Data Science Helps Hospitals Improve Patient Payments and Experiences While Boosting Revenue

Transcript of a discussion on new approaches to healthcare revenue cycle management and outcomes that give patients more options and providers more revenue clarity.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HealthPay24.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Gardner

Our next healthcare finance insights discussion explores new ways of analyzing healthcare revenue trends to improve both patient billing and services. Stay with us now as we learn about new approaches to healthcare revenue cycle management and outcomes that give patients more options and providers more revenue clarity.

To learn more about the next generation of data-driven patient payments process improvements, we’re now joined by Jake Intrator, Managing Consultant for Data and Services at Mastercard. Welcome, Jake.

Jake Intrator: Great to be here and excited to talk about our joint-solution with HealthPay24.

Gardner: We’re also here Julie Gerdeman, CEO of HealthPay24. Welcome back, Julie.

Julie Gerdeman: Thanks so much, Dana.

Gardner: Julie, what trends or market pressures are driving healthcare providers to seek new and better ways of analyzing data to better manage patient billing? What’s wrong with the status quo?

Healthcare’s sea change 

Gerdeman: Dana, we are in such an interesting time, particularly in the US, with this being an election time. There is such a high level of visibility -- really a spotlight on healthcare. There is a lot of change happening, such as in regulations, that highlights interoperability of data and price transparency for patients.

Gerdeman

And there’s ongoing change on the insurance reimbursement side, with payer plans that seem to change and evolve every year. There are also trends changing provider compensation, including value-based care and pay-for-performance.

On the consumer-patient side, there is significant pressure in the market. Statistics show that 62 percent of patients say knowing their out-of-pocket costs in advance will impact their likelihood of pursuing care. So the visibility and transparency of costs -- that price expectation -- is very, very important and is driving consumerism into healthcare like we have never seen before due to rising costs to patients.

Finally, there is more competition. Where I live in Pennsylvania, I can drive a five-mile radius and access a multitude of different health providers in different systems. That level of competition is unlike anything we have seen before.

Gardner: Jake, why is healthcare revenue management difficult? Is it different from other industries? Do they lag in their use of technology? Why is the healthcare industry in the spotlight, as Julie pointed out?

Intrator: The word that Julie used that was really meaningful to me was consumerism. There is a shift across healthcare where patients are responsible for a much larger proportion of their bills than they ever used to be.

Intrator

And so, as things shift away from hospitals working with payers to receive dollars in an efficient, easy process -- now the revenue is coming from patients. That means there needs to be new processes and new solutions to make it a more pleasant experience for patients to be able to pay. We need to enable people to pay when they want to pay, in the ways that they want to pay.

That’s something we have keyed on to, as a payments organization. That’s also what led us to work with HealthPay24.

Gardner: It’s fascinating. If we are going to a consumer-type model for healthcare, why not take advantage of what consumers have been doing with their other financing, such as getting reports every month on their bills? It seems like there is a great lesson to be learned from what we all do with our credit cards. Julie, is that what’s going to happen?

Consumer in driver’s seat 

Gerdeman: Yes, definitely. It’s interesting that healthcare has been sitting in a time warp. Historically, there remain many manual processes and functions in the health revenue cycle. That’s attributed to a piecemeal approach -- different segments of the revenue cycle were tackled either at different times or acquisitions impacted that. I read recently that there are still eight billion faxes happening in healthcare.

So that consumer-level experience, as Jake indicated, is where it’s going -- and where we need to go even faster.

Technology provides the transparency and interoperability of data. Investment in IT is happening, but it needs to happen even more.

Gardner: Wherever there is waste, inefficiency, and a lack of clarity is an opportunity to fix that for all involved. But what are the stakes? How much waste or mismanagement are we talking about?

Intrator: The one statistic that sticks out to me is that care providers aren’t collecting as much as 80 percent of balances from older bills. So that’s a pretty substantial amount -- and a large opportunity. Julie, do you have more?

Gerdeman: I actually have a statistic that’s staggering. There is waste of $265 billion spent on administrative complexity. And then another $230 to $240 billion attributed to what’s termed pricing failure, which means price increases that aren’t in line with the current market. The stakes are very high and the opportunity is very large.

We have data that shows more than 50 percent of chief financial officers (CFOs) want better access to data and better dashboards to understand the scope of the problem. As we were talking about consumerism, Mastercard is just phenomenal in understanding consumer behavior. Think about the personalized experiences that organizations like Mastercard provide -- or Google, Amazon, Disney, and Netflix. Everything is becoming so personalized in our consumer lives.

But healthcare? We are not there yet. It’s not a personalized experience where providers know in advance what a consumer or patient wants. HealthPay24 and Mastercard are coming together to get us much closer to that. But, truly, it’s a big opportunity.

