At huge financial institutions, software improvements do not usually improve revenue. At the very best, if you’re lucky, they might (although not provably) impr

At huge financial institutions, software improvements do not usually improve revenue. At the very best, if you’re lucky, they might (although not provably) improve the derivative of revenue or cut some costs. And at most banks, revenue projections are fragile and magical, making revenue’s derivatives are volatile and doubly magical. In that context, try explaining to a non-technical director and his or her director, why the system “needs” fixing, when it generated consistent profits for the last decade, and why the risks of instability are worth it. So, banks are understandably the epitome of risk-averse. Why make changes to the current system, when (1) the current system works, (2) almost nobody fully understands how or why the whole system works and (3) it generates revenue that’s 1000x the salaries of the engineers employed to keep it running? It’s not an environment where the dividends of innovation are typically worth the risk: besides, from the bank’s corporate perspective, there’s a whole startup industry (fintech) that exists to do the innovating “for you”. In short, it’s a division of labor, but it’s not a very transparent one to the unannointed, and it’s very frustrating to be on the “wrong side”. Superficially, they have tons of money: think about all the interesting problems they could solve with that money!! But of course, nothing is that simple.