One of the large trends in financial technology development that I've seen is that banks seem to heavily prefer that their staff leave and form third party soft

One of the large trends in financial technology development that I've seen is that banks seem to heavily prefer that their staff leave and form third party software service providing companies than hire and allocate resources to internal teams. This means transaction costs are driven up massively, but the leading industry players typically deploy innovations in tandem with their competitors. My banker friends have big problems trying to modernize sections of their operations on the basis that too much political capital is needed to liquidate entire floors of staff - but that restriction only lasts until someone has an off-the-shelf solution offering 25M in labour savings per quarter. These inefficiencies and cultural issues hamper execution leading to poorer client outcomes, lower margins, and weaker strategic positioning. I'm glad that some banks are pushing forward to gobble up that easy ROI, but I am concerned that the net effect of this type of automation is systemic risk, as the industry begins to bifurcate between low and high margin banks, and the latter are afforded accelerating capability to consolidate the former. Less players. More capacity. More reliance. Less redundancy. Not necessarily bad for John Q. Everyman, but if he's ultimately carrying that risk while pocketing none of the efficiency gains...