Most financial firms have been told the same thing: clean up your data before you layer AI on top, or automation will only magnify the mess.
But Steve Shillingford, CEO and founder of DeepSee, sees it differently. While we should always be looking for cleaner data, that’s a never-ending battle. Better to put effort into context to let agents do that work in real-time.
With settlement cycles getting shorter and operational pressure mounting, he makes a case that runs against much of what the industry has been saying, and it's the kind of thing that makes you stop and go "wait, what?"
In this episode, Steve joins David Kirby of Broadridge Consulting to discuss their recent partnership, why orchestration matters more than simply deploying another AI agent, and where the real settlement pain points are hiding — from overflowing shared inboxes to SSI errors that go undetected until it’s too late.
With T+1 already live in the US and Europe's transition deadline approaching in October 2027, the pressure to solve these challenges isn't going away anytime soon.
Highlights from the podcast include
- Why Steve thinks the "fix your data first" advice is backwards, and why he says no one with a data lake actually has clean data
- The data-lake-to-orchestration shift, and why consolidating data doesn't solve the underlying problem
- How a single trade-break email moves from a shared inbox to resolution
- Why email is where so much post-trade workflow starts and ends
- The Europe and UK T+1 picture, and why it's more complex than North America's
- Where SSI errors come from, and why where a security is held can matter more than the instruction
- AI and jobs: reallocation versus replacement, and "humans managing machines"
- The DeepSee–Broadridge partnership and the equity stake behind it
NOTES FROM THIS EPISODE:
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