Intrator: I agree. Payers and providers haven’t figured out how they enable personalized experiences. It’s something that patients are starting to expect from the way they interact with companies like Netflix, Disney, and Mastercard. It’s becoming table-stakes. It’s really exciting that we are partnering to figure out how to bring that to healthcare payers and providers alike.

Gardner: Julie, you mentioned that patients want upfront information about what their procedures are going to cost. They want to know their obligation before they go through a medical event. But oftentimes the providers don’t know in advance what those costs are going to be.

So we have ambiguity. And one of the things that’s always worked great for ambiguity in other industries is to look at the data, extrapolate, and get analytics involved. So, how are data-driven analytics coming to the rescue? How will that help?

Data to the rescue 

Gerdeman: Historical data allows for a forward-looking view. For HealthPay24, for example, we have been involved in patient payments for 20 years. It makes us a pioneer in the space. It gives us 20 years of data, information, and trends that we can look at. To me, data is absolutely critical.

Having come out of the spend management technology industry I know that in the categories of direct and indirect materials there have long been well-defined goods and services that are priced and purchased accordingly.

But, the ambiguity of patient healthcare payments and patient responsibility presents a new challenge. What artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithms provide are the capability to help anticipate and predict. That offers something much more applicable to a patient at a consumer level.

Gardner: Jake, when you have the data you can use it. Are we still at the point of putting the data together? Or are we now already able to deliver those AI- and machine learning (ML)-driven outcomes?

Intrator: Hospitals still don’t feel like they are making the best use of data. They tie that both to not having access to the data and not yet having the talent, resources, and tools to leverage it effectively. This is top of mind for many people in healthcare.

In seeking to help them, there are two places where I divide the use of analytics. The first is ahead of time. By using patient estimator tools, can you understand what somebody might owe? That’s a really tricky question. We are grappling with it at Mastercard.

By working with HealthPay24, we have developed a solution that is ready and working today. Answering the questions gets a lot smarter when you incorporate the data and analytics.

By working with HealthPay24, we have developed a solution that is ready and working today on the other half of the process. For example, somebody comes to the hospital. They know that they have some amount of patient payment responsibility. What’s the right way for a hospital to interact with that person? What are the payment options that should be available to them? Are they paying upfront? Are they paying over a period of time? What channels are you using to communicate? What options are you giving to them? Answering those questions gets a lot smarter when you incorporate data and analytics. And that’s exactly what we are doing today.

Gardner: Well, we have been dancing around and alluding to the joint-solution. Let’s learn more about what’s going on between HealthPay24 and Mastercard. Tell us about your approach. Are we in a proof of concept (POC) or is this generally available?

Win-win for patients and providers 

Gerdeman: We are currently in a POC phase, working with initial customers on the predictive analytic capability that marries the Mastercard Test and Learn platform with HealthPay24’s platform and executing what’s recommended through the analytics in our platform.

Jake, go ahead and give an overview of Test and Learn, and then we can talk about how we have come together to do some great work for our customers.

Intrator: Sure. Test and Learn is a platform that Mastercard uses with a large number of partner clients to measure the impact of business decisions. We approach that through in-market experiments. You can do it in a retail context where you are changing prices or you can do it in the healthcare context where you are trying different initiatives to focus on patient payments.

That’s how we brought it to bear within the HealthPay24 context. We are working together along with their provider partners to understand the tactics that they are using to drive payments. What’s working, what’s working for the right patient, and what’s working at the right time for the right patients?

Gerdeman: It’s important for the audience to understand that the end-goal is revenue collection and the big opportunity providers have to collect more. The marriage of Test and Learn with HealthPay24 provides the intelligence to allow providers to collect more, but it also offers more options to patients based on that intelligence and creates a better patient experience in the end.

The marriage of Test and Learn with HealthPay24 provides the intelligence to allow providers to collect more, but it also offers more options to patients based on that intelligence, and creates a better patient experience.

If a particular patient will always take a payment plan and make those payments consistently – that is versus when they are presented with a big amount and wouldn’t pay it off – the intelligence through the platform will say, “This patient should be offered a payment plan consistently,” and the provider ends up collecting all of the revenue.

That’s what we are super-excited about. The POC is showing greater revenue collection by offering flexibility in the options that patients truly want and need.

Gardner: Let’s unpack this a little bit. So we have HealthPay24 as chocolate and Mastercard’s Test and Learn platform as peanut butter, and we are putting them together to make a whole greater than the sum of the parts. What’s the chocolate? What’s the peanut butter? And what’s the greater whole?

Like peanut butter and chocolate 

Intrator: One of the things that’s made working with HealthPay24 so exciting for us is that they sit in the center of all of the data and the payment flows. They have the capability to directly guide the patient to the best possible experience.

They are hands-on with the patients. They can implement all of these great learnings through our analytics. We can’t do that on our own. We can do the analytics, but we are not the infrastructure that enables what’s happening in the real world.

