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51 Percent of Financial Services Companies Believe Existing Tech is Holding Them Back (betanews.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Legacy technology can be a major obstacle to digital transformation projects and, according to a new survey of financial services technology decision makers carried out for business consultancy Janeiro Digital, almost 51 percent say existing technology is holding back innovation. Three of the biggest roadblocks are seen as lack of support for change (34 percent), legacy technology and infrastructure (31.6 percent) and a lack of in-house technical skill (29.5 percent). As a consequence 23 percent of respondents believe their company is behind in digital transformation compared to others in the industry. Only 47 percent are currently implementing new technologies, with 12.6 percent wanting to do so but not having started. That leaves 40 percent not innovating which could see them lose out in a world where consumers want better, faster financial products.
They're gonna keep complaining like this until someone makes a computer that will learn to use itself. Then they will complain that it isn't fast enough.
The blame doesn't go for implementation, it goes for not understanding the opportunity cost of not doing something you should. When enough opportunities are passed, the businesses will cease to exist.
I phrase it like this, "Good IT is expensive. Bad IT is costly".
Do you have backups (expensive)? At some point it will cost you if you don't. It isn't a matter of if, but when.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I deal with tech a lot where I work, an instantly recognizable financial business.
Our core transaction processing systems run COBOL. When your Python app can settle as few trillion transactions nightly with deadlines met within minutes and downtime measured in seconds per year, present it. Someone will listen.
The stuff I deal with daily now uses Cassandra for a db backend, all is hosted within LAMP stacks (we said goodbye to WebSphere a while ago), and is tolerating all major browsers for internal and external users. Our constraints aren't tech, they are resources; we decide to support a certain range of demand, and so size the systems according to budget. When our users begin complaining, we will resize.
I've noticed a bunch of internal apps moved to interesting containers, and using two- or three-factor authentication. Our security methods treat employees as strangers, and internal systems as threats. Nothing is trusted until it is authenticated, carefully. This security problem is the source of much of the apparent lack of innovation in the industry, as we where I work are a top 50 target. Maybe top 10, we have not been told of a breach. We spend as much on testing our security as we do on the security.
Our single biggest repository is on a custom Linux system, some our own software. It handles the volume you would associate with Google. It has to be secure.
And we of course have document storage, but that's on old stuff based on Wang systems, which you cannot outperform yet. No you cannot.
Yet we are faced with demand for flexibility, new and innovative solutions to new problems, and creative products. We've delivered a blockchain based international settlement system with a respected partner, at the same time as we've spun off a product that made all the sense in the world but didn't sell and are turning off one that just isn't working for anyone.
A previous CIO lamented that a third of our projects failed. That's actually pretty good in the business world at large. But it's really not good enough. And new tech by itself will not do it. Better planning, better management, and better infrastructure will. And we are building those. I can name a few competitors that are clearly not, and I relish the opportunities we have to drink their milkshakes.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Other financial technology companies like Robinhood are written cloud-first and cloud-native with APIs in languages like Python and Go and Ruby and what have you. They're just going to eat up these old companies as their overhead costs are much lower and their code better documented and aligned more closely with modern programming practices. Their most modern competitors are running windows software designed in the 1990s. It's ripe for disruption and companies like Robinhood are absolutely going to grind these old companies in to a fine paste in the next ten years.
No, they are not. It's easy to start a system from scratch regardless of the language you are using. Let robinhood get to the 10-year mark with their only-break-at-runtime-because-look-ma-no-compilation-step python software and they'll be crying for someone to buy them out.
It looks easy when you first write the software, but let's see how resistant to breakage it is after 10 years of maintenance when half the code was written by people who weren't part of the original team. Their brand-new system of $X kloc of python+ruby probably works well enough with the existing specs. I want to see how well it works when changing requirements cause that codebase to balloon to $(X * 3) in ten years.
Even worse, you're complaining about the current systems being written in obsolete languages; FFS Ruby is *already* obsolete and it's in their *new* system!
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.