Guest: Angel Diaz (LinkedIn)
Company: Discover Financial Services (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk

Discover is a financial services firm aligning people, processes, and technology to deliver products that best serve their customers and help create a brighter financial future for them. The company is deeply involved in open source and actively contributes to multiple projects such as FinOS. However, Discover takes things a step further by applying those processes and engineering practices internally within the company.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Angel Diaz, Vice President of Technology Capabilities and Innovation at Discover, discusses the company’s contributions to open source and how they apply those processes internally within the company. He goes on to talk about some of the company’s key focuses for the future.

Key highlights from this video interview:

• Discover is a financial services firm that aims to help clients on their financial journey by delivering products that can best serve their customers. Diaz talks about the company’s focus, his own journey, and how it led him to join Discover.
• Diaz discusses how Discover has embraced open-source principles and used them as a framework for how they operate and work together. He explains how this open-source process works within the organization.
• Discover operates in the financial industry but Diaz explains that it is no different from other companies since they are in the business of trust and technology. He tells us that they consume open source and have well-defined processes on how they utilize technologies and maintain them. He talks about the company’s involvement in the FinOS.
• Diaz talks about how Discover encourages its internal teams to get involved in open source and contribute. He discusses the need for people, processes, and technology to be in alignment to help the customer be successful.
• Diaz tells us about the Discover Technology Academy which is broken down by technical area and engineering practice with around 200 active participants and a dojo team that pairs with engineering teams to help them improve. Discover Technology Experience comprises blogs, articles, and technical topics of how the company does things.
• Generative AI is a hot topic right now but Diaz feels that just like any set of technologies it is built on past successes and is addictive rather than truly revolutionary. He talks about one of their use cases involving generative AI in call centers and how they are thinking about some of the other areas they can bring in generative AI.
• Diaz discusses Discover’s participation in open source projects saying the company is involved with several communities and FinOS. He tells us about how active the company is in groups related to Kubernetes and supply chain.
• Diaz gives us some insight into some of the key focuses of Discover in the near future such as building a rich set of technology patterns and automation patterns. He talks about the company’s focus on improving developer experience through these patterns.
• Discover takes the operating model of open source and applies it internally not only with open source projects but in defining engineering practices and processes. He talks about the benefits of this approach.
• Companies changing licenses has been a trend that raises concerns for some but Diaz feels that it all normalizes in the end. He talks about the value of open source and how it leads to a strong ecosystem and great innovation.

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.