Executive Summary:
Discover how are reimagining enterprise finance in
the age of AI. In this episode of The Enterprise Edge
podcast, recorded live from Oracle AI World 2025 in
Las Vegas, host Mark Vigoroso sits down with Sam
Yen, Global Head of Enterprise Application Solutions
for JP Morgan Payments, to explore the cutting edge
of treasury transformation. Learn how JP Morgan and Oracle are moving beyond proof-of-concepts to deliver real business value through enhanced ERP integrations, agentic AI collaboration, and seamless payment automation. Sam reveals the critical importance of human-in-the-loop AI design, shares surprising stories of clients switching platforms based on integration capabilities alone, and explains why combining ERP data with banking data creates unprecedented opportunities for working capital optimization. Whether you're a CFO, CIO, or treasury professional navigating the rapidly evolving AI landscape, this conversation offers pragmatic insights on building trust, managing risk, and positioning your organization to be future-ready in an agentic world. Stream it now, and be sure to LIKE, SHARE and COMMENT!
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Transcript:​
Mark 00:00
Welcome everybody to the enterprise edge Podcast coming to you live from Oracle AI world here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Thank you for joining. Thank you for listening. We are pleased to have with us today. Sam yen, global, head of enterprise application solutions for JP Morgan payments. We have a wonderful discussion planned here today, and we will be hopefully offering some pragmatic advice and insights from Sam's perspectives in the financial services space. So Sam, thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. Great stuff. So there was a announcement today that I just saw hot off the press about JP Morgan payments and their relationship with Oracle, expanding the collaboration, and I think the terminology was launching some enhanced integrations with Oracle, fusion, cloud, ERP and point of sale. Maybe you could, in a maybe short, like, tell me what that's all about and what's significant about that.
Sam 00:59
Yeah, I mean, what's probably significant is the fact that Oracle also changed the name of the conference from Oracle Cloud world to Oracle AI world, yes. So we've been partners with Oracle for a number of years now. I think 2022 was when we announced the partnership. So a lot of capabilities. We've been building up more and more functionality over the years. So we started with the integrated banking, the ability to do automate your payments, be able to do reconciliation from that and groan from there. We over the years, we also launched touchless expenses for travel expense. We launched supply chain financing, virtual card this year, we also launched Account Validation services, which was super, super hot, a lot a lot of questions on that. And then also the merchant service solution that you talked about as well. One of the things that we also have been working with Oracle very closely on is, what do we do in an agentic world? So being able to make sure that that integration gets even more enhanced as agents Oracle, I think, announced something like 650 agents, or something like that. That's right, it's crazy. One of those, or a few of those are in the finance area. There's a payment agents. So what would that look like going forward, leveraging our existing integrations, but then also, what can agent to agent communications also bring forth in terms of a better user experience, streamlining manual processes and just making things easier for our joint clients.
Mark 02:26
Awesome. That's exciting. So speak, other than the change of name, what are some other key takeaways from from this week that you think have been noteworthy or maybe thought provoking?
Sam 02:36
I know for me it was just how many times AI was mentioned per minute? Yeah, different presentations, yeah. But I think what was more interesting for me, maybe was just chatting with people at the conference, especially our joint clients, and seeing where they are in the readiness for, for, for AI. And, you know, I think it really fell into two categories that I've seen, you know, one which is, nobody wants to be left behind. Let's put it that way, yeah, but there was a small group that really didn't want to be left behind, and, you know, had the mandate from up above to get started, do things, don't sit and wait. And that category, it seems like they've gone beyond their proof of concepts, and they're really, really interested in actually making product, making things productive, getting some business value out of that. And then there's, I think a vast majority of the folks that were spoken to are just trying to figure out, how do they take their first step? They've got a couple proof of concepts, but things the technology is changing so fast, and really looking for guidance. And I think that's what we want to do with the Oracle partnership as well, to show we've been first from a banking perspective, with a lot of the integrations with Oracle. So we wanted to at least put our mark on the table and say, Hey, this is some of the things that's gonna be possible in the very, very near future. Here's how we're going about it. And raise your hands if you're interested, because we'd love to talk to
Mark 03:55
you. It's awesome. It's awesome. You know, I'm interested in and we're not going to have time to get into too many of the details, but, and I'll probably oversimplify it, so you keep me honest. But if I think about the partnership you have with Oracle, and I see it as kind of, you're sort of like building rails, payment rails, operating norms within Oracle system, Oracle, ERP systems, and it requires it sort of brings up this level of or this topic of trust, right? Trust has come up a lot in my conversations this week, whether that's customers trusting Oracle or trusting the agent, or the agents to operate autonomously or semi autonomously. Risk is sort of wrapped in with that trust conversation. I'm curious how you guys think about and talk about and strategize around trust with Oracle when you've got you know Oracle is obviously trusting JP Morgan not to create liability for them. The enterprise clients trust the security model, and then you have your own risk management standards that you're trying to adhere to. How do you think about all of those sort of layers of trust as you build strategic partnerships with Oracle and others like them? If I've if that makes sense, is that does that? Yeah? Okay,
Sam 05:18
well, Mark, I work in a bank. Yeah, so trust is probably kind of like most important, most important for us, right, historically. So, yeah, no, we take it very, very seriously, especially with my my background. I was in technology.
