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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

#71

Post by curun1r »

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…

On the other hand, it would be great for consumers and those wanting to offer software in the banking ecosystem if there were more standardization in the banking industry. I'd be surprised if anything a bank does is so unique that it requires all their software to be bespoke. Perhaps we could get better security and usability if there were some large providers that offered key software to almost everyone in the industry.

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

#72

Post by lmm »

raverbashing wrote: post #54

Do they? Have they dropped "corporate" solutions that barely work, sold in golf courses to people that are not affected in the least by their decisions? Are they still using XML (or even worse, CORBA) as duct tape tying everything together? Have they dropped waterfall? Do they allow developers to have their say on architectures and solutions to use? Can they experiment with, let's say, Scala, Elixir or are they stuck…

Those are absolutely the right questions to be asking, and in my experience the answers are mostly "yes".

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

#73

Post by thebouv »

Odd, I was just talking to someone yesterday about this because there was a lamentation of not enough "tech companies" in our area to work for.

I pointed out that in the DevOps Handbook one of the lines I highlighted was that in 2013, HSBC (a very large bank) employed more software engineers than Google.

So I went to search other tidbits like that and found that in 2015 Goldman Sachs employed more software engineers than Facebook.

Banks aren't companies that have tech, they're tech companies that do banking.

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

#74

Post by s73v3r_ »

raverbashing wrote: post #54

Do they? Have they dropped "corporate" solutions that barely work, sold in golf courses to people that are not affected in the least by their decisions? Are they still using XML (or even worse, CORBA) as duct tape tying everything together? Have they dropped waterfall? Do they allow developers to have their say on architectures and solutions to use? Can they experiment with, let's say, Scala, Elixir or are they stuck…

I wouldn't say any of that would make them not a tech company.

Just a tech company that most of us wouldn't want to work at.

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

#75

Post by nrhk »

ohazi wrote: post #66
tvanantwerp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 partic…

The product owners most likely decided to budget their time/resources accordingly so if something did fail it wasn't critical money handling part.

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

#76

Post by [deleted] »

ohazi wrote: post #66
tvanantwerp wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 partic…

[deleted]

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

#77

Post by atomic77 »

Banks are better described as tech companies than the media / advertising behemoths. Information security is their bread and butter.

As far as I can tell, the only thing that qualifies a company as "tech" nowadays is a technical tradition of building on open source from the ground up (eg. LAMP and its successors), while banks have traditionally been dependent on a constellation of vendors.

The open source approach has proven a more effective model and it seems that this realization has finally spread outside of silicon valley. It's about time.

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

#78

Post by joshuamorton »

jnordwick wrote: post #69
joshuamorton wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those are well within what an L5 could get at Google. Unless you mean 300K base and a significant (ie 30-50% bonus).

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

#79

Post by guyzero »

vonmoltke wrote: post #67
guyzero wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GOOGL/financials?p=GOOGL

$110B total revenue for 2017

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

#80

Post by raesene9 »

Cyph0n wrote: post #55
raesene9 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unless the HSM is also doing the decryption, the key(s) can still be stolen while in RAM..

indeed it is. With bank HSMs the encrypted key and characters from the user's password are passed into the HSM and the check is done within the secure hardware, the main system does not get to see the decrypted password.
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