At a customer briefing in Sydney last week, Genpact, a transformed technology-focused division of General Electric, ran a panel discussion on "digital process journeys" and how to streamline business processes for the financial services sector.Bradley Blyth, head of digital architecture at Commonwealth Bank said that, at first, CBA began its "digital journey" by creating a "type of technology ecosystem" of people who were doing similar work to get some ideas on what customers wanted "but this didn't work out so well for us."It required a "pivot of mindset" to move from the idea that banking is a suite of products to the realisation that it's a way to "help customers improve their financial well-being." The starting point was to ask customers - although in the first iteration, the learning phase was limited to testing ideas with bank staff as customers - before branching out to "other customer segments".One comment garnered from the audience - made by a former CBA staffer - was that the banks which will be successful in the future will be those that have made themselves "so sticky and relevant in the lives" of their customers. Gary Howard, general manager of operations, personal banking, at NAB, was asked what had caught his imagination in the last couple of years. He explained that the digital team at NAB Labs was created at his bank some years ago, but added: "We spend lot of cash just keeping the lights on, so getting to play with new technologies - that's a relative luxury. Like [the other Big Four banks] we're a big bank with lots of legacy issue that we wrestle with."We partner where we need to partner in order to get value from third parties. But we need to get better at stringing together front middle and back office"" Howard said.The panel was keen to emphasise, that, "the bots are not coming for your jobs", and that the real focus was on tasks. "We are starting play with basic robotics and machine learning, [but] AI is how you augment intelligence into the workforce, alongside a human," Howard added.