That’s HealthPay24. They are in the real world. When you have the data flowing back and forth, we can help measure what’s working and come up with new ideas and hypotheses about how to try different payment programs.

It’s been a really important chocolate and peanut butter combination where you have HealthPay24 interacting with patients and us providing the analytics in the background to inform how that’s happening.

Gerdeman: Jake said it really well. It is a beautiful combination because years ago, the hot thing was propensity to pay. And, yes, providers still talk about that. It was best practice many years ago, of pulling a soft or even hard credit check on a patient to determine their propensity to pay and potentially offer financial assistance, even charity, given the needs of the patient.

But this takes it to a whole other level. That’s why the combination is magical. What makes it so different is there doesn’t need to be that old way of thinking. It’s truly proactive through the data we have in working with providers and the unique capabilities of Mastercard Test and Learn. We bring those together and offer proactively the right option for that specific patient-consumer.

It’s super exciting because payment plans are just one example. The platform is phenomenal and the capabilities are broad. The next financial application is discounts.

Through HealthPay24, providers could configure discounts based on their own policies and thresholds. But, if you know that a particular patient will pay the amount when offered the discount through the platform, that should be offered every time. The intelligence gives us the capability to know that, to offer it, and for the provider to collect that discounted amount, which might be more than that amount going to bad debt and never being collected.

Intrator: If you are able to drive behavior with those discounts, is it 10 percent or 20 percent? If you give away an additional 10 percent, how does that change the number of people reacting to it? If you give away more, you had better hope that you are getting more people to pay more quickly.

Those are exactly the sorts of analytical questions we can answer with Test and Learn and with HealthPay24 leading the charge on implementing those solutions. I am really excited to see how this continues to solve more problems going forward.

Gardner: It’s interesting because in the state of healthcare now, more and more people, at least in the United States, have larger bills regardless of their coverage. There are more co-pays, more often there are large deductibles, with different deductibles for each member of a family, for example, and varying deductibles depending on the type of procedures. So, it seems like many more people will be facing more out-of-pocket items when it comes to healthcare. This impacts literally tens of millions of people.

So we have created this new chocolate confection, which is wonderful, but the proof is in the eating. When are patient-consumers going to get more options, not only for discounts, but perhaps for financing? If you would like to spread the payments out, does it work in both ways, both discounts as well as in payment plans with interest over time?

Flexibility plus privacy

Gerdeman: In HealthPay24, we currently have all of the above -- depending on what the provider wants to offer, their patient base, and the needs and demographics. Yes, they can offer payment plans, discounts, and lines of credit. That’s already embedded in the platform. It creates an opportunity for all the different options and the flexibility we talked about.

Earlier I mentioned personalization, and this gets us much closer to personalization of the financial experience in healthcare. There is so much happening on the clinical side, with great advances around clinical care and how to personalize it. This combination gets us to the personalization of offers and options for patients and payments like we have never seen in the past.

Gardner: Jake, for those listening and reading, who maybe are starting to feel a little concerned that all this information -- about not just their healthcare, but now their finances -- being bandied about among payers, providers, and insurers, are we going to protect that financial information? How should people feel about this in terms of a privacy or a comfort level?

We aspire and really do put a lot of work and effort into being a leader in data privacy and allowing people to have ownership of their data and to feel comfortable.

Intrator: That is a question and a problem near and dear to Mastercard. We aspire and really do put a lot of work and effort into being a leader in data privacy and allowing people to have ownership of their data and to feel comfortable. I think that’s something that we deeply believe in. It’s been a focus throughout our conversations with HealthPay24 to make sure that we are doing it right on both sides.

Gardner: Now that you have this POC in progress, what have been some of the outcomes? It seems to me over time the more you deal with more data, the more benefits, and then the more people adopt it, and so on. Where are we now, and do we have some insight into how powerful is this?

Gerdeman: We do. In fact, one example is a 400-bed hospital in the Northeast US that, through the combination of Mastercard Test and Learn and HealthPay24, were able to look at and identify 25,000 unpaid accounts. Just by targeting 5,000 of the 25,000, they were able to identify an incremental $1 million in collections to the hospital.

That is very significant in that they are just targeting the top 5,000 in a conservative approach. They now know that they have the capability through this intelligence and by offering the right plans to the right people to be able to collect $1 million more to their bottom line.

Intrator: That certainly captures the big picture and the big story. I can also zoom in on a couple of specific numbers that we saw in the POC. As we tackled that, we wanted to understand a couple of different metrics, such as increases in payments. We saw substantial increases from payment plans. As a result, people are paying more than 60 percent more on their bills compared to similar patients that haven’t received the payment plans.

