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
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
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes you can, and that's kind of the point. Slowly but surely, more and more companies are realising that their digital efforts are just as integral to their business as whatever else it is that they're doing. Every company needs to be a tech company now. In Australia, Commbank realised this at a very early stage: there's actually very little differentiation between the financial products from bank to bank. Sure, inte…
> Every company needs to be a tech company now.
I've heard this mantra for some years now (in various forms, eg "all companies are tech companies, or dying ones"), I wonder where it stems from.
Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies
#203I 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
>Coca-Cola is not a marketing company,
I never agreed with this mentality. Advertisement is Coke's cost center; it's not what they sell. They sell licensing rights to soft drinks: that's what makes them money.
Advertisement is a cost of having a customer facing brand. Should P&G and Unilever be considered advertisement companies?
Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies
#204Goodbye Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citi, and the rest of the credit cartel! You will never be missed. Hello Wealthfront, Robinhood, Simple, and the rest of the movers and shakers!
> Simple, and the rest of the movers and shakers Yeah, a bank that announce that 1% of their customers had their account involuntarily closed with 30 days notice is sure to build trust in the new world order. https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/14/simple-account-closures/
Simple engineer here, not representing the company's views necessarily but relaying my own opinions.
That situation was indeed a load of bullshit, but the other side of that coin is that we were doing something that has never had to happen in the history of modern banking, probably because it's insane.
You see, normally when a bank is acquired by another bank, the acquirer gets the acquiree's FED terminals, ACH numbers, deals with Visa, etc. that make the transition more-or-less seamless for customers. So customers keep their cards, their direct deposit still works, their checks still work, and all they need to do is log in to a different website to manage their accounts.
What we were forced to do was to essentially close hundreds of thousands of bank accounts at our former banking partner, open new accounts at our new partner, transfer funds, and issue new cards. And we had a contractual deadline before which the transition had to be 100% complete. We explored literally every other option available, including having BBVA acquire our ACH and Visa prefixes, but that was a no-go for reasons I'm not aware of.
So we got the vast majority of our customers to make this painful switch, which was a miracle in itself, but we could not make it all the way down the list, and that sucked. New bank means new account-holder rules, customers changed email addresses/phones, customers moved, we underestimated the complexity/time requirements, all sorts of reasons applied; but the bottom line is that it was an inevitable situation for this kind of transition, and while we did what we could, we let some customers down (0.7% to be exact).
At least I can say that we won't have to go through this again, and we're finally out of the woods with all of these platform transitions, and we're back to building products again. Feel free to AMA.
Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies
#205isn't it everything ? everything is techno engineered these days uber the tech taxi amazon the tech store ... it's the engineered era
Amazon is the way to put your product on the internet. AWS is their biggest profit center and a lot of Amazon's product sales are from merchants who happen to sell their product on Amazon (and use Amazon's fulfillment centers).
Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies
#206I 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…
>but their technology still is subservient to their non-tech business goals. While "software is eating the world" has been quoted to the point of being a cliché,
Better to say "software ate the world, but netflix has eaten the software" by almost singlehandedly wiping all its upstart competitors from "indigenous tech companies."
To some extend, Netflix deserve some credit for tech. A non-dotcom running tier one CDN is not a small deal.
Yet, they are still a small fish "in the bigger picture of things" though.
Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies
#207I wish banks would learn what a "transaction" is. I have repeated problems with electronic banking where one party to the transaction shows it as a "success" and the other party shows it as a "failure". These problems tend to be tough for me to resolve as both parties insist on their end.
I'm almost ready to go back to writing checks by hand. Waving a cancelled check around has always worked well to resolve transaction disputes. There's no paper trail with electronic banking.
Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies
#208I 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 in technology for an investment bank and i hear “we are not a technology company” every quarter. Ironically, the tech we develop is a major factor, if not the only factor, for revenue. My motivation is instantly shattered when i hear that.
Maybe you can fix the problem where I want to download all my statements and transactions for the last tax year. It should be a one button push from their web site. But nope, it's always 15 minutes to a half hour tediously downloading things statement by statement, form by form, argghh.
Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
>Coca-Cola is not a marketing company, I never agreed with this mentality. Advertisement is Coke's cost center; it's not what they sell. They sell licensing rights to soft drinks: that's what makes them money. Advertisement is a cost of having a customer facing brand. Should P&G and Unilever be considered advertisement companies?
> Should P&G and Unilever be considered advertisement companies?
Absolutely. The value of their businesses are entirely based on the brands that they have built, and those brands are built by advertising. Making food to stuff in the boxes is just a cost of building a successful brand.
Re: It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies
#210I 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
You can fairly say that Coca cola is a packaging company.