Technical people are responsible for building and maintaining all the systems that handle the stuff that the business want done. And I also told business people what they should be doing. Seeing banks as a non-tech industry is a mistake in my opinion, and many banks do seem to agree that they should be a tech company. Many are active in tech communities, organise tech related events, and really seem to care about tech. And yet, tech salaries seem to be lagging.
Worked in several banks. "We are not bank, we are tech company with bank department" - was mentioned occasionally in each of them. What was also common - red tape, outdated software (tools, libraries, frameworks), restricted access to workstation, processes focused around pushing approvals around (instead of automation). That's why my response to "we are not a bank" sentiment above is "it's a bank, alright".
Saying that they are a tech company is popular amongst the big banks these days. Technically that's true - they (and most businesses these days) are driven by tech and would fall apart without it. But tech is most definitely a cost center entity at such firms and tech employees likewise treated as second class citizen. As my old engineering manager at a bank told us - "if a trader tells you to jump and dance like a monkey, you jump and dance like a monkey".
I've heard Goldman Sachs has attempted to make some strides in running their Marcus product more like a Silicon Valley tech company (within reason). But I've also heard that ultimately that it too fell prey to the burden of the old conservative bank culture. A friend who worked there until recently told me not to fall for the glitzy marketing, and that it was just all more of the same. Would be interested what someone who is actually working there now has to say, esp. someone that has worked in both SV tech companies and Goldman to compare.
Banks definitely should be tech companies, and understand and embrace the important of tech for their business. But you're absolutely right; the banks where I worked definitely tried to be technologically progressive (sometimes even a bit too much in my opinion[0]), but it was undeniable that much of the company was slow and bureaucratic, and despite all the "empowering developers", we often got stupid decisions handed down to deal with. Often they were aware of the stupidity, but changing something was still a very slow process.
At one bank, I was in a team that straddled the line between the international and domestic sections of the bank, which used to be more independent from each other, but we had to deal with both. Getting a simple firewall opened up between two systems on either side took 6 months.
[0] One bank that arguably took the tech company most seriously, wanted to be a bit too much on the cutting edge in my opinion. They were very active in the Angular community, which was absolutely great, but they also wanted to do CICD, which just didn't fit with all the security checks necessary at a bank. Parts were moving very fast, and parts were moving very slowly.
At that same bank, we also had a very clear mandate that we could say no to business. At some point, after we felt we put too much in production in rapid succession with insufficient testing, we had to block a next thing that a business guy really wanted to see in production. Really pissed him off, and he threw a tantrum I hadn't seen before or since at any workplace, but we insisted and our manager backed us up, so that was definitely good.
Having worked in a fintech D2C app, the distinction I drew was that there were 2 'products'
- the financial product i.e getting 4% return on your money
- the digital product i.e the app
The 1st was the real product, the 2nd the nice-to-have
Obviously core tech in banking is infinitely more critical than an app but the point is the same; the tech in banks, unless its 'quant', HFT or ML is not the money maker and therefore won't be paid as such
The app that people use to access their money is absolutely core tech. If the payment infrastructure goes down (or worse: is buggy), that's a massive problem. Banks that don't consider this core aren't keeping up.
The thing is, while reliability of payment infrastructure matters, the UX and convenience of it does not as much - "everyday services" are not the core business of the banks (for ordinary individuals, mortgages and consumer loans is, for high net value, investments), they are pretty much a loss-leader that needs to exist but it's neither a major revenue maker nor a determining factor for customers - e.g. they will shop around for the mortagage, and if they get a good deal, they'll switch to another bank without even looking at how convenient their apps are.
Yes, there are some consumers for whom those everyday services are everything and they'll go to some 'app only' bank that does that well and without excessive fees. From the point of a traditional bank, that's not a problem, good riddance - if they don't use other products and aren't willing to pay excessive fees for everyday things, there's no money in having them as customers, and when they'll want to do something profitable (e.g. take a mortgage) they'll come back from that app-only bank as that product (the financial product, not the tech product) is actually competitive.
Note: this is from an EU viewpoint. USA may have a bit different perspective as the regulations there allow quite a lot revenue streams (e.g. bounced check fees) from people with no money and no other products, in EU much of exploitative payment practices have become restricted, so these customers simply become unprofitable and not really desired, the main value of "having them" is that this might help you sell profitable products to them later when they have more money and/or more plans for credit.
Many of our customers didn’t even use the app. They could phone up and get someone to do every action for them. If your product can operate without the app then the app is secondary
Financial transactions by phone? To me, that sounds inefficient, expensive, error prone and insecure. All banks I know provide an app and a website to their users. Having to talk to a person to handle your money is something from the 1980s.
Of course for very specific high-value transactions, it may be useful to talk to someone, especially when it's something that also involves advice, but most people only do that kind of thing two times in their life: for mortgage and pension.
Modern banking does not function without the app (be it web or mobile).
