Technology

Talking with the leader of a large bank the other day proved illuminating.  He said to me that he could see the digital revolution happening, and wants to embrace it.  All well and good.  He continued then to say something that I hear quite often: “but what do we do about the people”. Just as…

I was having a debate yesterday where a bank executive was asking me about what the hottest things in FinTech are right now.  My answer was machine learning (AI) and blockchain.  There are others such as contextual commerce, voice recognition and digital assistants, but machine learning and blockchain are top of mind. His response was…

As mentioned, ANZ are happy keeping their 40-year-old version of a system – why does that always remind me of some movie title – and I have decided to shut up about this after one last blog update.  This one is a final piece of perspective to this whole discussion, and puts a 40-year-old system in…

I tried to make some allowance for ANZ running a 40-year-old core system yesterday, by pointing to the fact that people are slow to change and there may well be no compelling reason to switch a legacy system. Even though I’ve tried to make the case many times: Banks with pre-internet age core systems have…

I talked about the legacy problem yesterday and, in reality, the problem isn’t just the legacy system. It’s the legacy people and legacy customer. The legacy people are the ones who sit in the organisation and resist change. They know where their cheese is and they don’t want it to move. This appears to be…

Well I couldn’t let this one go by without commenting on it.  A regular theme in the blog is get rid of old technology if it’s running core systems.  The reason is that systems designed before Mark Zuckerberg was born are surely not fit for purpose in this day and age.  Well, the CIO of…

I can remember a few years ago that the UK pound was almost at the level of being valued at $2.  Two dollars to the pound.  Amazing.  I brought a lot of American stuff that year.  Yesterday, I bought something and it was $1.30 to the pound.  Shoot.  The dinner for $100 that a few…

I was piqued by Victor Matarranz’s [SEVP Head of Group Strategy and Chairman’s Office, Banco Santander] presentation at MoneyConf last week, mainly because he began by talking about Fintech 1.0 versus Fintech 2.0. Fintech 1.0 he defined as the emergence of peer-to-peer lenders and new payments companies between 2010 and 2014.  During this time everyone…

I go to too many conferences and have my very own list of Bingo Buzzwords including apps, APIs, analytics, blockchain, cloud and more.  There are four specific words that are used often however, which make my crawl a little.  The reason is that I don’t think anyone knows what they mean by them.   The four words…

I had an interesting conversation with one banker this week.  They work for a bank that is interested in blockchain use cases (aren’t we all) and have been tasked to create a proof of concept.  All well and good.  Then the challenge kicked in. Who wants to work on the proof of concept? The team…