Community

The incumbent banks have been rather resilient to the digital revolution and the challenger banks have been relatively marginal. Why? I believe that Trust is at the center of the choice still, and if you want to host meaningful money like you paycheck, you tend to use a big bank. Part of this Trust came from Banks being in our life for some time and being present in our high-streets contributed to this perception. I am not sure that this is recognised as much as it should. 

In leaving the high-street, big banks reduce this perception (even if there is a fair amount of inertia to this erosion), and they start competing on equal terms with challengers. And well, I am a Barclays customer and I have not seen any noticeable improvements to their App in many years. And this is still considerably behind Monzo and others. I am now starting to consider shifting my main & business to a challenger instead. 

And the other major strength in banking is the balance sheet. This is what allows you to provide services (particularly lending). Once the deposit start shifting, it is when it is going to start to hurt those big banks. Especially as they don't have the agility to react. 

The culture has not been best in relation to engineering or effectiveness and have allowed much tech debt and operational debt to develop. It seems like it is coming to roost. 

What puzzles me is that Mr Jenkins was at the helm for a good while. So, he holds much responsibility for this "museum of tech". I understand that at that time he had to deal with much of the aftermaths of the financial crisis and whether Barclays was to push Retail or IB more. But surely, digital modernisation was on the cards too. Is this an admission that modernising tech was not done well? 

And what lessons to take from this? Meaningful digital change it is more about organising the collaboration business and technology than strictly delivering technology. And it is typical to keep them at arm's length of each other in banks with a big change function inbetween and many layers of tech management. Are we then admitting that this model does not work and need rethinking? 

The article may genericise a spot observation, but it raises a good question nonetheless. The old adage of buy-not-build does not particularly wash when: 

- You customise a lot of what you buy, meaning that you custom develop while making your life harder working in  the constraints of a package

- What you buy has considerably more capabilities than you need (or many overlaps with other packages already in place). A sure way of complexifiying rather than simplifying your architecture

- The integration spaghetti between the packages and the data alignment become the real nightmare

- The real cost is the cost to change when banks need to adapt quickly. The buy-not-build mainly applies in a cost to run perspective where change and differentiation is not the main driver.

Kaizen thinking takes the very pragmatic view of building to just your needs and assessing carefully when product/SaaS provides advantages. There is some value in this perspective. 

With this said, products like Thought Machine take an open perspective (smart contracts for product definitions), which make them very customisable / extensible. That seem to offer the happy middle and I guess they'll be doing very well indeed.