For no particular reason, I was reflecting on being a boomer the other day. Probably ti was to do with the speed of change. After all, when I was a lad, there was no tech at home. I played with Batman and James Bond Corgi toys – which I still do – and that was about it.
Back at school days, we had notebooks and learned calligraphy (google it). Maths was based upon slide rules and logarithmic tables. I remember the teachers having a hissy fit when I turned up one day with an electronic calculator. They really disliked technological progress. They also didn’t like my fashion sense when, at age fifteen, I started turning up with hair over my shirt collar and wearing platform shoes. Those were the days.
Going through college, my mum taught me to type. She was a lecturer in secretarial skills – shorthand and typing – and I wanted to be a journalist, so she taught me the skills to achieve around 60 words per minute. That’s been a good skill to learn ever since, particularly now that I am a kind of journalist and need to write fast (ed: why not use voice-to-text you old fart). But then my mum got annoyed with me when she turned up at the collage campus one day and I was wearing make-up and had my ear pierced. Those were the days.
Leaving college, I went to a mainframe computing company – the one that people told me no-one was fired from (I was!) – and became a programmer in BASIC, COBOL and PL/1 … could still do this if anyone needs an old fart for programming.
Getting that first job, I also got my first bank account and discovered what a cheque book and passbook was. You paid money in through a branch and three to five days later, it was approved. All of this recorded in physical accounting books of debits and credits. Amazingly, technologically, we had these things called cash machines so that I could see when my cheque deposits were approved and get money for partying. Those were the days.
Then the 1990s came around and suddenly we were seeing PCs develop in the home. I had my first exposure to personal computers in about 1985, which shows how long that’s been! I got my first email address in 1987. This means that we are talking about systems forty years old and soon to be fifty. It makes me feel old, but then what’s the problem with that? It’s called experience.
Equally, the 1990s saw me married with a mortgage. With no clue how a mortgage worked, when I decided to move to another house and the bank manager said that would cost me thousands to break the current mortgage, I was ballistic. Those were the days.
By the early 2000s, I was working from home with a desktop set-up from Dell that was brilliant. We were just moving from dial-up to broadband, but I still remember that lovely sound of accessing the network.
One big memory was watching David Bowie performing live on the internet, streamed by AOL. It seemed like the world had leaped forward.
By this time, all of the big banks were rolling out online banking. It looked pretty nasty, was not easy to use, relied on branch back up for all the paper processes that were still in place – depositing cheques! – and was not really committed to by the bank leadership teams who knew nothing about technology. Some things don’t change but, ah, those were the days!
A decade later and almost all of those big banks had almost failed. We had a financial crisis, a sovereign debt crisis and a financial system on its back foot. At the same time, we had a breakthrough in the developments of cloud computing and smartphones. A computer in my pocket connected to a global range of processes in the cloud changed the world … and so was born fintech!
We no longer needed online banking, cheque books, cash and paper. The world was transformed in the last decade.
Oh, and that was the year I got a tattoo, much to my mother’s disapproval. Don’t ask me where or I’ll have to kill you. Ah, those were the days.
And now we are midway through the 2020s, and AI is transforming everything from how we bank to how we talk to how we learn to how we eat. It’s just a start but, ever since ChatGPT appeared along with its brethren like Gemini, Claude, Deepseek and more, our world is changing once more.
In particular, going back to the old days, no one even mentioned being gay. In fact, funnily enough, I was discussing this the other day about the Flintstones theme song and how it ends by saying we’ll have a gay old time. That is definitely old time. Today, we talk about tattoos, accents, gender, our private parts and more openly on the telly. Back in my day, a lady called Mrs Mary Whitehouse would be turning in her grave but hey, the world moves on.
In fact, that’s probably the point. Whether playing with Corgi toys or dialling up to watch David Bowie, every decade changes our world and this decade is no exception. The only thing that hits home hard is how quickly the world is changing, as we see our newest bank branches staffed by robots.
If you’re into the latest developments of AI integrated into our physical world through robotics then you need to check this out.
Meanwhile, on reflection, the thing you realise, as a boomer, si that the only constant is change. Change in society and technology and change in the world. The only constant is change.
Chris M Skinner
Chris Skinner is best known as an independent commentator on the financial markets through his blog, TheFinanser.com, as author of the bestselling book Digital Bank, and Chair of the European networking forum the Financial Services Club. He has been voted one of the most influential people in banking by The Financial Brand (as well as one of the best blogs), a FinTech Titan (Next Bank), one of the Fintech Leaders you need to follow (City AM, Deluxe and Jax Finance), as well as one of the Top 40 most influential people in financial technology by the Wall Street Journal's Financial News. To learn more click here...