Then we zoomed in a step farther. We wanted to understand the specific types of patients who benefited more from receiving a payment plan and how that potentially could guide us going forward. We were able to dig in, to build a predictive model, and that’s exactly what Julie was talking about. Those top 25,000 accounts, how much we think they are going to pay and the relative prioritization. Hospitals have limited resources. So how do you make sure that you are focusing most appropriately?

Gardner: Now that we have gotten through this trial period, does this scale? Is this something you can apply to almost any provider organization? If I am a provider organization, how might I start to take advantage of this? How does this go to market?

Personalized patient experiences

Gerdeman: It absolutely does scale. It applies across all providers; actually, it applies across many industries as well. Any provider who wants to collect more wants additional intelligence around their patient behavior, patient payments and collection behavior -- it really is a terrific solution. And it scales as we integrate the technologies. I am a huge believer in best-of-breed ecosystems. This technology integrates into the HealthPay24 solution. The recommendations are intelligent and already in the platform for providers.

Gardner: And how about that grassroots demand? Should people start going into their clinics and emergency departments and say, “Hey, I want the plan that I heard about. I want to have financing. I want you to give me all my options.” Should people be advocating for that level of consumerism now when they go into a healthcare environment?

Gerdeman: You know, Dana, they already are. We are at a tipping point in the disruption of healthcare. This kind of grassroots demand of consumerism and a consumer personalized experience -- it’s only a matter of time. You mentioned data privacy earlier. There is a very interesting debate happening in healthcare around the balance between sharing data, which is so important for care, billing, and payment, with the protection of privacy. We take all of that very seriously.

Nonetheless, I feel the demand from providers as well as patients will only get greater.

Gardner: Before we close out let’s extrapolate on the data we have. How will things be different in two or three years from now when more organizations embrace these processes and platforms?

Intrator: The industry is going to be a lot smarter in a couple of years. The more we learn from these analytics, the more we incorporate it into the decisions that are happening every day, then it’s going to feel like it fits you as a patient better. It’s going to improve the patient experience substantially.

The industry is going to be a lot smarter in a couple of years. The more we learn from these analytics, the more we incorporate it into the decisions that are happening every day. It's going to improve the patient experience substantially.

Personally, I am really excited to see where it goes. There are going to be new solutions that we haven’t heard about yet. I am closely following everything that goes on.

Gerdeman: This is heading to an experience for patients where from the moment they seek care, they research care, they are known. They are presented with a curated, personalized experience from the clinical aspect of their encounter all the way through the billing and payment. They will be presented with recommendations based on who they are, what they need, and what their expectations are.

That’s the excitement around AI and ML and how it’s going to be leveraged in the future. I am with Jake. It’s going to look very different in healthcare experiences for consumers over the next few years.

Gardner: And for those interested in learning more about this pilot program, about the Mastercard Test and Learn platform and HealthPay24’s platform, where might they go? Are there any press releases, white papers? What sort of information is available?

Gerdeman: We have a great case study from the POC that we are currently running. We are happy to work with anyone who is interested, just contact us via our website at HealthPay24 or through Mastercard.

Gardner: I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect healthcare finance insights discussion on new ways of analyzing healthcare revenue trends to both improve patient billing and services.

And we have learned about new approaches to healthcare revenue cycle management and the outcomes that give patients more options and providers more revenue clarity. So please join me in thanking our guests, Jake Intrator, Managing Consultant for Data and Services at Mastercard. Thank you so much, Jake.

Intrator: Thank you.

Gardner: And thank you as well to Julie Gerdeman, CEO of HealthPay24. Always a pleasure, Julie.

Gerdeman: Thanks so much, Dana.

Gardner: And a big thank you to our audience as well for joining this HealthPay24-sponsored healthcare thought leadership discussion. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator. Thanks again for listening and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HealthPay24.

Transcript of a discussion on new approaches to healthcare revenue cycle management and outcomes that give patients more options and providers more revenue clarity. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2020. All rights reserved.

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Data Sovereignty, Security, and Performance Panacea: Why Mastercard Sets the Standard for Global Hybrid Cloud Adoption

Transcript of a discussion on how a major financial transactions provider is exploiting cloud models to extend a distributed real-time payment capability across the globe despite some of the strictest security and performance requirements.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer podcast series. I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on the latest insights into hybrid IT and cloud computing.

Gardner

Our next cloud adoption best practices discussion focuses on some of the strictest security and performance requirements for a new global finance services deployment. We’ll now explore how a major financial transactions provider is exploiting cloud models to extend a distributed real-time payment capability across the globe.

Due to the needs for localized data storage, privacy regulations compliance, and lightning-fast transactions speeds, this extreme cloud-use formula pushes the boundaries -- and possibilities -- for cloud solutions.

Stay with us now as we hear from an executive at Mastercard and a cloud deployment strategist about a new, cutting-edge use for cloud infrastructure. Please join me now in welcoming our guests, Paolo Pelizzoli, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Realtime Payments International for Mastercard. Welcome, Paolo.

