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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

#241

Post by nopinsight »

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…

A major reason why upstarts like Netflix could successfully disrupt old guards, while banks and healthcare industries are still largely immuned despite huge inefficiencies in the way they operate, is the trust factor.

People don’t mind trying out a new entertainment service by a small startup especially they get a free trial month. If it breaks, so what? The same cannot be said about places they choose to manage their finances or health.

Perhaps it might be more promising for a new partnership by big-names in adjacent industries, such as the Amazon-Berkshire Hathaway-JP Morgan healthcare initiative, to disrupt these trust-based industries.

If there is a good way to accelerate the process of consumer trust building, it might allow more newcomers a chance of disruptions. It should result in lower costs and economic surpluses for the consumers. ‘How?’ is the 64-million-dollar question.

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

#242

Post by shreyanshd »

WalterBright wrote: post #208
shreyanshd wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am sorry you have to spend half an hour downloading your statements. But what you’re complaining about comes under commercial banking tech, which is generally outsourced to IT consulting firms. Our tech platform is generally for institutional clients, who have systems on their end, and our systems interact with theirs to carry out business.

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

#243

Post by dredmorbius »

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.

Channel matters FAR more than content.

("Content is king" was always a distraction. And that came from Sumner Redstone (Viacom), not Bill Gates, who only quoted it.)

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

#244

Post by somberi »

lev99 wrote: post #167
bunderbunder wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I go the other way, somewhat. Last time I was interviewing for jobs, one line I heard from a whole lot of financial companies was, "We like to think of ourselves as more of a tech company than a bank." It's an instant turn-off for me when I hear something like that. These are companies that should be thinking of tech as a means to an end, and not an end in an of itself. Even when I worked at a major software v…

If (good) tech companies use tech as a means to an end, and a bank wants to think of themselves as a tech company, that means that a bank thinking of themselves as a tech company doesn't necessary think of tech as an end in of itself. Companies too invested in tech tend to spend themselves into bankruptcy. Companies not invested enough in tech tend to be overcome by companies with better tech more slowly.

There could be multiple reasons for this, two of which come to my mind:

1. The person who said it may be fancying his own role as tech-heavy and might relate to his/her imagination of what tech-pure companies do. Saying, we are like Google, appeases the person saying it, and satisfies their ego.

2. Often candidates like listening to this. It may not have worked for you, but for the candidates who like hearing this, this works wonderfully. If I were to wager, this line works for more candidates than it pisses off.

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

#245

Post by Terretta »

nowarninglabel wrote: post #240
Terretta wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come work at MUFG, largest bank in free world, $2.7T, which decided we have to be a tech company. Our head of technology strategy for Americas is on hacker news at quarter to midnight. And hiring, not just for blockchain. (See my “about” text.) Worth a chat if you’re in NYC or San Diego.

If you don't mind me hijacking your comment, I'm actually currently trying to solve a problem through which I am trying to connect to people such as you. Essentially, Kiva has served the world's unbanked and underbanked through crowd-funding to some success, but ultimately to reach all the underserved we need to get the data we and our partners have to large regional and global banks so they can price the risk of the…

This sounds great.

You’d troll their LinkedIn looking for a title that esonated, read the job description to be sure, and try connecting, exchange enough convo to move over to their bank email, and then share the idea.

In our case, I’m the right guy. You can email me (and connect on LinkedIn if you like) and I’ll reply with my bank email. Elaborate on the idea then.

I’ve got 250 leaders thinking about how they could use new kinds of data, we’ll connect you to right groups. Even I have a team of PhDs looking for interesting things to tie together to better serve communities.

Note though, getting capital isn’t our problem, we’re interested in more ways to give it out, use it, put it to work.

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

#246

Post by Terretta »

keithwhor wrote: post #237
Terretta wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come work at MUFG, largest bank in free world, $2.7T, which decided we have to be a tech company. Our head of technology strategy for Americas is on hacker news at quarter to midnight. And hiring, not just for blockchain. (See my “about” text.) Worth a chat if you’re in NYC or San Diego.