05:34
Yeah,
Sam 05:36
we don't talk. But no, no, I trust. Trust is really, really important. And and I was just trying to make the point, coming from technology, where innovation, like a technology company, you're pushing, you're on the bleeding edge of innovation, or working in a bank, has been a transition, transition for me, where innovate as quickly as you can. But you know, here are the guardrails. And first and foremost, do not do anything that could erode trust. Yeah, I think we're at a point in terms of AI adoption and the types of AI solutions that Oracle Enterprise software vendors are rolling out where it's not completely automating things, right? Like this, this, this principle of human the loop is really, really important. Yeah, I used to have a design background, right? So the design pattern that I see that's going on right now a lot of the times is AI is very good at letting you driving awareness of a situation, right? I'll give you an example. Hey, you're running low on cash, right? What the agent can next do next is give you context, not not just that you're running low on cash, but why are you in that situation and and that's where the partner, the power of the partnership, is also important. Because as a bank, we could, we could tell you, Hey, you're running low on cash. It's harder for us to answer the question, why, but when we partner with the ERP system that has all the business context, of business processes, the business objects that determine cash flow, we could give you a sense of why you are low on cash, right? So the first drive awareness give you context. The next thing, which in this pattern, is giving you recommendations. Hey, did you know that you're on Oracle Fusion? Did you know that JP Morgan has these capabilities. And if you're running low on cash, you know, there's a couple things that could help you, get you out of that cash crunch situation, right? You know, you can pay your vendors through virtual card and, you know, get a longer float. Maybe your buyers have set up supply chain financing for you, right? So that's the third part of the pattern, which is just bringing you some recommendations. But then here's the human in the loop. You need to you've gotten the awareness, you've gotten the context, you've gotten recommendations. You need to make the decision, and after you make the decision, then AI can, then again, help you streamline and make efficient. Make efficient. You know the decision that you made. So I think at this point, you know that's how you make sure that there's trust, because you're actually surfacing a lot of context, a lot of information. Normally, what's what's being done today anyway, before you make decisions, it's being done more efficiently. But ultimately, you're still making this choice yourself.
Mark 08:11
Got it? So there's transparency there? Yeah. So you mentioned earlier you've had some interaction, interactions with joint customers, Oracle, JP, Morgan, customers. How how do they, I mean, they're both iconic brands, right? They're both trusted brands. How does the does the customer? It's almost like, I think about it, like the Intel Inside brand, right? Where Intel is, there's a sticker on my PC, and there's, there's meaning behind that is that how the enterprise customer sort of sees JP Morgan payments in the context of the Oracle umbrella, or talk to
Sam 08:50
talk to me about I see it slightly differently, though, because we have, we have joint clients, but sometimes we talk to different parts of the organization. Okay, gotcha, right. So if you think of Oracle, usually you're going to usually you're going into the technology, the CIO, from a JP Morgan perspective, we're usually talking to the CFO or the head of Treasury, yeah. So I think the great thing about the partnership is when we go together, sometimes we bring those two departments together also in the conversation. Got it. You know, we hear from our treasury clients. Hey, anything that we want to do in terms of transformation, the Treasury transformation, the finance transformation, you can't do that without technology today. You can't do that without the partnership with the IT organization. So it's really great to kind of bring everybody together and have that conversation sometimes, you know, when we're always trying to help our clients innovate and make and streamline their finance operations, or Treasury operations. If you use a word like finance transformation or Treasury transformation, you get the eye rolls. Oh, we've heard this so many times, five years ago, 10 years ago. But I think the difference, what is different this time, is it's not just a bank talking about, you know, this transformation, or your system integrators, or the ERPs, it's actually coming together and jointly doing this together, right? You know, we are meeting with Oracle on a weekly basis to plan, you know, listening to what our clients, or joint clients are telling us, planning our roadmaps. And I haven't seen that before, so I think that's different this time, that's
Mark 10:20
cool. Are there any examples, maybe in terms of fly on the wall and some of those conversations, you think about road map. You think about transformation of Treasury and finance. What are the implications of agentic? Ai, in those settings?
