competition.
“Because previously, to be able to do things like this would cost so much money that small businesses cannot afford, and also large businesses as well cannot afford to just maybe put all their eggs in one basket.
“But the cloud has created this concept of two-way door decisions where you can innovate and you can, um, you know, if that didn’t work out for you, it doesn’t work out for you. You can come back from that. But then also you can easily scale. You can serve large amounts of customers and learn new things at the same time.
“So when you think about continuous integration, when you think about CI/CD, when you think about robotics, when you think about, you know, containerisation, but then also even things as basic as being able to create your own website, right. So many of this has been made possible in modern day because of the cloud.”
This exclusive interview with Tomi Popoola was conducted by Mark Matthews of The Motivational Speakers Agency.
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