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It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

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Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

#31

Post by 123212321 »

xaybey wrote: post #26
123212321 wrote: post #11

This isnt really true. Banks dont pay anywhere near tech salaries. Its all lip service. The flow of good engineers is always banks -> tech companies and never tech companies -> banks.

I make significantly more at GS than I did at google. The difference is that the majority of my compensation comes from the yearly bonus - a quirk in finance.

As a regular engineer? Or is there a math heavy component?

My understanding is that I could get about 200k base at goldman and maybe a 20% bonus, this is for working in a high in demand field. Google/FB/Other job I can get 300k+ while working less hours, paid for lunch, better treatment, more respect.

Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

#32

Post by wafflesraccoon »

oblio wrote: post #20
organsnyder wrote: post #9

I work for a large healthcare system, and the "we're not a tech company" line is often heard. At many levels, I agree—we're in the business of delivering healthy outcomes to our communities, so we need to make sure that efforts across the enterprise support that—but it is often applied in ways that stifle us from delivering what we feel would be the most impactful and cost-effective solutions. I like to respond that…

I like to ask people what's the biggest advertising company in the world. You'd be surprised how many people don't know :)

Who is the biggest advertising company? Google?

Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

#33

Post by arenaninja »

xaybey wrote: post #26
123212321 wrote: post #11

This isnt really true. Banks dont pay anywhere near tech salaries. Its all lip service. The flow of good engineers is always banks -> tech companies and never tech companies -> banks.

I make significantly more at GS than I did at google. The difference is that the majority of my compensation comes from the yearly bonus - a quirk in finance.

Interesting. I work for a direct GS competitor and compensation is nowhere near FANG level, not even with bonus accounted for

Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

#35

Post by nissimk »

123212321 wrote: post #19
ionforce wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a way to express/model technology so that it isn't considered this accessory but something that is core to their values/mission? Have we not done a good job of proving that investment in technology is a force/profit multiplier?

The truth is tech is not a force multiplier in finance, except for HFT. A few firms do pay a ton for engineers (higher than google level comp), but there are probably less than 5000 of those engineers in NYC.

No. Many smaller financial firms derive their advantage from technology. There are many areas of finance aside from high frequency trading and they all benefit from significant force multiplication from technology. Even in the lowly area of operations automation there are firms that achieve significant scale with a small number of personnel through technological advantage. Granted this is sometimes achieved with a combination of in house and commercial technology packages, and sometimes the overall system design is done by non-technical people who just manage grunts to do all of the work, to say that these companies are not benefiting from force multiplying technology is foolish. There are very few financial professionals left who are not technology people in some sense of the word.

Many firms benefit from better data. All that data needs to be acquired and managed. Many firms benefit from better analytics and models. Those models need to be tested and implemented.

Your number is low.

Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

#36

Post by tvanantwerp »

raesene9 wrote: post #12

I'm of the opinion that all banks should be technology companies, in that pretty much all of their operations rely on computing, so the better they are at developing and operating computer systems they better they'll be able to do business. Unfortunately, many banks (at least in the UK market) seem to see IT as some kind of overhead, to be minimized in cost and/or outsourced (e.g. Lloyds outsourcing to IBM https://ww…

100% agree. My wife works in private banking, and her descriptions to me of the IT/software environment they have to deal with are absurd.

Recently, the integration of a new loan management system was badly botched and several clients have been hit by it. Bills not going out, therefore not being paid, therefore money being taken forcibly from their accounts without notice. And these are customers with millions each in the bank. This has been ongoing for a couple of months now. The client managers themselves are irate--they've been cultivating these relationships for years, and it's all been jeopardized.

How can so many banks be so blind to the fact that everything they do depends on getting the technology right?

Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

#37

Post by oblio »

wafflesraccoon wrote: post #32
oblio wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to ask people what's the biggest advertising company in the world. You'd be surprised how many people don't know :)

Who is the biggest advertising company? Google?

Unless something changed recently, I believe that $95bn of advertising revenue makes them the biggest advertising company in the world :)

Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

#38

Post by raesene9 »

curuinor wrote: post #10

it is extremely easy to tell a bank from a tech company: tell if they hash their damn passwords. i'm not even talking salt here, just hashing

if you're thinking of some bank's propensity to ask for specific characters of passwords (rather than the whole thing) meaning they can't have hashed it, it's worth noting that many protect the passwords with symmetric encryption and then store the keys in an HSM to mitigate the risk of unauthorised access.

Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

#39

Post by bannable »

wafflesraccoon wrote: post #32
oblio wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to ask people what's the biggest advertising company in the world. You'd be surprised how many people don't know :)

Who is the biggest advertising company? Google?

Probably WPP or Omnicom.

Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

#40

Post by 123212321 »

nissimk wrote: post #35
123212321 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is tech is not a force multiplier in finance, except for HFT. A few firms do pay a ton for engineers (higher than google level comp), but there are probably less than 5000 of those engineers in NYC.

No. Many smaller financial firms derive their advantage from technology. There are many areas of finance aside from high frequency trading and they all benefit from significant force multiplication from technology. Even in the lowly area of operations automation there are firms that achieve significant scale with a small number of personnel through technological advantage. Granted this is sometimes achieved with a co…

Source is I work in this field. There are positions with big data and data management that pay well. But the ones paying 350k+ are way harder to get than working at a top tech firm. Theres a quant trading firm called engineers gate that has a bunch of ivy league programmers, the top of the top. They havent made a nickel off their technology. They have a had a huge outflow of talent to Google and FB. People do get paid 500k+ to manage a firms data, but thats because the firm makes so much that the money splashes around, not because its a huge component of their profitability.

Even at Two Sigma, the engineers are second class to the quants.

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