Operations

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The dirty, low-profile, undignified business of actually complying with all the fantastical confabulations that sales, trading and the legal profession put the bank into.

It is astounding how little resemblance these manicured legal contracts bear to the actual ebbs and flows of operational systems in a bank. Since lawyers never see the latter, this is of no moment to them, but they will spend weeks arguing amongst themselves to shut down the paranoid contingencies that populate the Cartesian theatre of a lawyer’s imagination, notwithstanding that they've never manifested themselves in anyone’s actual experience. See, for example: close-out netting; cross default; NAV triggers.

Up to a certain level of seniority, operations folk see themselves as misshapen bell ringers of the financial services world, doing the grubby but necessary work to ensure the congregation is on time, well dressed and properly presented for evensong. Imperceptibly, as they grow, they will discover a taste for the contorted figurative expressions of those who lead them: the sedentary, sedimentary middle management layer that sits over them preparing powerpoints and dashing from steerco to steerco. These young scallywags soon intuit that, if they wish to avoid the executive recommendations of these steercos — that their functions be outsourced, right-sized, or delegated to a fleet of chatbots, they need to ascend into that management layer so they can be the ones making these recommendations, and overseeing their inevitable remediation.