Reports of our death are an exaggeration: Difference between revisions

Reports of our death are an exaggeration (view source)

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 Thirdly it is naive in the extreme to prime that regulatory compliance is formalistic, let alone “the easy bit of banking”.
-Park all that. For what Mr Perez overlooks as a core competence in a successful bank is the same thing Mr Cryan did. Its ''people'". They are the irreducible, ineffable, magic difference. The tech stack can give them wings, but they have to decide where to fly. They narratise.the bond, form networks, make connections, ''persuade''. These things a machine cannot do.
+Park all that. For what Mr Perez overlooked as a core competence in a successful bank is the same thing Mr Cryan did: its ''people'". They are the irreducible, ineffable, magic difference. The ''informal'' networks by which it works, magically crossing the terrain like some hovering, morphing jellyfish.  Sundar Pichai can’t code that. That human expertise is required to hold the creaking systems together, to work around absurdities and take a pragmatic view — this is not a big in the system, but a feature.
+Not how modernist a disposition this is. It is to critique an organism by its formal, legible operation. It is the view from the disembodied luminaries who occupy that Cartesian theatre called the executive suite. They see only formal vulnerability, because formal structures are all they can see. Individuals are measurable by floorspace occupied, salary, benefits, pension contributions, revenue generated. Most employees don't generate legible revenue. They show up on the map ''only as a liability''.
+From the executive suite, the calculus is obvious: why hire a dude to do that, when a machine could do it cheaper, quicker, and more reliably?
+Therefore the model, articulated by Cryan and implied by Perez: ''prepare for the coming of the machines''. Automate ''every'' process. Reduce the cost line. Remove people, because when they come for us, Amazon won’t be burdened by people
+Now, to be clear, the tech stacks of most banks are dismal. Perez is right about that. Amazon’s tech ''would'' wipe the floor with any banks tech: most are sedimented, interdependent concatenations of old mainframes, Unix servers, Windows terminal servers, and somewhere in the middle of the thicket will be a wang box from 1976 with a CUI interface that can't be switched off without crashing the entire network. These patchwork systems are a legacy of dozens of mergers and acquisitions and millions of lazy, short-term decisions to fix broken systems with sellotape and glue rather than maintaining and overhauling them properly. And banks are tech companies: you can't stop a bank and put it up on the blocks for 6 months while you rebuild it. (though covid: opportunity missed.) it is hard to rebuild the engine of a car while it is barreling down the motorway at 70mph. Banks didn't start thinking of themselves as tech companies until the last twenty years.
+Per John Gall: temporary patches have a habit of becoming permanent.
+We presume Google and Amazon, who always have, are better and more disciplined about their tech infrastructure than that.<ref>See the [[Bezos memo]].</ref>
+The tech stack can give them wings, but they have to decide where to fly. They narratise.the bond, form networks, make connections, ''persuade''. These things a machine cannot do.
+So, note the category error bank leaders make in seeing technology as the competitive threat  it is not. It is just the ticket to play.
+This is bit to say banks employees an unusually are gifted, intelligent bunch. You are invited to read other pages of this site for our views on that.
+Imagine a bank strategy that said the in
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