Paolo Pelizzoli: Thank you.

Gardner: We’re also here with Robert Christiansen, Vice President and Cloud Strategist at Cloud Technology Partners (CTP), a Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) company. Welcome, Robert.

Robert Christiansen: Thank you for having me. Good to be here.

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Gardner: What is happening with cloud adoption that newly satisfies such major concerns as strict security, localized data, and top-rate performance? Robert, what’s allowing for a new leading edge when it comes to the public clouds’ use?

Christiansen: A number of new use cases have been made public. For the front runners like Capital One [Financial Corp.], and some other organizations, they have taken core applications that would otherwise be considered sacred and are moving them to cloud platforms. Those have become more-and-more evident and visible. The Capital One CIO, Robert Alexander, has been very vocal about that.

Christiansen

So now others have followed suit. And the US federal government regulators have been much more accepting around the audit controls. We are seeing a lot more governance and automation happening as well. A number of the business control objectives – from security to the actual technologies to the implementations -- are becoming more accepted practices today for cloud deployment.

So, by default, folks like Paolo at Mastercard are considering the new solutions that could give them a competitive edge. We are just seeing a lot more acceptance of cloud models over the last 18 months.

Gardner: Paolo, is increased adoption a matter of gaining more confidence in cloud, or are there proof points you look for that opens the gates for more cloud adoption?

Compliance challenges cloud

Pelizzoli: As we see what’s happening in the world around nationalism, the on-the-soil [data sovereignty] requirements have become much more prevalent. It will continue, so we need the ability to reach those countries, deploy quickly, and allow data persistence to occur there.

Pelizzoli

The adoption side of it is a double-edged sword. I think everybody wants to get there, and everybody intuitively knows that they can get there. But there are a lot of controls around privacy, as well as the SOX and SOC 1 reports compliance, and everything else that needs to be adjusted to take into the cloud into account. And if the cloud is rerouting traffic because one zone goes down and it flips to another zone, is that still within the same borders, is it still compliant, and can you prove that?

So while technologically this all can be done, from a compliance perspective there are still a lot of different boxes left to check before someone can allow payments data to flow actively across the cloud -- because that’s really the panacea.

Gardner: We have often seen a lag between what technology is capable of and what regulations, standards, and best practices allow. Are we beginning to see a compression of that lag? Are regulators, in effect, catching up to what the technology is capable of?

Pelizzoli: The technology is still way out in the front. The regulators have a lot on their plates. We can start moving as long as we adhere to all the regulations, but the regulations between countries and within some countries will continue to have a lagging effect. That being said, you are beginning to see governments understand how sanctions occur and they want their own networks within their own borders.

Those are the types of things that require a full-fledged payments network that predated the public Internet to begin to gain certain new features, functions, and capabilities. We are now basically having to redo that payments-grade network.

Gardner: Robert, the technology is highly capable. We have a major player like Mastercard interested in solving their new globalization requirements using cloud. What can help close the adoption gap? Does hybrid cloud help solve the log-jam?

Christiansen: The regionalization issues are upfront, if not the number-one requirement, as Paolo has been talking about. I think about South Korea. We just had a meeting with the largest banking folks there. They are planning now for their adoption of public cloud, whether it’s Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), or Google Cloud. But the laws are just now making it available.

Prior to January 1, 2019, the laws prohibited public cloud use for financial services companies, so things are changing. There is lot of that kind of thing going on around the globe. The strategy seems to be very focused on making the compute, network, and storage localized and regionalized. And that’s going to require technology grounding in some sort of connectivity across on-premises and public, while still putting the proper security in-place.

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So, you may see more use of things like OpenShift or Cloud Foundry’s Pivotal platform and some overlay that allows folks to take advantage of that so that you can push down an appliance, like a piece of equipment, into a specific territory.

I’m not certain as to the cost that you incur as a result of adding such an additional local layer. But from a rollout perspective, this is an upfront conversation. Most financial organizations that globalize want to be able to develop and deploy in one way while also having regional, localized on-premises services. And they want it to get done as if in a public cloud. That is happening in a multiple number of regions.

Gardner: Paolo, please tell us more about International Realtime Payments. Are you set up specifically to solve this type of regional-global deployment problem, or is there a larger mandate? What’s the reason for this organization?

Hybrid help from data center to the edge

Pelizzoli: Mastercard made an acquisition a number of years ago of Vocalink. Vocalink did real-time secure interbank funds transfer, and linkage to the automated clearing house (ACH) mechanism for the United Kingdom (UK), including the BACS and LINK extensions to facilitate payments across the banking system. Because it’s nationally critical infrastructure, and it’s bank-to-bank secure funds transfer with liquidity checks in place, we have extended the capabilities. We can go through and perform the same nationally critical functions for other governments in other countries.

