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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

#111

Post by joshuamorton »

jnordwick wrote: post #107
joshuamorton wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not quite sure what your point is. Mine was that their bonus being > salary implied a role/level at a bank that was higher than what they likely had at Google, so a commensurate salary increase would make sense. Could you explain what you're getting at?

Just that pay is high for basically a sr engineer at the right location (close to the money). The fact that bonus is 50+% of base is normal for those roles, more normal than faang comp. Compensation is just structured differently, so it isn't useful to use it as a measure of seniority between the two industries.

Right, and my point is 300K all in is not more than senior comp at a FAANG.

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

#112

Post by sbov »

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…

Can't you play this definition game with any company though?

I kind of think that if an organization views tech as a competitive advantage and core competency, they are a tech company. E.g. Netflix may be in the business of entertainment, but they are also a tech company. Google may be in the business of selling ads, but they are also a tech company.

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

#113

Post by tomc1985 »

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.

Hardly a fair comparison, considering Google's extensive non-advertising product offerings

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

#114

Post by suddensleep »

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…

Disclaimer: I work as a data scientist at a large financial institution based in the US; to be fair it is one that has a reputation for being on the "cutting edge of tech", FWIW.

The data teams I work with don't know SAS and some members aren't even that facile with Excel, opting to use Apache Spark (mostly Python, but also Scala bindings) or pandas instead. Almost no one does serious data work on their local machines, and there is a big push to store all of our data off-prem.

The dev teams I work with actively experiment with different cloud-based architectures, devops automation tools, database solutions, etc.

From a product perspective, lots of teams use agile workflows, but each team is allowed to (and encouraged to) choose their own style of getting work done.

This is not meant to imply that banks have largely moved to this model; I think that we are the exception rather than the rule. This is _also_ not meant to imply that top-down corporate "solutions" don't affect us, and that greed has been completely factored out of the equation. But I've been pleasantly surprised by how much leverage and freedom we have as the "tech department".

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

#115

Post by tmaly »

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 work at a financial services company.

You simply cannot exist if you are not a tech company due to the complexity of the regulations.

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

#116

Post by BigChiefSmokem »

lr4444lr wrote: post #101
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…

XML gets a bad wrap. For a protocol you can easily use over RESTful APIs and define a strong schema around, plus with all of the well-optimized libraries in major programming languages and IDE support, I don't really mind working with it at all.

The biggest problem with XML is verbosity. Besides the excess complexity it also add bits over the wire to transmit all that extra crap.

JSON is king.

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

#117

Post by ex3ndr »

BigChiefSmokem wrote: post #116
lr4444lr wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XML gets a bad wrap. For a protocol you can easily use over RESTful APIs and define a strong schema around, plus with all of the well-optimized libraries in major programming languages and IDE support, I don't really mind working with it at all.

The biggest problem with XML is verbosity. Besides the excess complexity it also add bits over the wire to transmit all that extra crap. JSON is king.

Are you intended to read this XMLs? Having strongly typed protocol is a very cool thing in large multi-entity frameworks. Have you seen any successful JSON schema? I have not.

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

#118

Post by raesene9 »

malthaus wrote: post #94
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…

The problem is legacy culture & systems. Theres almost no chance of a transformation unless a paradigm shift in senior management thinking takes place. Maintaing their mess costs massively and large projects carry risks and a bad track record no one on top can support. Too bad the fintech revolution lost some of its momentum challenging the profitable areas of banking

I'd agree that a paradigm shift is definitely needed to address the problem. Banks need to see that constant investment not "put it in and let it run for 10-15 years" is what's needed.

And yes the point about risk of new projects... who wants to lead a project to replace a mainframe system that's been running successfully for the last 30-40 years and if it goes wrong you're guaranteed to be on the front page of the papers...

I wonder if a pattern will emerge where big banks let the challengers develop the tech, then they buy them and move across to it, once the kinks are all ironed out.

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

#119

Post by justjico »

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…

100% Agree. It’s like saying Coca-Cola is not a marketing company, they sell beverages. Or Apple is not a “design” company, they sell hardware. sigh

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

#120

Post by kokey »

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…

I worked for a bank in the UK that's a US bank that has no retail presence in the UK (that probably narrows it down a lot) but much of the IT operations were being run and managed from the UK. The headcount in the global IT organisation was about the same as the headcount of Apple at the time. I've always known banks has been relying on computers for decades and probably longer than most industries and from my experience this bank was particularly progressive when it comes to technology and happy to innovate and experiment. When working in other parts of the financial industry in the UK it wasn't quite the same as this. I think there's certainly a stronger engineering culture in the US and the benefits of technology delivering productivity at scale is appreciated. The UK also has a legacy of a lot of well paying functions in the financial industry that wasn't relying on technology with people who don't have an aptitude for technology.
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