Slashdot Mirror
Reluctance To Go Mobile Inhibiting Innovation In Financial Services (enterprisersproject.com)
Lemeowski writes: Compliance concerns have long prevented financial services businesses from adopting mobile capabilities as quickly as other industries. But Yvette Jackson of Thomson Reuters argues that technology advancements have made compliance worries of the past now obsolete, and financial services companies are running out of excuses for not going mobile. She stresses that holding onto this reluctance will cause businesses to miss opportunities, limit innovation, and turn away talent by restraining their workflow. She says, "Any millennial joining the financial services industry, who expects a flawless user experience both at home and at work, is – I'm sure – surprised on their first day in the office when they get to their desk and are transported back in time by the technology they're expected to use."
Sounds right. I recently applied for a programming job at a bank. After the interview and showing me the place, they offered me the job. I politely declined. Then I quickly closed my accounts and moved to a more modern bank. Why? That bank literally uses MSAccess tables to store ALL of the customer data. And VB5 "processes" to interact with the feds. Un-believable. They are still doing it to this day. Ironically enough, they now have a web presence that doesn't work 99% of the time.
Every competent bank offers a mobile app which lets you manipulate your accounts and deposit checks via OCR, and companies like Vanguard and Fidelity offer mobile apps, too.
For support on-call personnel, there are laptops (bigger screens and real keyboards) plus tethering.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
I'm far to be a millenial and I worked in the past and I am still working for a financial institution and some days I believe I am a paleontologist. They are still running Windows XP on a majority of the workstations with IE8 and Java 6. They have architects lagging behind to implement a nearly two decades obsolete architecture. The security guys are sleeping hard, I found many potential security holes in the environment, while security guys are still talking about what a hard to guess password is. I am looking to escape this nightmare.
Achille Talon
Hop!
I haven't done a whole lot of work in financial services, but what I have done was with ancient in-house software that had clunky, keyboard-only interfaces that would make any self-identified "millennial" break down crying. It was also rock solid software that didn't crash randomly or even slow down. It didn't lose data or corrupt files or update fifteen times in an hour. It worked exactly the way it was expected to work: the same way it had worked for decades.
You see, when you're working with millions of dollars in other people's money, a "flawless user experience" is a significantly less important aspect of software development than never fucking up.
I have a feeling that the financial services industry isn't going to miss millennial "talent" who needs to be able to dick around with their accounts on their smartphone anytime, anywhere.
Trying to figure out if the author is shilling some service, or just woefully inept? Ah, but what can you expect from a CIO focused article...
--WooooHoooo--
that millenials are allowed to have any responsibility worth having in financial services industry? I have karma to burn, so fume and mod down all you want. But isn't this orthodoxy in technology actually a good thing if it keeps people with poor impulse control away from making decisions about significant-size financial transactions?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
I sure don't want my bank account's security left open on a developer's tablet at Starbucks while they chat-up the barista. So please, if you hear about jobs where workers can have access to sensitive customer/patient information while downing shots at the bar please let us know. This business does not respect the security of my information. Working on off-line dev code from home is fine. Access to data off site is not!
Bank manager: [Looking through a credit card statement the size of a yellow pages telephone book, shaking his head and calling a customer on the telephone:
"You may be a city trader, but as your local bank manager and a respected member of the community, I must insist that you come down to my office this afternoon for a serious face-to-face chat about the sensiible management of money!".
City trader: "Yes, what would like to know?"
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
As someone who works at a decent-sized bank, and knowing what other 'big' banks are doing around the area, I really wonder what the writer was thinking here.
Financial services are roughly three categories:
* Backoffice -- Mostly IT, so maintenance, development etc. (on aging platforms from time to time, but that doesn't matter). Not something you want to do mobile, you want a decent workstation. Maybe outsourced, maybe in-house (if deemed sensitive enough)
* Frontoffice: helpdesks, financial advisors, etc. They already have apps/tablet software, etc, so they can come to your house to sell you their product. So, nothing new there
* management: doesn't need anything, really. They might want mobile, but all they need is to receive their email, make minutes, etc. And they do that on mobile devices just fine already
(of course, this is traditional banking, not the asset/trust/stock/portfolio management... But even then, they still wouldn't want to do that mobile)
So really, are there *any* advantages to going mobile? The article (which, yes, I browsed), is about employees wanting to go mobile. Really, nobody wants that but some lazy-ass phonepeckering controlfreak manager (and I mean lazy-ass because if you want to do your work quickly, you want a decent workstation to type mails at speed, or call while typing... with 10 fingers instead of one).
It's bad clickbait...
"Any millennial joining the financial services industry, who expects a flawless user experience both at home and at work, is – I'm sure – surprised on their first day in the office when they get to their desk and are transported back in time by the technology they're expected to use."
Too fucking bad. Newer isn't always better or more reliable. People / companies paid money for stuff that works, and they don't mind if it keeps working.
She stresses that holding onto this reluctance will cause businesses to miss opportunities, limit innovation, and turn away talent by restraining their workflow.
Perhaps, or perhaps it'll just turn away those easily distracted by shiny new - squirrel !
