How Berkadia’s innovation conference demonstrates its commitment to people and technology

This is a sponsored guest post by Berkadia. Technical.ly is a free news resource thanks to financial supporters like Berkadia, a Technical.ly client.

Each year, Berkadia’s annual innovation conference, ICON, brings together over 560 attendees for three days of groundbreaking discussions and networking. 

At 2024 ICON, hosted in late summer, Berkadia’s Innovators joined internal and external business partners to delve into commercial real estate and technology trends and shared some of their product and technology advancements over the past year. 

At one of the event’s panels, Chief Innovation Officer Damu Bashyam was joined by Berkadia’s management committee for a discussion on strategy across various business lines and how innovation is helping the company achieve goals and stand out from the competition. Bashyam shared Berkadia’s “hybrid innovation” approach: keep modernizing legacy systems, while also developing disruptive innovation that embraces new technologies and business models to capture new markets. 

Another session with leadership from Berkadia’s Innovation Team covered themes like operational excellence and integrating emerging disruptive technologies to differentiate the company in the CRE market.

Every year, ICON sparks excitement and engagement among Berkadians. The recent launch of Berkie, Berkadia’s AI assistant, added to that enthusiasm. Berkie has already enhanced internal productivity by automating routine tasks and finding efficiencies in software development, allowing Berkadians to focus on more strategic, value-add activities. At the conference, the Machine Learning/AI and Data teams also shared their latest advancements in connecting AI to proprietary data. 

2024 ICON also featured a hackathon, where team members could practice Berkadia’s philosophy of learning through experimentation — or as the company mantra goes, “Fail Fast, Learn Fast.”  

The hackathon’s “Most Business Value” award went to a team led by Smriti Goenka for their application of AI to automate data abstraction and loan summaries, which is expected to boost efficiency by 30-40%. Another team, led by Mudassir Meer, received the “Most Innovative” award for automating daily health checks within the Enterprise Operations Center, reducing a three-hour manual task to just five minutes using Microsoft Copilot and Power Automate. 

Both projects highlight Berkadia’s commitment to utilizing tech to find efficiencies and drive value and can be scaled for implementation across other areas of the organization.

To Berkadia’s Innovators, ICON is a week to network with colleagues, align on broader technology strategies and showcase our successes and achievements with each other. It demonstrates our company’s commitment to creating an innovative culture. 

Technology, data and analytics aren’t buzzwords — Berkadia leadership believes they’re what’s driving the industry forward. Investments in these areas have positioned Berkadia as thought leaders in CRE innovation. Conversations with Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae around the use of technology to streamline processes and detect and prevent fraud, for example, have been positively influenced by Berkadia. 

Berkadia’s strategy is to hire the brightest tech minds in the industry and let them do what they do best: create and innovate. The company is committed to fostering a curious, empowered and diverse workforce that challenges the status quo and drives change.