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I think you're sort of right. Banks don't think of themselves as tech companies. Their culture, priorities and upper managemet aren't those of a tech company.
by d4nt 13y ago
I think you're sort of right. Banks don't think of themselves as tech companies. Their culture, priorities and upper managemet aren't those of a tech company.
But they are now tech businesses. Here's an example: Last year RBS made a mess of deploying some code[1]. It shut down their online and telephone banking services as well as stopping money transfers for a few days. Their ATM and branches were still giving out money but this pretty much shut the bank down because people rely on transfers to get paid and pay their bills. The backlog of transactions took days to work through and the whole thing cost the bank 100s of millions in compensation and damaged reputation.
Their branches remained open, but it didn't matter. What people need banks for now is the storage and processing of electronic money transfers. They are a SaaS business with a branch network bolted on. They just haven't realised it yet.
[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15606707 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15606707, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_RBS_computer_system_problems http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_RBS_computer_system_prob...
- gaius 13y agoRight, but being a "tech business" wouldn't have prevented the root cause of that, which was laying off their experienced workers and offshoring to a cheap location. Tech businesses make that kind of blunder all the time.