Tech Firms Are Building Bridges Across The Moats That Protected Banks
Payments amount to a $ 1.9 trillion business around the world, a sum too rich to leave just to #banks, according to McKinsey’s Global Payments Report.
Financial Technology
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Rabobank’s Innovation Lab Is Building Tools for Industries Beyond Financial Services
#Fintech #innovation at Rabobank is making itself felt in fields outside of #financial #services. The bank’s innovation lab pioneered an IoT project for agriculture and is an example of how innovation in financial services touches virtually every industry. “We ended up with a project called MOOvement, which is an IoT device used for tracking cattle on farms, today […]
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Building bank cultures where engineers can thrive
Co-Author Abidemi Ogunbowale-Thomas, Digital Senior Manager
Nowadays, there’s so much attention focused on the rise of the robots that the #engineers who create them are getting overlooked. In this post, we’ll look at why this is such a key issue for financial services organisations, and what they can do about it.
The objective? Fostering #cultures where hard-to-find and hard-to-retain engineers will feel included, respected and inspired.
In our experience, too many organisations are still failing to look after their engineers. Why’s that such a mistake? Because to #thrive in the digital era, organisations need the agility that comes from bringing #technology to the decision-making core of the business. And that means radically reassessing the role of engineers within the organisation.
Up to now, engineers have often been taken for granted. They’re the people who get the code written. End of story. That outlook needs to change. As a starting point, #banks need to recognise that engineering is an art form.
Engineers and technologists see themselves as digital artisans, craftspeople who’ve studied hard to acquire and hone their specialist skills. And they expect work that challenges and stimulates them in equal measure. If they don’t get it, their productivity can be critically affected.
This new awareness should help banks to build true engineering cultures. These have three strands running through them:
- First, learning. Technology advances quickly, so organisations must inspire their engineers to keep pace. Because recruitment can be difficult, expensive and time-consuming, it makes much better sense to invest in upskilling the existing workforce. Structured training programmes and personal development days are both important. A focus on learning has an added benefit: It gives the organisation deep insight into their engineers’ current (and targeted) capabilities. The ideal? FullStack engineers, people with coding expertise in multiple applications. But they’re few and far between. The more realistic goal? Having a team of t-shirt engineers who are willing to keep learning new skills.
- Second, make sure engineers have the tools they need to get the job done. We’ve seen too many companies expecting their engineers to deliver the world, but with devices that are slow and ineffective. This wastes time and impacts productivity. It’s also demoralising and can create a vicious blame cycle between the business and engineers.
- Third, focus on transparency and equal voice. Business decision-making is much less likely to be shared and understood in organisations where departments are siloed. And that lack of business value context is like blindfolding engineers and then asking them to deliver market-leading solutions. Equally, engineering must have a voice at the top table to influence decision-making and the direction the business is taking.
The benefits of sharing the bigger business picture can be seen at Facebook: Engineers there get to see the monetary impact, positive or negative, of their work. Adopting a similar approach doesn’t just lead to better solutions; it’ll make your engineers feel like they’re part of something bigger than coding. That will increase their job satisfaction and, as a result, their effectiveness.
By tying these three strands (learning, tools and transparency) together, banks will cultivate skilled, fulfilled engineers who are also business savvy. Cultures like these are the lifeblood of the Netflixes and Googles of this world, where the work engineers do is integral to the broader business strategy. But from what we see, banks are still lagging a long way behind.
We’ve provided a comprehensive to-do list. But what’s the fundamental message? Ultimately banks won’t change their cultures until they commit to bridging the divide between the business and IT. Technologists have to be business-aware. And business people need to understand technology. This is imperative for the future. And guess what? The future’s already started.
The post Building bank cultures where engineers can thrive appeared first on Accenture Banking Blog.
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Hyperledger May Start Building Insurance-Specific Products
Insurance has definitely been in the #fintech spotlight, with startups like Lemonade and Ladder striving to make a traditionally painful experience as seamless as possible. But the insurance industry is nearing a turning point as #blockchain tech is making sure strides into the sector, according to Brian Behlendorf, executive director at #Hyperledger Project. “Healthcare can […]
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SoFi Is Building the ‘Banking Model’ of the Future
Relationship-#banking is top-of-mind for financial institutions, but in many cases, that does not translate into real actions. That’s according to Mike Cagney, CEO of #SoFi. “We don’t think of ourselves as a finance company, we are a relationship company,” Cagney said during TechCrunch Disrupt yesterday. “[Traditional] FIs have been resistant to this #model, but in […]
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WiseBanyan is Building a Bank, ‘Backwards’
#WiseBanyan began as a free digital investment advisor in 2014, but in 2016 it hit its stride, launching its first paid product, more than doubling its userbase, and nearing a $ 100 million benchmark in assets under management. Next up for the startup is bigger ticket financial products. “For us, the keyRead More
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Who’s Building the Banking Smart Pipes?
On the 11th of March the world celebrates World Plumbing Day. For most of us, this probably doesn’t mean much. Mainly because in the western world we take great plumbing for granted. Working sanitation seems like such a non-event, that the idea of celebrating it seems redundant. But of courseRead More
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Building the Foundations for a Scalable Ethereum
Do events like The DAO collapse prove blockchains need formal governance? #Blockchain analyst Josh Stark argues that it’s too early to tell.
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IBM Building Blockchain Dispute Resolution System
IBM could launch a finance-oriented #blockchain solution as early as this fall. According to The Wall Street Journal, IBM’s Global Financing unit is looking to kick off a project that would focus on resolving transaction disputes. The #system reportedly won’t replace the Global Financing unit’s existing systems, at least not in the near term. Rather, it will […]
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Silicon Valley Bank Building Out Payments Services
Watch out #payments industry, #Silicon #Valley #Bank is coming. The bank for startups — officially named SVB Financial Group &8212; said last Friday that it was boning up its payments infrastructure and #services by “leveraging strategic partnerships to offer scalable and sustainable payment solutions to our clients, at every stage ofRead More
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