Next Generation Banking: Questions to Ask When Applying New Technologies

After writing about whether we are creating faster horses when we think of applying open sourced technologies to banking, some more thoughts occurred to me:

Are we applying Blockchain to clearing and settlement, rather than reimagining the whole trade cycle from liquidity structures to collateral management using open source platform structures?

Are we using data analytics to get more customer share of wallet rather than reimagining our customer relationships using digital intelligence?

Are we using API capabilities to breakdown our existing financial processes into plug-and-play components, rather than reimagining our components on the basis that we can now build new ones?

In each case, my concerns are all about applying new technologies to existing bank structures, rather than changing the thinking to create new structures. In each case, I wonder whether we are just developing faster banking rather than reimagined banking, in the same way that Victorians imagined faster horses rather than reimagined transport.

I have some ideas of reimagined banking, which I’ll come back to another day, but let me typify how flawed our thinking might be by using cars as the example.

Henry Ford reimagined transport by building the first mass production line for cars. You could have the car in any colour as long as it’s black, and he thanked the lord he didn’t ask the customer what they wanted as he’d get the answer faster horses.

Today, Ford, Chrysler, General Motors, BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, Honda and more are trying to reimagine cars …