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To be honest, he is not breaking any secrets. Most bank technology dates back to the 80s / 90s and did not need major overall but for Y2K. It is generally robust (but not so resilient), saclable to the needs, however harder to change (but does not change so much). Cost of ownership is high, keeps IBM in business collecting MIPS, but that is marginal in the grand schema.  The biggest issue of all is that the new generations of engineers won't want to touch those with a barge pole and banks will have very response capabilities to new business models. 

Oh and if you think Banks are bad, have a look at the Insurance industry. Even worse and the inertia to evolve to new ways of working is way higher in there. 

Sounds like a CEO that knows how to engage people… Not. If 900 people where not contributing you really have to question the work system organisation, and most likely toxicity of culture that go together with the method used for letting people go that close to Christmas. If I was an investor, I know who I’d be looking to offload.

Isn't it ironic that traditional banks have to rely on challengers to power innovation / new thinking? 

I bet Berlin (other Fintech centre) must be rejoicing at the news... 

Another item to add to the list after Brexit and the IR35 that has virtually killed the contracting / flexibile workforce market as larger businesses do not have the time to establish determination for each temp workforce.

It shows the process from a custom feature to productised to commoditised. This is typical evolution in the strategic lifecycle that is well captured in something like Wardley Maps. 

It feels like Barclays developed it as a useful feature and left it at that, while the market continued to evolve and reached for size by taking advantage of standardisation. When that happens, it is very difficult to keep a homegrown feature. 

The biggest miss is that they should have unbundled it to become a market proposition of its own. We are going to see this a lot with the expansion of open banking. Either new offerings commoditising custom features and banks ending up adopting them, or banks unbundling elements of their estate as market offerings (platform play). 

Better start learning about Wardley Mapping if you are a banking exec! 

Hi Andrew - I don't think that Agile is the unique answer. It is much broader than the scope that Agile has covered so far. I tend to talk about digital leadership instead so it opens wider possibilities. I wrote such article on Planet Lean explaining how to bring strategy in digital change and creating situational awarness using maps https://planet-lean.com/strategy-lean-digital-transformation/

I am working on a whitepaper for banking too. 

I don’t think it is just the tech expertise, it is the strategic context of the value chains and the plays they can make between the platform of the banks and the multiple ways of intermediating the value chains. A board member does not need to know how you do containers on Cloud. But they need to refresh their understanding of how you do Strategy / Org Design / Leadership in fast evolving Digital landscape. Tools and strategic school from the 60s don’t cut it anymore. The drama is that when we talk digital transformation, all that is mentioned is delivering technology. It is also and predominantly a different way of organising, leading, strategising, collaborating. That, they need to update selves with.

For true circular economy they should also offer a secure recycling capability. Because most cards end their life cut up in landfills.

There are already -and that has existed for a very long time- contact centres that operate distributed from home. 

I think that the transition back will be much more telling than the lockdown itself. Digital businesses have proven that they can still function remotely during the lockdown. This also means that they will be the last ones to really justify going back to full office work. What will be the point as well to go into an office in split work when one would have to collaborate "remotely" with the rest from the office. 

This situation is probably opening the door to become serious about virtual work / telecommuting as a permanent feature of the work.

With this in mind I think that senior leadership has not grasped the needs for Digital collaboration. The emergence of people using Zoom for instance (because it has considerably stronger features than the likes of Skype) has been clamped down on security concerns. Same goes for using collaborative boards which are all Cloud base, with no inhouse alternatives most of the time. 

Digital work also offer many advantages to attract/retain talents as work flexibility will become very attractive and it is possible to get workforce from anywhere. 

Time is to seriously explore effective digital collaborative set-ups, time to coach the teams using them well as the situation is indeed going to make a big change in the running of digital businesses. 

After much time using Zoom, I have never come across such issues, and there are many ways of establishing a decent security to the meetings. One has to wonder how much is more about user training than the application itself. 

Also, it is easy to ban from the top. But from experience Zoom has unique features (eg. breakouts) that enable an effective collaboration and meetings. The alternatives generally available are way inferiors and require twice as much efforts and prep in facilitation for achieving half the result. Said CEO is probably not seeing the drop in productivity that this generates to make a genuine choice.

Time to wake up Sir, Banks are Digital businesses, Digital is a team sport, your teams need decent tools and that should be in the balance of such decisions.