Vocalink has now been integrated into Mastercard, and Realtime Payments will extend the overall reach, to include the debit/credit loyalty gift “rails” that Mastercard has been traditionally known for.

I absolutely agree that you want to develop one way and then be able to deploy to multiple locations. As hybrid cloud has arrived, with the advent of Microsoft Azure Stack and more recently AWS’s Outposts, it gives you the cloud inside of your data center with the same capabilities, the same consoles, and the same scripting and automation, et cetera.

As we see those mechanisms become richer and more robust, we will go through and be deploying that approach to any and all of our resources -- even being embedded at the edge within a point of sale (POS) device.

As we examine the different requirements from government regulations, it really comes down to managing personally identifiable information.

As we examine the different requirements from government regulations, it really comes down to managing personally identifiable information.

So, if you can secure the transaction information, by abstracting out all the other stuff and doing some interesting cryptography that only those governments know about, the [transaction] flow will still go through [the cloud] but the data will still be there, at the edge, and on the device or appliance.

We already provide for detection and other value-added services for the assurance of the banks, all the way down to the consumers, to protect them. As we start going through and seeing globalization -- but also the regionalization due to regulation – it will be interesting to uncover fraudulent activity. We already have unique insights into that.

No more noisy neighbors

Christiansen: Getting back to the hybrid strategy, AWS Outposts and Azure Stack have created the opportunity for such globalization at speed. Someone can plug in a network and power cable and get a public cloud-like experience yet it’s on an on-premises device. That opens a significant number of doors.

You eliminate multi-tenancy issues, for example, which are a huge obstacle when it comes to compliance. In addition, you have to address “noisy neighbor” issues, performance issues, failovers, and stuff like that that are caused by multi-tenancy issues.

If you’re able to simply deploy a cloud appliance that is self-aware, you have a whole other trajectory toward use of the cloud technology. I am actively encouraged to see what Microsoft and Amazon can do to press that further. I just wanted to tag that onto what Paolo was talking about.

Pelizzoli: Right, and these self-contained deployments can use Kubernetes. In that way, everything that’s required to go through and run autonomously -- even the software-defined networks (SDNs) – can be deployed via containers. It actually knows where its point of persistence needs to be, for data sovereignty compliance, regardless of where it actually ends up being deployed.

This comes back to an earlier comment about the technology being quite far ahead. It is still maturing. I don’t think it is fully mature to everybody’s liking yet. But there are some very, very encouraging steps.

As long as we go in with our eyes wide open, there are certain things that will allow us to go through and use those technologies. We still have some legacy stuff pinned to bare-metal hardware. But as things start behaving in a hybrid cloud fashion as we’re describing, and once we get all the security and guidelines set up, we can migrate off of those legacy systems at an accelerated pace.

Gardner: It seems to me that Realtime Payments International could be a bellwether use case for such global hybrid cloud adoption. What then are the checkboxes you need to sign off on in order to be able to use cloud to solve your problems?

Perpetual personal data protection

Pelizzoli: I can’t give you all the criteria, but the persistence layer needs to be highly encrypted. The transports need to be highly encrypted. Every time anything is persisted, it has to go through a regulatory set of checks, just to make sure that it’s allowed to do what it’s being asked to do. We need a lot of cleanliness in the way metrics are captured so that you can’t use a metric to get back to a person.

If nothing else, we have learned a lot from the recent [data intrusion] announcements by Facebook, Marriott, and others. The data is quite prevalent out there. And payments data, just like your hospital data, is the most personal.

As we start figuring out the nuances of regulation around an individual service, it must be externalized. We have to be able to literally inject solutions to regulatory requirements – and not by coding it. We can’t be creating any payments that are ambiguous.

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That’s why we are starting to see a lot of effort going into how artificial intelligence (AI) can help. AI could check services and configurations to test for every possibility so that there isn’t a “hole” that somebody can go through with a certain amount of credentials.

As we go forward, those are the types of things that -- when we are in a public cloud -- we need to account for. When we were all internal, we had a lot of perimeter defenses. The new perimeter becomes more nebulous in a public cloud. You can create virtual private clouds, but you need to be very wary that you are expanding time factors or latency.

Gardner: If you can check off these security and performance requirements, and you are able to start exploiting the hybrid cloud continuum across different localities, what do you get? What are the business outcomes you’re seeking?

Common cloud consistency

Pelizzoli: A couple of things. One is agility, in terms of being able to deploy to two adjacent countries, if one country has a major outage. That means ease of access to a payments-grade network -- without having to go through and put in hardware, which will invariably fail.

Also, the ability to scale quickly. There is an expected peak season for payments, such as around the Christmas holidays. But there could be an unexpected peak season based on bad news -- not a peak season, but a peak day. How do you go through and have your systems scale within one country that wasn’t normally producing a lot of transactions? All of a sudden, now it’s producing 18 times the amount of transactions.

