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The traditional economic solution was to aim for increasing productivity. Today we have vast goggles (a vast measurement) of technology untapped. We have the opportunity for technology led productivity to create new economic growth and rescue the western, the developed and the devloping economies.

Sadly the focus on QE, on what it is properly called lending money and usery, has since the beginning of civilisation been seen as a merit bad in all societies. Lending for utilities and production  eg co-operative/farming/union banks/ development banks and lendinh increases and lubricates economies. Lending for luxuries, like Federal, State and local government administration, luxury residnetial housing, margin lending investment do not create any real wealth.

Lets focus more on technology led productivity and less on QE/margin lending on non-productive goods and services.

Picking up on just a couple of business critical banking functions:

• Customer service
• Know Your Client

In retail and priavte banking the most important aspect is customer service. Irecently read a research report from a top 5 global ETF provider, eg trillions of AUM. They had studied the role of the Finanical advisor/Wealth advisor. The advisor added value by keeping the client aligned to the agreed financial plan and asset allocation. The Advisor could add 1to3% of portfolio value per annum over the long term. Customer Service - keeping engaged and metoring your client. This could be done very effectively via video banking.

Secondly Know Your Client.  I recently was involved in setting up a new corprate bank account this took weeks and KYC on potential all 100+ shareholders and officers and a traget KYC opening bill of $20k. Working with the bank's banking and complaince we were able to streamline this and save costs. AGain video banking would easily enable a better KYC solution - especially the ongoing and annual complaince reviews.

Digital banking, including all digital media - video, sms, social media, mobile apps are ALL going to play an important role in customer service. Lets get used to it!

As in all changing events, we need to get more distinctions.

CFO's need to be handson to be able to validate big data and big data mining extracts and do simple "sanity checks". So the CFO needs to keep their hands dirty and be able to do some simple cross checking of numbers and trends.

Conversely, as the authior rightly says, there is increasing collaboration and increasing multiply sources making up the big data. It is ridiculus to try to condense, simplify, summarise the content in big data to a flat two dimensional spreadsheet.

So both are needed.

I have come across CFO's of listed companies whom no longer have the skills to do basic summation and trend anomaly spotting. Ihave come across Annual reports, that on exmaination have been publsihed with mistakes and needed the internal audit and external audit to wonder how basic accounting errors accurred.

Lets keep spreadsheets as a simple skillset and tool, to keep big data honest, true and fair