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A service like this would be much appreciated from the market. I can imagine the challenges are convincing banks to signup and to convince them of the value of

by danaw 13y ago

A service like this would be much appreciated from the market. I can imagine the challenges are convincing banks to signup and to convince them of the value of a service that isn't directly consumer facing. If they had a few key early adopters that could strengthen the sales pitch, but it becomes more difficult when trying to sign on the smaller banks and credit unions. I know a software developer at my local CU and he can't say enough how backwards, slow, and politically motivated decision making is in the company. That is a huge barrier and I wish Second Treasurery the best of luck.

JackFr 13y ago
Best of luck to them. I would hold out more hope if they had spoken to 100 banks rather than 100 heads of tech firms. The banking industry in general is not averse to automation (and has been for the past 55 years - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognit...), but there are cases where transactions are complex without being _needlessly_ complex.
VLM 13y ago
"I can imagine the challenges are convincing banks to signup" Is closely related to "backwards, slow, and politically motivated decision making" Enough outsourcing and experimentation has been done that they already know how they'll get burned, making the sale hard. I worked at a financial services company which spun off a megacorp-ABC and later got purchased by megacorp-XYZ. In between they tried to sell their services to everyone, but a major source of pushback was "Thats nice but you guys are megacorp-ABC and we are not" at the start, and at the end "OMG megacorp-XYZ is our biggest competitor". Another huge problem is commoditization. There's not much difference between entities; that's a good thing for almost everyone involved, although it makes empire builders make ridiculous internal claims about their secret sauce. "Our secret sauce, the ONLY thing that makes us distinct from our competitors, is our TPS report headers". That's not exactly going to help outsourced TPS report generator startups. So my startup advice would be to pitch that you're not trying to get bought out by their biggest competitor (but then, whats the point of a startup?) and that you're doing something "really new" not taking over a commodity companies secret sauce.

by danaw 13y ago

JackFr 13y ago

Best of luck to them. I would hold out more hope if they had spoken to 100 banks rather than 100 heads of tech firms. The banking industry in general is not averse to automation (and has been for the past 55 years - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_ink_character_recognit...), but there are cases where transactions are complex without being _needlessly_ complex.

VLM 13y ago

"I can imagine the challenges are convincing banks to signup" Is closely related to "backwards, slow, and politically motivated decision making" Enough outsourcing and experimentation has been done that they already know how they'll get burned, making the sale hard. I worked at a financial services company which spun off a megacorp-ABC and later got purchased by megacorp-XYZ. In between they tried to sell their services to everyone, but a major source of pushback was "Thats nice but you guys are megacorp-ABC and we are not" at the start, and at the end "OMG megacorp-XYZ is our biggest competitor". Another huge problem is commoditization. There's not much difference between entities; that's a good thing for almost everyone involved, although it makes empire builders make ridiculous internal claims about their secret sauce. "Our secret sauce, the ONLY thing that makes us distinct from our competitors, is our TPS report headers". That's not exactly going to help outsourced TPS report generator startups. So my startup advice would be to pitch that you're not trying to get bought out by their biggest competitor (but then, whats the point of a startup?) and that you're doing something "really new" not taking over a commodity companies secret sauce.