Speaker 3 10:35
Yeah, I think agentic. So can I give I'll give you
Sam 10:39
a couple examples. Let me give you a more basic example agentic there. Yeah, there are a lot of customers that are just, there's a lot of friction in the process today, right? You know, just making the banking connectivity to automate your payments, and, you know, making sure that you're able to stay within your ERP system, and having to log into a banking portal to do simple things, and that process is difficult, and most of the large clients, as much as we want everybody to be a JP Morgan client, you're gonna have multiple banks, sometimes hundreds of different banks, so any way we can. Oh, and I also want to add, if we're talking to the Treasury organization, again, this is a tech function. A lot of times tech doesn't have the bandwidth to do these things. It takes too long. So just that built in out of the box integration capability, we're seeing that's creating a lot of goodwill in both directions. I was so I could definitely, we've definitely had situations where a customer has seen the integration with JP Morgan, and actually, you know, they had different bank accounts before and migrated over to JP Morgan just because of that out of the box integration. What surprised me more was we had a JP Morgan client, a long time, JP Morgan client, that saw the integration with Oracle and actually switched over to Oracle as well. So we've seen that in both directions. So so that maybe those are some examples of just like table stakes, the bare minimum. Because once you have that, then you've got that visibility, that one that visibility then leads to things like real time which is, which is important. So not just, you know, day old or week old information, but real time information. Once you have real time information, that you could get into forecasting types of scenarios, then you could layer on more and more things, like I talked about before, with supply chain financing and those types of things as well on the agentic stuff, I think we're a little early, to be honest. Like I said, that's part of the reason why I was interested in coming here, just to see what the audience appetite for. But yeah, I mean, coming here, there is that 10% that are, that are really gung ho. They've already, they're on all the latest versions of Oracle, you know, they're, they're playing around with all the agents that, you know, the six, those are the ones that we really want to target and figure out, like, what we could do
Mark 12:56
together. Did you, did you find many financial services delegates here this week? Were there other people in the industry that you could sort of engage with,
Sam 13:04
you mean, in terms of, like finance, people within our joint clients, or people in, specifically in the
Mark 13:09
industry, in the industry, like, you know, potentially even even Treasury people or CFOs, and people you could really think through
Sam 13:17
stuff with. I mean, there was, there was a handful, yeah, so, yeah, especially in the conversations that we were in. We did a bunch of presentations together with Oracle, okay? And yeah, it was a nice mixture of people that were in the line of business and people that were nice in technology as well. Okay, good.
Mark 13:33
You know, I'm curious about data, right? And there's a lot of discussion this week about data, and Larry spent a lot of time on data. And as the the role of JP, Morgan payments and Oracle evolves, talk to me a little bit about how data, whether that's insights, about how some of these workflows are operating. How Treasury operations are happening. Are there, is there access now? Is there insight that either you or Oracle is now getting or expects to get that weren't potentially obtainable before that you could potentially extract and monetize? Talk to me about the data element, the data piece of all of this.
Sam 14:21
Yeah, so of course, data, data, okay, AI is based on data, and we're talking about AI here. So the fact we talked about this a little bit previously, right? Bringing together that ERP data with the payments and banking data together leads to some very, very powerful scenarios that you can do separately, yes. So that's, I think that's, that's the part I'm going to focus on. Like, I don't know that we have any ambitions to monetize data by itself, yeah. But in terms of, you know, how we can improve the lives of our joint clients and drive, you know, process efficiencies. I gave that one example of providing context and providing recommendations that's on joint data. If you just look at some of the services and some of the pain points where there's inefficiencies and financial services, you know, supply chain, financing, working working capital, management, optimizing working capital, looking at cross border payments, FX rates, those are things where I think there's a lot of rich opportunity. Again, when you take a look at what the ERP provides, right, all the vendors, all the kind of historical payments, you look at all the things that we provide in terms of financial services and products, and being able to bring those two things together and really optimize all of those flows like, the way I look at it is, anytime money moves in an ERP system, there's an opportunity for payments, right? And the bank to kind of get close, more closely together and see how that those things could be optimized,
Mark 15:53
right, right? Got it. Got it. So in your in your remit at JD Morgan, which includes, you know, I think it's enterprise applications. I think it's somewhere in your title, that's right. What do you look for when you're looking at a partnership like Oracle, and you're looking at maybe other enterprise ISVs and software companies out there, you're architecting sort of more of a long term strategic partnership, Alliance vision. What are you looking for in those relationships?
