Using banking as a comparative lens, they discuss how regulation, data and trust are reshaping energy systems and laying the groundwork for the “citizen supply chain.”
For energy and utilities, regulation has always been a defining force, often complex, overlapping and at times conflicting.
What is changing is how organizations respond. Rather than viewing compliance as a constraint, leaders are using it to drive efficiency, modernize infrastructure and accelerate the adoption of new technologies.
Banking offers a useful parallel. As Andy Schmidt explains, financial institutions have learned to treat regulation as a built-in driver of innovation, unlocking funding and enabling new service models.
Energy organizations often operate across jurisdictions with competing regulatory requirements, making strict compliance a balancing act. Increasingly, success depends on engaging directly with regulators, helping shape frameworks that are both protective and practical.
This mirrors a similar shift in banking, where institutions collaborate with regulators to align on outcomes and navigate trade-offs.
In energy and utilities, reliability is the foundation of value. Customers expect essential services to work seamlessly, often without noticing them, until something goes wrong.
As the sector becomes more digital, trust is becoming equally important. Protecting data, securing infrastructure and ensuring safe operations are now central to maintaining that reliability.
Banking provides a useful comparison, where trust has long been the defining product.
Together, reliability and trust form the backbone of the citizen supply chain.
Data is rapidly becoming as valuable as physical infrastructure in the energy sector.
From grid management to customer engagement, utilities are moving toward real-time, event-driven operations. Legacy batch systems can no longer support the speed and complexity required.
Banking’s evolution toward real-time payments reinforces this shift, highlighting the broader move toward immediacy across industries.
As energy systems become more interconnected, leaders are drawing on capabilities from other industries.
Fraud detection and customer verification, long established in banking, are becoming increasingly relevant for utilities as risks evolve.
At the same time, banking continues to learn from energy in areas such as resilience and infrastructure management, highlighting a growing convergence between sectors.
The conversation points to a broader transformation: energy and utilities are becoming central to a connected ecosystem of services that support citizens.
In this emerging model, regulation, data and trust are shared foundations. For energy leaders, success will depend on the ability to integrate across sectors, collaborate with partners and operate in real time.
Stay tuned for part two of the conversation, which examines how industries can work together to build a more resilient citizen supply chain, particularly in times of disruption.
- 1. Introduction: Turning regulation into competitive advantage
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Charley Wark:
Hello, everybody out there. My name is Charley Wark and I am the head of our global commercial industries at CGI. If there was a list of the ten most exciting jobs out there, I'm pretty sure that my job would rank on that top ten list. Why? Well, because every day, at least every week, I get to learn something new.
I'm in a team full of industry experts that are dispersed across geographies in multiple continents. So, every day I get to hear new perspectives and learn new things. But even though I have the most exciting job in the world, I still fill my weekends with even more interesting things. And in my case, it's Formula One. I'm a diehard Formula One fan. And I'm the type of fan that follows the development closely. I watch every race, I watch every qualifying, I watch every test, even the in-between season speculations, and all the new regulations they pull up every year.
And of course, I follow the regular season. Why? Well, because one of the most fascinating things about the Formula One circus is the constant push to be on the edge. Not just when it comes to driving, but also building the car, being on the edge of what's allowed from a regulatory perspective, and staying so close so that you will have the competitive advantage. And for anybody who's been watching Formula One, you might remember the double diffuser, or you might have seen the between CES and testing this year when Ferrari pulled out a completely new wing that opens up in the middle and separates in more than 200 degrees angle. That’s allowed because it's not regulated against.
So why am I talking about Formula One? Well, because I believe that all other industries have something that they can learn from Formula One, or especially the highly regulated industries. Because today, leaders often see the cost of regulation being the cost of doing business for whatever industry that might be. They might even see it as an inhibitor. And this is very evident in two industries that we are going to deep dive into today.
And that is why I have with me today our global industry leader for banking, Andy Schmidt. Hi, Andy.
Andy Schmidt:
Hi, Charley.
Charley Wark:
And of course, we have our global industry leader for energy and utility, Peter Warren. Hi, Peter.
Peter Warren:
Hey, Charley. Good to see you.
- 2. Banking treats regulation as a strategic advantage
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Charley Wark:
Let’s start by turning to you, Andy. How do you think industry can turn such a highly regulated industry like banking, for example? How can they turn the constraint of regular regulations into an opportunity, using regulation to unlock business opportunities?