I find this statement funny, if only because in the context of Silicon Valley culture, the statement "[x] is on hacker news at quarter to midnight" normally just means "[x] isn't doing any work at quarter to midnight." (I understand what you're going for and appreciate it, it's just interesting how social signals are interpreted given different industries / contexts.) (... and yes, me posting this comment does, in fa…

On the contrary, if your job depends on understanding trends in a field, read more:

https://qz.com/668514/if-you-want-to-be-like-warren-buffett-...

Being aware of HN is part of my work.

In my case, we get four key dimensions of value:

1. Seeing trends early is in the job description, and a small slice of zeitgeist is here. I check here, several other self-selecting subgroup sites, a broad RSS list, white paper subscription sites, etc., and typically also read one subject matter book a day. With enough dots of info across a broad array of sources, you can see trends earlier.

2. Finding emerging tech likely able to go ‘enterprise’ is also part of my JD. That often depends on leadership. Some of those leaders are here. You can tell a lot about a company from its founders. I’ve been an extremely early customer of startups found here, years later they lead their segment and we’re already on board. Examples like Hashicorp or CoreOS come to mind.

3. Emerging debates that do matter are often here early, where threads are high quality enough to get exposure to well thought, good logic, alternative views. Being able to absorb more of those improves low data decisions.

4. You can even find talent early. Many met here have gone on to release awesome tools, join or found cool companies, get acquired by BigCos... it’s great to see talented and motivated trajectories and learn it’s not all just luck.

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

#247

Post by bennyelv »

wan23 wrote: post #168
babaganoosh89 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably a VP of engineering

Probably not - you'd be surprised how low the the title of "Vice President" is in finance companies.

In my opinion, not unreasonably for these two reasons:

Banks generally delegate responsibility for huge sums of money to quite a low level in the organisation, and their clients are usually much smaller than the bank is. There needs to be some kind of parity in the apparent seniority between client and bank. The CEO of an SME doesn't want to be dealing with someone who sounds junior when discussing deals regarding the total value of their company.

Banks are so large and complex that it's usually not far off the bottom wrung of the org chart that you're responsible for huge sums of money/risks/contracts. People in smaller organisations with similar monetary responsibilities (in absolute terms) are usually the senior ones with senior sounding titles.

For example, I was a lowly infrastructure engineer in a tier 1 global investment bank working in the platform engineering team not far off the bottom of the ladder, yet I was responsible for infrastructure spending decisions in the scale of 10-100 million dollars. A drop in the ocean for the IT budget of $5Bn dollars, but a larger monetary responsibility than the CEO of a mid sized company has. So yes, I was called a VP.

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

#248

Post by bennyelv »

oarsinsync wrote: post #191
barrkel wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VP of Engineering isn't as devalued as VP of Sales even in companies where a couple of years of experience gets you VP. Subject matters.

I know people who are less than 5 years into their first jobs from graduation who are VPs in Engineering, in financial firms in London (City) and New York (Wall Street). Organisation/culture/industry matters more than subject, I think.

In my experience it's pretty rare to get the VP title in less than 5 years. In fact in my graduate intake nobody did it in that timescale. Good people would get it in 5-7 years.

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

#249

Post by heedlessly2 »

justjico wrote: post #119
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

Apple is a design company.

Foxconn, Qualcomm, and Samsung make their hardware.

Cognizan and InfoSys develop some of their software too.

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

#250

Post by bunderbunder »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #221
bunderbunder wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, I go the other way, somewhat. Last time I was interviewing for jobs, one line I heard from a whole lot of financial companies was, "We like to think of ourselves as more of a tech company than a bank." It's an instant turn-off for me when I hear something like that. These are companies that should be thinking of tech as a means to an end, and not an end in an of itself. Even when I worked at a major software v…

> It's an instant turn-off for me when I hear something like that. While I can see why you find it grating, I think I would forgive them. Whatever else they are, interviews are also those awkward social moments when new acquaintances are just trying to push beyond small talk while trying to please each other. At this stage, it's normal for people to try a little too hard.

You're right that it's could just be a recruiter being over-eager and/or missing the mark on what would attract me personally. But that doesn't really change my stance on the subject.

Interviews aren't really like a casual social interaction. Progressing past the initial phone call typically involves spending from several hours up to to a whole weekend on some cute homework project, shirking on one's current job for more phone calls, burning PTO for on-site interviews and whatnot. I've got precious little time I'm willing to spend on that sort of stuff, so it's in my interest to be supremely petty.

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