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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

#61

Post by hammock »

debt wrote: post #42
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 :)

I say the same about largest media company in the world. It's shocking that people don't know it's Facebook. And in their case not just in the world, but the largest media company in history by a very wide margin. People don't see any connection between William Randolph Hearst and Mark Zuckerberg; Facebook really has the best PR team.

Might it not be Google?

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

#62

Post by rootlocus »

freehunter wrote: post #50
debt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say the same about largest media company in the world. It's shocking that people don't know it's Facebook. And in their case not just in the world, but the largest media company in history by a very wide margin. People don't see any connection between William Randolph Hearst and Mark Zuckerberg; Facebook really has the best PR team.

Well the difference is that Facebook is an aggregator and doesn't actually publish or write any of their own content. They're a media company, sure, but they're not directly comparable to newspapers or cable news outlets.

From a consumer point of view, Facebook is pretty much a news source. For some even the only news source.

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

#63

Post by lugg »

freehunter wrote: post #50
debt wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say the same about largest media company in the world. It's shocking that people don't know it's Facebook. And in their case not just in the world, but the largest media company in history by a very wide margin. People don't see any connection between William Randolph Hearst and Mark Zuckerberg; Facebook really has the best PR team.

Well the difference is that Facebook is an aggregator and doesn't actually publish or write any of their own content. They're a media company, sure, but they're not directly comparable to newspapers or cable news outlets.

Exactly what do newspapers and cable news have in common with each other that Facebook doesn't?

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

#64

Post by [deleted] »

ABCLAW wrote: post #25

One of the large trends in financial technology development that I've seen is that banks seem to heavily prefer that their staff leave and form third party software service providing companies than hire and allocate resources to internal teams. This means transaction costs are driven up massively, but the leading industry players typically deploy innovations in tandem with their competitors. My banker friends have bi…

[deleted]

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

#65

Post by Tloewald »

It's still easy to tell banks from tech companies. Banks probably won't offer you 2FA or allow you to use secure passwords and will cheerfully bring down their website for maintenance for twelve hours at a stretch. They'll also charge you mysterious transaction fees.

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

#66

Post by ohazi »

tvanantwerp wrote: post #36
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 i…

Why is it always the "notifying" part that breaks with shitty software like this, and not the "money being taken forcefully" part, which always seems to work flawlessly? Doesn't that seem a little suspicious?

If they were uniformly bad at writing software, the critical money handling part should fail at roughly the same rate. If they can get that part to work reliably, failure of other parts of the system seem particularly inexcusable.

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

#67

Post by vonmoltke »

guyzero wrote: post #60
bannable wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably WPP or Omnicom.

Omnicom: $15B revenue annually, $17B market cap WPP: $18B revenue, $23B market cap Google: $110B revenue, $750B market cap Seems like a good argument that being tech-forward provides a multiplier on value versus doing the same old thing, if you believe that these are all just advertising companies.

> Google: $110B revenue

Where did you get 110 from? I'm seeing 90 for last year.

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

#68

Post by [deleted] »

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 :)

[deleted]

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

#69

Post by jnordwick »

joshuamorton wrote: post #51
xaybey wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This would imply you're at the Director level or above at GS. I expect you were L5 or less at Google, so this would make sense, but I'd expect Director at a big bank to be equivalent to an L6+ role at a Google or FB, or am I totally off base somewhere. (that is, you aren't really expected to make director)

I've seen non director (pres) level offer packages up to $300k including guaranteed bonus minimum.

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

#70

Post by raesene9 »

tvanantwerp wrote: post #36
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 i…

My theory has always been that the people in senior positions at these companies tend to be older and have come up through the ranks before IT was quite as integral to their operations.

So they don't understand technology and therefore tend to not take it as seriously as they should.

That said, that argument starts to hold less water these days. I had my first job in a web-focused bank 18 years ago now!

One of the consequences I've seen (and I'm guessing its even more prevalent these days with easy access to cloud computing resources) is that bad IT in banks leads to the rise of Shadow IT where departments take it on themselves to work around the main corporate IT function.

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