Sam 16:27
Well, first and foremost is clients, where our clients are, what they use. Yep, I think most importantly for us is delivering the best services and the best experience to our clients, meeting them where they are. Got it so. So I think that's the first one, but again, it's we also need to partner with partners that also have the same values that we do. I talked about trust, quality, reliability, scalability, those, those types of things, but also innovation, right? How can we, how can we move forward together to be able to provide, you know, not only what's good for today, but I'd never like to use the term future proof, but at least future make making sure that we're helping our joint clients and giving you the advice and setting up the foundation to be future ready. Yeah.
Mark 17:22
I mean, there's an example. Can't remember who was. It might have been one of the CIOs in Steve Miranda's keynote, he talked about, they selected an ERP in 2012 they deployed it in 2017 five years later, and it was, it was like tone deaf. It was completely not what they needed, right? And this idea of future I like it. It's not future proof. That was not a future proof decision. It was not a future adaptive decision. And Larry talked a lot about sort of longer range, and how he sees database and OCI and applications all providing a unique advantage for Oracle. Do you? I don't know how much you heard of Larry's comments, but curious if that vision, which is pretty credible, in my objective opinion, when you talk about the database position that Oracle has, the OCI position that Oracle has, and the application position that Oracle has, it's as close to A whole solution. I think that that's out there, right? I mean, would you agree with that? I meant, and I'm not even selling Oracle, but
Sam 18:28
so full disclaimer, yeah, I had a session that was the same time as Larry's. Oh, okay, okay, so I missed it, but, but, but, yeah, I agree with what you said. Yeah, yeah. I think he missed one more answer of it, which is the infrastructure building? Oh, of course, yes. So yes, I Yeah. Again, I am impressed how Oracle, over the years, started as a database company, moved into business applications, created that platform layer, and now is starting to build out infrastructure as well. So that's right, it's almost like a vertical, verticalized solution, where you can kind of get everything that you need from one place. So, yeah, that is
Mark 19:05
impressive. Yeah, it's good bet. It's a good bet. All right, one more, and then I'll let you go. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna force you to talk about SAP. I can't. Okay, there we go. I just gotta. I got a no sign. All right, fine. I'm curious. I was curious. Maybe I'll turn it off afterwards and ask you. Ask you a different question, more if you were not doing what you're doing now, professionally, what would you be doing? You said you had some design background. I'm curious. What would you be doing if you're not driving digital transformation in the finance
Sam 19:36
space? You know? I think probably something in education. And teach education? Yeah. So my wife's a teacher. She teaches like so is mine, and I've had, I've had a taste of teaching a little bit kind of at the university level.
Mark 19:50
We'll see. Now I have to ask my other question, if you were a professor, what would you teach?
Sam 19:56
If I could craft any course, whether it's high school or college, that would be what they don't teach you in school that you need to know in real life. So, like, one of the, one of the, especially like in business life and corporate life, you know, sometimes I'm asked to give, you know, what's what? What's my advice to people that are just driven firm? It's really communication, yeah, it's, I don't know. I can't, I don't know who to attribute this quote too. But it's something, it goes like this. You know, there are two types of people when they communicate, some people that could take something really simple and make it sound really, really complicated, and other people that could make complicated things sound really simple, like always strive for the second one, because that's a career limiting skill if you don't have it.
Mark 20:36
The first one, I think they're called lawyers. No comment, exactly. All right. Well, Sam, this has been tremendous. Thank you so much. I know the time went fast, but I loved your insights and your comments, and exciting to hear about the relationship with Oracle, and looking forward to keeping close track of it. So thank you so much for your candor and your time. Absolutely and thank you everyone for listening. Do us a favor as always, to give it a like, a share a follow, a comment, and we'll catch you next time on the Enterprise edge podcast. Until then, signing off from the Venetian in Las Vegas, you.
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