Those types of things give us a different development paradigm. We have a lot of developers. A [common cloud approach] would give us consistency, and the ability to be clean in how we automate deployment; the testing side of it, the security checks, etc.

Before, there were a lot of different ways of doing development, depending on the language and the target. Bringing that together would allow increased velocity and reduced cost, in most cases. And what I mean by “most cases” is I can use only what I need and scale as I require. I don’t have to build for the worst possible day and then potentially never hit it. So, I could use my capacity more efficiently.

Gardner: Robert, it sounds like major financial applications, like a global real-time payment solution, are getting from the cloud what startups and cloud-native organizations have taken for granted. We’re now able to take the benefits of cloud to some of the most extreme and complex use cases.

Cloud-driven global agility

Christiansen: That’s a really good observation, Dana. A healthcare organization could use the same technologies to leverage an industrial-strength transaction platform that allows them to deliver healthcare solutions globally. And they could deem it as a future-proof infrastructure solution.

One of the big advantages of the public cloud has been the isolation of all those things that many central IT teams have had to do day-in and day-out. That is to patch releases, upgrade processes, constantly looking at the refresh. They call it painting the Golden Gate Bridge – where once you finish painting the bridge, you have to go back and do it all over again. And a lot of that effort and money goes into that refresh process.

And so they are asking themselves, “Hey, how can we take our $3 or $4 billion IT spend, and take x amount of that and begin applying it toward innovation?”

Right now there is so much rigidity. Everyone is asking the same question, "How do I compete globally in a way that allows me to build the agility transformation into my organization?"

And if someone can take a piece out of that equation, all things are eligible. Everyone is asking the same question, “How do I compete globally in a way that allows me to build the agility transformation into my organization?” Right now there is so much rigidity, but the balance against what Paolo was talking about -- the industrial-grade network and transaction framework -- to get this stuff done cannot be relinquished.

So people are asking a lot of the same questions. They come in and ask us at CTP, “Hey, what use-cases are actually in place today where I can start leveraging portions of the public cloud so I can start knocking off pieces?”

Paolo, how do you use your existing infrastructure, and what portion of cloud enablement can you bring to the table? Is it cloud-first, where you say, “Hey, everything is up for grabs?” Or are you more isolated into using cloud only in a certain segment?

Follow a paved path of patterns

Pelizzoli: Obviously, the endgame is to be in the cloud 100 percent. That’s utopian. How do we get there? There is analysis being done. It depends if we are talking about real-time payments, which is actually more prepared to go into the cloud than some of the core processing that handles most of North America and Europe from an individual credit card or debit card swipe. Some of those core pieces need more rewiring to take advantage of the cloud.

When we look at it, we are decomposing all of the legacy systems and seeing how well they fit in to what we call a paved path of patterns. If there is a paved path for a specific type of pattern, we put it on the list of things to transition to, as being built as a cloud-native service. And then we run it alongside its parent for a while, to test it, through stressful periods and through forced chaos. If the segment goes down, where does it flip over to? And what is the recovery time?

The one thing we cannot do is in any way increase latency. In fact, we have some very aggressive targets to reduce latency wherever we can. We also want to improve the recovery and security of the individual components, which we end up calling value-added services.

There are some basic services we have to provide, and then value-added services, which people can opt in or opt out of. We do have a plan and strategy to go through and prioritize that list.

Gardner: Paolo, as you master hybrid cloud, you must have visibility and monitoring across these different models. It’s a new kind of monitoring, a new kind of management.

What do you look to from CTP and HPE to help attain new levels of insight so you can measure what’s going on, and therefore optimize and automate?

Pelizzoli: CTP has been a very good and integral part of our first steps into the cloud.

Now, I will give you one disclaimer. We have some companies that are Mastercard companies that are already in the cloud, and were born in the cloud. So we have experience with AWS, we have experience with Azure, and we have some experience with Google Cloud Platform.

It’s not that Mastercard isn’t in the cloud already, it is. But when you start taking the entire plant and moving it, we want to make sure that the security controls, which CTP has been helping ratify, get extended into the cloud -- and where appropriate, actually removed, because there are better ones in the cloud today.

Extend the cloud management office

Now, the next phase is to start building out a cloud management office. Our cloud management office was created early last year. It is now getting the appropriate checks and audits from finance, the application teams, the architecture team, security teams, and so on.

As that list of prioritized applications comes through, they have the appropriate paved path, checks, and balance. If there are any exceptions, it gets fiercely debated and will either get a pass or it will not. But even if it does not, it can still sit within our on-premises version of the cloud, it’s just more protected.

As we route all the traffic, that is where there is going to be a lot of checks within the different network hops that it has to take to prevent certain information from getting outside when it’s not appropriate.

Gardner: And is there something of a wish list that you might have for how to better fulfill the mandate of that cloud management office?

