But surely with their focus on AI, those things should not be a problem...
12 Jun 2025 09:56 Read comment
The incumbent banks have been rather resilient to the digital revolution and the challenger banks have been relatively marginal. Why? I believe that Trust is at the center of the choice still, and if you want to host meaningful money like you paycheck, you tend to use a big bank. Part of this Trust came from Banks being in our life for some time and being present in our high-streets contributed to this perception. I am not sure that this is recognised as much as it should.
In leaving the high-street, big banks reduce this perception (even if there is a fair amount of inertia to this erosion), and they start competing on equal terms with challengers. And well, I am a Barclays customer and I have not seen any noticeable improvements to their App in many years. And this is still considerably behind Monzo and others. I am now starting to consider shifting my main & business to a challenger instead.
And the other major strength in banking is the balance sheet. This is what allows you to provide services (particularly lending). Once the deposit start shifting, it is when it is going to start to hurt those big banks. Especially as they don't have the agility to react.
18 Jan 2024 09:02 Read comment
The culture has not been best in relation to engineering or effectiveness and have allowed much tech debt and operational debt to develop. It seems like it is coming to roost.
What puzzles me is that Mr Jenkins was at the helm for a good while. So, he holds much responsibility for this "museum of tech". I understand that at that time he had to deal with much of the aftermaths of the financial crisis and whether Barclays was to push Retail or IB more. But surely, digital modernisation was on the cards too. Is this an admission that modernising tech was not done well?
And what lessons to take from this? Meaningful digital change it is more about organising the collaboration business and technology than strictly delivering technology. And it is typical to keep them at arm's length of each other in banks with a big change function inbetween and many layers of tech management. Are we then admitting that this model does not work and need rethinking?
14 Jun 2023 14:20 Read comment
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