By the team at The Cloud Awards
Here we speak with a Cloud Awards lead judge – Stephen Backhouse – to learn about his role as a judge, what industry trends excite him, and his tips for future entrants.
Stephen joined the panel in 2024, and specializes in FinTech. He has acted as the lead judge in the following categories:
‘Best Cloud Payment, Billing, or Finance Solution’ at The Cloud Awards
‘Best Security Solution for Finance or Banking’ at The Security Awards
‘Best Fintech for Tax Management’, ‘Best FinTech in RegTech and Financial Compliance’, and ‘Best FinTech for Financial or Management Accounting’ at The FinTech Awards.
Can you tell us about your professional background, and what led to your current role?
I trained as a chartered accountant and as a chartered tax adviser in a small professional firm, and worked there for a number of years after qualifying. When the time came to move on, I went into industry and I’m now the financial controller for an international wine importer and wholesaler. It’s been interesting looking at finances from both sides of the fence – both as an adviser and within the business itself – and it’s helped to give me insights into a wide breadth of industries, which I’ve brought to the judging process.
What motivated you to get involved as a judge for The Cloud Awards, and what does the role mean to you?
I’ve always had an interest in technology, and often had the pressure of being “the office computer guy”. Because of this, I’ve been well placed to assess what’s worked and what hasn’t in my professional life. When the opportunity arose to become a Cloud Awards judge, I was excited to take it up; I felt it sits at an intersection of my interests and professional knowledge and skills. Being a judge gives me a chance to be involved at the cutting edge, putting my insights from outside the sector to good use to help identify standout products that might be overlooked by those within the tech industry.
Why do you think awards programs like The Cloud Awards matter to the technology industry?
With the huge amount of fast-paced change that’s happening in the industry, it can be increasingly difficult for customers, and the uninitiated, to find useful and innovative products in what can seem a crowded field. Awards programs help users identify those products and suppliers which are the gold standard, and are truly providing the best services they can.
What trends within the industry excite you right now?
Having dealt with a lot of small businesses when I was in practice, and being a trustee of a small charity, I’m really interested to see what innovations in technology can do for SMBs. Enterprises have always been able to gain access to specialist knowledge and skills, but recent developments are helping to level the playing field between larger and smaller firms. By helping to automate tasks and allowing organizations to perform analyses which have been beyond their reach until recently, technology is giving SMBs a leg up on its competition, at more attainable price points than before.
Have you seen any particularly innovative or surprising trends emerge from the entries you’ve judged so far?
The biggest thing which has surprised me is the sheer number of applications which are being found for machine learning and artificial intelligence, which in recent memory have gone from science fiction, to something of purely academic interest, to a technological and cultural phenomenon. Although in the long term, it may prove that AI isn’t appropriate for all these uses, it’s exciting to watch this renaissance in computing with its boiling cauldron of prospective uses for this innovation.
What makes a submission stand out to you?
A submission jumps out for me and puts itself ahead of the competition when it’s obvious that the nominee has really thought about their users’ needs and what they can do to solve their problems. In my professional life, I’ve used many client systems which seemed to have been built with assumptions on what a user might find helpful, and as a result have a lot of features which go unused. In contrast, systems which are more focused on the customer become much more accessible and useful to their users as a result, even if the technology within is not necessarily as advanced or pushing boundaries.
What advice would you give to those hoping to win in a Cloud Award program?
If your service is using new technology (such as AI), it’s important to ask yourself how you are building trust among the end users; no matter what your system can do, it isn’t any help if the users put it to one side and go back to their old methods. Nominees should consider whether or not the user can overrule the decisions that the system has made, and what sorts of datasets the model has been trained on and how they relate to the sector. If a system gives useful solutions and keeps the human in the loop, it can help build much more trust and become much more useful than a system foisted on the end user.
Another useful piece of advice, in particular for providers of systems of broad applications applicable to a wide range of sectors, is to take the nuances of the category into consideration. If your solution does have wide application, you should ask yourself how your system helps to address the specific problems of the industry in question. If your solution comes across as too generalized, without clear application to the category, then you run the risk of losing out to a more specialized solution – even if it might be less technologically sophisticated.
What is your favorite part of being involved in the awards process?
I really enjoy being able to see the wide range of applications for new technology that people have been able to come up with. Every time I judge an award, I find my mind fizzing with new ideas, and I end up filled with excitement for technology all over again.
About the Author: Cloud Awards Team