Pelizzoli: We have CTP, which HPE purchased along with RedPixie. They cover, between those two acquisitions, all of the public cloud providers.

Now, the cloud providers themselves are selling you the next feature-function to move themselves ahead of their competitor. CTP and RedPixie are taking the common denominator across all of them to make sure that you are not overstepping promises from one cloud provider into another cloud provider. You are not thinking that everybody is moving at the same pace.

They also provide implementation capabilities, migration capabilities, and testing capabilities through the larger HPE organization. The fact is we have strong relationships with Microsoft and with Amazon, and so does HPE. If we can bring the collective muscle of Mastercard, HPE, and the cloud providers together, we can move mountains.

Gardner: We hear folks like Paolo describe their vision of what’s possible when you can use the cloud providers in an orchestrated, concerted, and value-added approach.

Other people in the market may not understand what is going on across multi-cloud management requirements. What would you want them to know, Robert?

O brave new hybrid world

Christiansen: A hybrid world is the true reality. Just the complexity of the enterprise, no matter what industry you are in, has caused these application centers of gravity. The latency issues between applications that could be moved to cloud or not, or impacted by where the data resides, these have created huge gravity issues, so they are unable to take advantage of the frameworks that the public clouds provide.

So, the reality is that the public cloud is going to have to come down into the four walls of the enterprise. As a result of that, we are seeing an explosion of the common abstraction -- there is going to be some open sourced framework for all clouds to communicate and to talk and behave alike.

Over the past decade, the on-premises and OpenStack world has been decommissioning the whole legacy technology stack, moving it off to the side as a priority, as they seek to adopt cloud. The reality now is that we have regional, government, and data privacy issues, we have got all sorts of things that are pulling it all back internally again.

Out of all this chaos is going to rise the phoenix of some sort of common framework. There has to be. There is no other way out of this. We are already seeing organizations such as Paolo’s at Mastercard develop a mandate to take the agile step forward.

They want somebody to provide the ability to gain more business value versus the technology, to manage and keep track of infrastructure, and to future-proof that platform. But at the same time, they want a technology position where they can use common frameworks, common languages, things that give interoperability across multiple platforms. That’s where you are seeing a huge amount of investment.

I don’t know if you recently saw that HashiCorp got $100 million in additional funding, and they have a valuation of almost $2 billion. This is a company that specializes in sitting in that space. And we are going to see more of that.

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And as folks like Mastercard drive the requirements, the all-in on one public cloud mentality is going to quickly evaporate. These platforms absolutely have to learn how to play together and get along with on-premises, as well as between themselves.

Gardner: Paolo, any last thoughts about how we get cloud providers to be team players rather than walking around with sharp elbows?

Tech that plays well with others

Pelizzoli: I think it’s actually going to end up being a lot more of the technology that’s being allowed to run on these cloud platforms is going to take care of it.

I mentioned Kubernetes and Docker earlier, and there are others out there. The fact that they can isolate themselves from the cloud provider itself is where it will neutralize some of the sharp elbowing that goes on.

Now, there are going to be features that keep coming up that I think companies like ours will take a look at and start putting workloads where the latest cutting-edge feature gives us a competitive advantage and then wait for other cloud providers to go through and catch up. And when they do, we can then deploy out on those. But those will be very conscious decisions.

I don’t think that there is a one cloud fits all, but where appropriate we will go through and be absolutely multi-cloud. Where there is defining difference, we will go through and select the cloud provider that best suits in that area to cover that specific capability.

Gardner: It sounds like these extreme use cases and the very important requirements that organizations like Mastercard have will compel this marketplace to continue to flourish rather than become a one-size-fits-all. So an interesting time that we are seeing the maturation of the applications and use cases actually start to create more of a democratization of cloud in the marketplace.

I’m afraid we will have to leave it there. We’ve been exploring how a major financial transactions provider is exploiting cloud models to extend and distribute real-time payments capacity across the globe. And we have learned how the need for localized data storage and privacy regulations, compliance, and lightning-fast transaction speeds are pushing the boundaries of what cloud solutions can do.

So please join me in thanking our guests, Paolo Pelizzoli, Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Realtime Payments International for Mastercard. Thank you so much, Paolo.

Pelizzoli: Thank you very much. I really appreciate it.

Gardner: And we have also been joined by Robert Christiansen, Vice President and Cloud Strategist at Cloud Technology Partners, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company. Thank you, Robert.

Christiansen: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Gardner: And a big thank you as well to our audience for joining this BriefingsDirect Voice of the Customer hybrid IT and cloud computing strategies interview.

I’m Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening. Please pass this along to your IT community, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a discussion on how a major financial transactions provider is exploiting cloud models to extend a distributed real-time payment capability across the globe despite some of the strictest security and performance requirements. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2019. All rights reserved.

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