Andy Schmidt:
It's a great question. I'd say not only can they regulation into opportunity, they have to, given how competitive banking in general and financial services are these days. Unlike many industries that are adapting to increasing oversight, banking has as long looked at regulatory intensity as a design constraint, much like what you were saying about that new wing for Ferrari. Increasingly, they're looking at it as a strategic asset.
So, when we're looking at what banking really offers, which is trust, and along with that, data stewardship, financial resilience, these are all things that in a citizen supply chain ecosystem are increasingly important. When we look at regulation through this lens, it really should be seen as a funded mandate for innovation.
We've looked at and had to adapt to—had to absorb things like—Dora, like Basel, like open banking. These things drive modernization, they unlock board-level funding, and they become innovative offerings for a platform strategy around open banking or authentication for AML and KYC. So, we as an industry have to have more of a “regulatory as innovation” mindset if we're going to be competitive in an increasingly data-oriented and increasingly digital world.
- 3. Energy’s balancing act with compliance and innovation
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Charley Wark:
Interesting. Peter, do you think there is anything that energy and utilities have in common with banking when it comes to this fight of always being innovative to seize the opportunity?
Peter Warren:
They do. And I remember a quote from one of the CEOs I was talking to one day: he said, “Peter, we always walk the line between complying to these regulations and missing those regulations.” Because in some cases they conflict. If they comply 100% to one set, they automatically violate another set or part of them. So, they're constantly in a situation where they're trying to move forward, and I think there's a bit of a shift going on in the world. Andy talked about this too: regulations can be an opportunity—not necessarily always trying to do the thing Ferrari “can we get away with it?”, but a little bit of that.
You see people moving from regulated industries, starting up companies that are deregulated as part of the overall entity. One client is a regulated utility on one side of his business card, and on the other side, there are seven or eight other companies that are deregulated on the other side. So, what they're doing is finding ways of moving forward.
I think that learning from these types of things—what do you have to do, what can you do, is a shift. And not always looking at regulations as punitive. I remember an oil executive saying ESG is going to kill us. And the reality is, now that they've re-looked at it and they may not be doing ESG in every geography for compliance state, ESG drives out inefficiencies. It makes things better. So we see now that innovation that was originally adopted for ESG regulation and got a gold checkbox is now accelerating because it's newer, better technology. And, as we know from CD and music, and F1 isn't a good example, there are not too many 1970s cars on the circuit at the moment. So, technology, new technology always consumes old.
- 4. Shaping smarter regulation with regulators
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Charley Wark:
And speaking of ESG and Formula One, I think that Formula One, by changing regulations to be more sustainable, are also driving innovation for the private car industry or for the car industry, manufacturing cars for our personal use. So, Andy, do you think that conflicting regulations can be managed even in an industry as regulated as banking, so that you can focus on the outcomes rather than ticking boxes?
Andy Schmidt:
I think 100%, especially when you have financial institutions that span not just countries but entire geographic regions. It’s essential to talk to your regulators about what you're doing to adhere to the spirit of the regulation and identify clearly where you might have challenges adhering to the letter. When you're talking about protecting the client, when you're talking about protecting the data, when you're talking about protecting the infrastructure, there are certain trade-offs that you're naturally going to make these days. Being clear to your stakeholders on the regulatory side what trade-offs you're making and why, and asking them for advice is going to be an essential part of the conversation. Regulation that evolves in a vacuum is painful for everyone. Regulation that evolves with market needs and with market input is something that you can actually implement, actually leverage. And so again, these types of conversations are going to be essential for for global institutions, for regional institutions that are looking to do the right thing by the client and by the regulatory authorities.
Peter Warren:
I agree with Andy on that because we see companies that are being passive in the marketplace and just saying, “Okay, this is being done to me,” don't have a lot of success. Where we've been engaged in several countries to help the regulator understand the needs of the industry. It's interesting to see our own words come back to us in legislation.
One of our colleagues, Diane Gutiw, is the advisor for AI to the country of Canada where I happen to live. And now we're seeing her words come back to us because we've been influencing. It was brought with the idea of making legislation more empowering, keeping the guardrails on, because we—like a racetrack—can't go off the track too far. Keeping this moving forward is a key structure. And we've seen that in the UK, we've seen that in the United States and throughout Europe.
- 5. Trust as the core banking product
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Charley Wark:
So speaking of this, helping also to change regulations in the countries that you operate, we have to also talk about the high need of regulating data from a data privacy perspective to protect the citizens and to protect, of course, the cities, the countries that we live in. This is an area that I think the banking financial services industry is probably best in class globally with all the heavy regulation.
