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Capital One enters enterprise B2B software, new data management SaaS

capitalone.com

51–60 of 63 posts

Re: Capital One enters enterprise B2B software, new data management SaaS

#51

Well… I read it. And I’ve gotta say, that sounds like a blatant violation of Regulation Y, the requirement that bank holding companies engage only in, “The business of banking.” There are lots and lots of activities that fall under that umbrella, but enterprise B2B software sales isn’t one of them. CapOne may be too big to fail, but it’s not too big to receive a C

Which Capital One is breaking Regulation Y? Capital One Bank (USA) N.A. — Currently offers a wide variety of credit card products, other lending products, and deposit products. Capital One, N.A. — Offers a broad spectrum of banking products and financial services to consumers, small businesses, and commercial clients, including traditional banking products through an extensive branch network in Connecticut, the Distr…

Must be fun to be an accountant at these places

Re: Capital One enters enterprise B2B software, new data management SaaS

#52

Well… I read it. And I’ve gotta say, that sounds like a blatant violation of Regulation Y, the requirement that bank holding companies engage only in, “The business of banking.” There are lots and lots of activities that fall under that umbrella, but enterprise B2B software sales isn’t one of them. CapOne may be too big to fail, but it’s not too big to receive a C

Agreed, I don't understand how this doesn't immediately violate Reg Y.

Re: Capital One enters enterprise B2B software, new data management SaaS

#53
post #17
post #3

Here’s a direct link to Capital One Software: https://www.capitalone.com/software/ And a link to the first product they launched, “Slingshot”: https://www.capitalone.com/software/solutions/ Essentially it sounds like Capital One is taking some of their internal tooling and starting to sell it, starting with their tooling for managing Snowflake instances.

I've been out of consulting for 7 years now, so I don't know how widespread or old the trend is, but I'm seeing a lot of banks moving to a product operating model for their internal/backend software. The last place I worked had been at it for a couple of years and there were a few teams that really ran with it. At some point why not turn them into a profit center?

Years ago when I was at Chase Manhattan (shudder) they were at the other end of the extreme where there were multiple teams within the bank that did the exact same thing, and they would have to undercut one another to get business from other internal teams. Somehow everyone got enough business that the teams didn’t ever merge which is good, because rivalries between the teams became so fierce that none of them could work with someone who had been on a competing team. Managers loved it because if you had dollars to spend you would have a lot of people kissing up to win your favor - you could get a lot of free lunches and end of year your office would be full of gift baskets.

Re: Capital One enters enterprise B2B software, new data management SaaS

#54
post #48

Having used to work at Capital One within Shared Tech, I worked with a lot of really brilliant engineers who could easily have been working at FAANG. That being said, they didn't pay as well as FAANG so a lot of us moved on. I'm not surprised at all by this move, there's a lot of solutions at Capital One that can be monetized. The company is so large that there's redundant solutions concurrently developed by differen…

> Having used to work at Capital One within Shared Tech, I worked with a lot of really brilliant engineers who could easily have been working at FAANG.

I don't doubt this - but my guess is that a lot of these top engineers are working at CapitalOne for relatively low salaries compared to FAANG explicitly because they're tethered to the company by an H1B or L1 or similar visa and can't easily jump ship.

The headquarters of Capital One is smack-dab in the middle of the US defense and IC contracting hub in Tysons Corner in Northern Virginia. They're competing for talent now with hundreds (thousands?) of small software contractors and also the big defense players like Northrop, Lockheed, etc. And on top of that, the big tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft have expanded heavily in the area and are now gobbling up all the talent as they pay way more than DOD and gov't contract work.

Yet Capital One still doesn't offer competitive salaries that even match the defense contractors, never-mind AWS and Microsoft. I know half a dozen talented engineers who got tired of the $175K defense industry salary "ceiling" and jump ship to Amazon. I know of zero who've moved to Capital One, though they probably employ more engineers in the area than any other company.

And from what I've seen, it's because their engineering departments are 90% Indians on H1B (again - some very talented). Most US citizens won't want to work there.

Re: Capital One enters enterprise B2B software, new data management SaaS

#55
This makes me want to get rid of my Capital One card. I knew they'd wasted millions on a giant engineering department that does jack for their business (worked with many of their ex-engs), and this is proof that they never had anything useful to do. CTO must be trying to save his bonus by making up a new irrelevant business to justify their unnecessarily large engineering org and lack of purpose.

Re: Capital One enters enterprise B2B software, new data management SaaS

#56
post #22
post #9

What do a lot of giant corporations like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Cisco and now Capial One have in common? They write their own software. What's in your wallet? All the money you saved.

At a certain scale you simply can not afford software licenses. If they could they almost certainly would have tether bought an off the shelf software.

Speaking as someone who has worked at multiple such companies, they don't buy off the shelf because you can't get a big budget and build a big team and get a big win and a big promotion that way. They also have so many teams they literally invent the same thing 3 times over. Sometimes building and firing the same team 6 times over as they try and fail to build one thing.

When a company has more money than sense, it enjoys spending it more on building rather than buying. It's also much easier to justify dedicating FTEs to yet another internal project rather than vetting a vendor and churning out a PO for a product you don't know how long you'll use.

Re: Capital One enters enterprise B2B software, new data management SaaS

#57
I work in the enterprise/b2b bank software and consulting market. Nothing seen here appears to have any impact on our business or customers. Not quite sure who this is oriented at.

If you are so big you can spend time arguing with capital one about your IT workloads, you may consider doing it in house or working with a smaller partner like ourselves who exclusively focuses on the software part. When you don’t have to worry about running a bank, you can get a lot of other work done. It’s also a shitload easier to operate outside of the regulatory domain you would otherwise be trapped in.

Re: Capital One enters enterprise B2B software, new data management SaaS

#58
This is sometimes hot and cold sometimes depending on C.I/T/D.O decisions. I used to work for enterprises that said software is eating the world and revenue , insourcing and IP differentiation. Come next CXO cycle , we are a manufacturing company / Fintech / Insurer and IT is left to the specialists (and sell off entire arms or rebadge).

Aside , no two warehouses may be alike (fragmentation) + the fact that specialized products that keep adding new features find it hard in the data lineage space / governance space. I doubt if this steam will keep up unless there is a significant revenue (and that will be a challenge for anyone who would make a decision on a SaaS product)

Re: Capital One enters enterprise B2B software, new data management SaaS

#59
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a certain scale you simply can not afford software licenses. If they could they almost certainly would have tether bought an off the shelf software.

Speaking as someone who has worked at multiple such companies, they don't buy off the shelf because you can't get a big budget and build a big team and get a big win and a big promotion that way. They also have so many teams they literally invent the same thing 3 times over. Sometimes building and firing the same team 6 times over as they try and fail to build one thing. When a company has more money than sense, it e…

[deleted]

Re: Capital One enters enterprise B2B software, new data management SaaS

#60
post #3

Here’s a direct link to Capital One Software: https://www.capitalone.com/software/ And a link to the first product they launched, “Slingshot”: https://www.capitalone.com/software/solutions/ Essentially it sounds like Capital One is taking some of their internal tooling and starting to sell it, starting with their tooling for managing Snowflake instances.

I see they’ve already mastered the enterprise software technique of a “screen-by-screen video” that shows zero actual screens of the actual product, just a series of animations vaguely indicating business processes that are efficient & scale & managed etc.

How else do you get people to sign and/or pay for dogshit you haven't even built or battle tested yet? (if you're offended, I'm talking about your product)
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