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
This woman has no idea what she is talking about. I am posting anonymously because I work for one of the top five banks in the US as a systems administrator whose job is to protect internal IT assets, create monitoring tools, and help make long-term decisions. I am also writing this as a pissed off individual who just read an article written by a complete moron on the subject.
One - my bank that I am employed at has tools and resources that all web based, both internally and for the most part, for all of our customer-facing functions. Most of our sites are at minimum CSS2 compliant, thus making our sites responsive and able to be viewed in a variety of browsers. In addition, like many other banks, we have customer apps for the major platforms. So as far as not being able to be used from a smartphone, or in some other modern manner, I cry foul.
Two - I work from home a lot. We utilize many up to date products / protocols to enable remote workers to access their files, team sharing resources, etc. HR, calendars, employee resources, etc. are all available. Many of these are utilized by several in-house apps / sites to provide custom work environments / workflows for various teams and departments. I operate both Windows and Linux servers (been a UNIX man since before I was out of junior high school), and I employ modern tools. My favorite tool is my Hackintosh running a remote access application ;)
Three - Like it or not, banking and financial institutions are required by Federal (and in many cases International) law to adhere to various standards and auditing procedures, and yes, we get audited quite a lot - which is something the average consumer should WANT AND REQUIRE by any banking institution. Some of this may utilize non-post 2010 technology and/or buzzwords, but it works, and like it or not, it is well understood by both the teams that support these installs as well as those auditing them. You don't change something because some dumbass somewhere said "Wow! This website says this is the next thing - we change NOW!" Plus, like it or not, non-IT people are very difficult to teach / retrain on how to use a new environment, and so is the Federal Government. Sometimes things aren't changed because of some long-standing regulation that controls how changes occur. Perhaps this is why the American banking system is one of the most stable things around... (I expect arguments on that statement...)
Four - Millennials are often not qualified to understand the hows and whys something was implemented a particular way. Sure, their high-falooting college edumacation gave them everything they need to know about IT, so the first thing they do is come in is to run their mouths, and then get frustrated because no one older or more experienced / wiser seems to want to immediately jump on board and run with their new ideas. Sure, new ideas should be explored, but only in time and with the appropriate amount of study and testing. I spend the majority of my days creating tools to help detect and resolve problems on multiple environments automatically. I have to keep abreast on everything going on in the networking and security communities. So, I understand the potential issues with every change I recommend or even make on how to do something. I listen to all the ideas that are brought before me, but I also have the experience to know when something is more or less a fad, and when something can truly improve the workflow for myself, my team, or enterprise-wide. Legacy tools and code are going to be present everywhere for some reason.
Five - Tables and smartphones are wonderful things, but I personally can't be productive in my job using a tablet or an iPad, no matter what someone else might think. I need a laptop or a personal computer that I can run a shell on, etc. Another way to look at this is how can an organization adapt to allow for many different types of technology to be used by people with varying needs as long as their jobs are performed correctly? Has this author never heard of A
But then, once a project gets to the point where technical requirements need to be specified in detail, the pains start. The banks marketing department wants "everything to work with just one click and without cumbersome login (just re-use the Facebook OpenID)", and the legal and security deparment of the same bank of course want tight security, confirmation dialogs and limits to what a user can do to himself, data protection etc. etc. etc...
At that point, I really hate it that our customers (the Banks) think that we can wield some magic wand and turn completely contradicting requirements into a workable specification.
Fancy, colorful "apps" that behave like your 12-year-old-daughter's favorite social networking toy will just never be secure tools for serious investors.
The financial services industry, who expects a captive user base both at home and at work, will – I'm sure – be surprised in the next few years when they check their quarterly reports and find that the technology they're using and services they provide, have completely removed them from the arena in which new potential customers look for financial services.
There is a huge difference between the level of access given to customers and the level of access given to workers inside the financial industry. The actual people working in the industry are responsible for making deals worth in the hundreds of thousands, and sometimes millioins, on daily basis. I am not sure that forcing people like that to be present on site when they do that is such a bad thing.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
My impression is that it is rarely appropriate to include the words "bank" and "think" in the same sentence.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Microsoft still issues updates to Silverlight. They may have officially stopped supporting it, but that seems more of a legal trick to drop liability for any damages which may result from using it. The platform itself is alive and well, it just has the same status as all of Google's "beta" projects: not official.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Windows 10 supports IE.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
They think. You just recognize it as price gouging, excess fees, and undesirable services.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
You have no idea what's going on in the payments industry. Otherwise known as banking.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
"Any millennial joining the financial services industry, who expects a flawless user experience both at home and at work, is – I'm sure – surprised on their first day in the office when they get to their desk and are transported back in time by the technology they're expected to use."
And that millennial, my good man, would be a fucking idiot. There is no such thing as flawless user experience. Most systems, most procedures have flaws.
From these types of articles, it seems that millennials are fucking idiots that can't think for themselves and if they don't have things spoon fed to them they can't function. Talk about the moron generation. I hope, for their sake, this is not true because reality is going to eat them alive they will forever be consigned to the dustbin of uselessness.
Look, it's money. It's not something that impacts at other than a binary state. "Have" or "not have". Otherwise, why would you want to know about your finances?
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"