I know, Andy, you are often quoted to say that the banks are in the business of trust. If there's something you can make into a product, you can turn trust into a product and actually sell that to other industries. I hope I didn't misquote you too badly, but could you explain a little bit what it is that you mean with how this industry is built on the product of trust?
Andy Schmidt:
Sure. When you look at banking, most of the products are commodities: checking accounts, home loans, car loans, and even investment accounts. And so, what you're focusing on is trust in terms of being able to protect my assets, protect my information, and give me good advice. Increasingly, in our corporate and transaction banking survey that just came out, the advice piece of it is where there are some opportunity for the banks, The trust, the protection piece of it is still there and is still highly regarded, and is often more highly regarded for the banks than they are for, say, third parties because they have this framework, because they have the experience behind it. So, if trust is compromised because these accounts are so homogenous, so easy to transport, especially with open banking, then you run the risk of having the customer just move to another provider and never come back again. That element of trust, that element of confidence is woven into the fabric of banking, woven into the fabric of financial services and has been has been for generations.
- 6. Real-time data and the limits of legacy systems
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Peter Warren:
And in my industry, I would say trust is part of it, but reliability is probably the main thing. Trust that your lights are going to come on in the morning, you expect them to be reliably on. You trust that there's going to be fuel at the service centers, that your water is going to come on, your waste is going to go down the toilet (it’s not a sexy part of our industry, but it's there), and that things aren't going to be contaminated.
Many of our clients say data's value to the organization rivals many of the physical assets’ value. And to that point, taking from the Formula One industry, one of the databases we now use in our industry started in retail banking, and was used by a company in racing to do the real-time vector analysis of cars on the track.
The reason why it's important to the energy industry now is we're much more like a retail bank doing high-vole transactions and trading in the retail parts of our industry, but also through the transmission and the customer side than we are on the legacy side. Most of the modern companies that we're dealing with now are not modeling themselves, and in fact, many of the executives aren't coming up through the ranks anymore. They're people coming from other industries like banking, like the cell phone industry or other very competitive industries, they're bringing that level of thinking and they're expecting those levels of tools here. And quite frankly, in this AI generation of worlds, we cannot have tools that are batch processing anymore. So, there's a real shift here, and Andy, I think you see that in yours too.
- 7. Cross-industry lessons and resilience
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Andy Schmidt:
100%. I mean, we have real-time payments and we are moving towards real-time information. But one of the challenges we do have still on the core banking side is batch processing. So, we're getting there. But there are inefficiencies. And so, it's like upgrading the wing, but not doing anything to your steering. It makes it harder to navigate your financial position when you have some of these challenges in terms of just driving your car or running your organization.
At the at the same time, the banking industry has learned a lot from energy and utilities. When we're looking at keeping real-time infrastructures up and running, when we're looking at protecting client information, protecting critical infrastructure, we’ve learned resilience planning from grid operations. We've learned better incident management discipline and are increasingly using AI to predict outages, just like the energy and utilities industry (and even the manufacturing industry does as well). And, of course, focusing on redundancy and failover, and being able to do that on a national scale, even international scale, depending on the operations of the bank.
Peter Warren:
Yeah, and just going back to that point, when we were preparing this call, we spoke about how fraud is an increasing challenge across all industries. Energy and utilities, knowing the banking term—I think you referred to it as “knowing the customer”—that type of functionality is something that utilities need to know now, whether they're gas, electric, or water. People are being fraudulent here. And it may be something that, if regulations allow, the banking industry could provide as a service to my industry. If you do it at pace and scale over there and are truly the trust folks, perhaps there's something for somebody in the banking industry to team up with one of the people in the energy industry to provide a service over here, because we definitely see that as a need.
- 8. Fighting fraud with KYC beyond banking
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Andy Schmidt:
Absolutely. And it's and it goes back to the foundation of trust. And so, trust, being able to validate who you're working with, who you're sending a payment to, who you're receiving a payment from—that identification, that authentication is something that we can certainly extend to the energy and utilities industry and beyond, to help you understand. Who are you doing business with? Who is your customer? Are they who they say they are? And how do you manage funds flows? How do you manage delivery flows, those service flows back and forth between you and your client?
- 9. Closing and preview of part two
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Charley Wark:
That is a very good point for us to stop this conversation here today and sum up in a second part of this podcast because we're getting very close to talking about the “citizen supply chain” and how all industries need to collaborate to be able to pull together in the societies where we operate. So, with that, I'd like to thank you, Andy Schmidt, head of banking, and Peter Warren, head of energy and utility at CGI. We’ll speak to you again in part two of this podcast.
Peter Warren:
Thank you, Charley.
