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OMG. Aren't there rules laid out by regulators in UK for banks to flag unused bank accounts as dormant and give an opportunity for accountholders to reactivate them? Closing down accounts just because they're not used seems ridiculous.

HOW of technology / software has changed or HOW of federated buying of technology / software has changed?

A Top 5 UK bank has 84 systems to process payments whereas the same bank's Indian subsidiary doesn't even have a total of 84 systems to do everything. While a single Core Banking Solution works for banks in emerging markets, banks in advanced markets have always used best-of-breed solutions, which were always procured via federated buying process. Sorry but I fail to see any change.

While the Federated Buying term might be new, procurement of enterprise applications has always been done by committees whose members are drawn from multiple functions / SBUs. Like, even 30+ years ago, ERP procurement committees had members from Sales, Purchase, Materials, Finance, Production, HR, and other functions in single SBU companies and SBU heads in addition in multiple SBU companies. I know examples where multiple SBU companies even bought different ERP products for different SBUs because the federated buying process couldn't reach consensus on a single product for all SBUs. Within banking, it's not uncommon for Retail Banking, Business Banking and Investment Banking SBUs to have different CBS products.

Tokenization seems to undermine your strategy #4, specifically the part about CVV. 

Post tokenization under Reg CofT here, many merchants have stopped asking for CVV. While they say "CVV is not needed..." in a bid to appear cool and enhance CX, I believe the truth is that CVV of tokenized credit card CANNOT be verified. 

While CofT improves security by reducing the risk of hacking, I wonder if it increases the risk of fraud by taking CVV, one key weapon in the fight against fraud, out of the credit card processing equation.

Having sold COBOL-to-Java conversion tools as far back as ca. 2000, I've been closely tracking this space. What gives me more hope about LLM transpilers compared to the previous genres of transpilers is the proposition that old transpilers converted sphagetti COBOL code to sphagetti Java code whereas modern Gen AI transpilers translate poorly documented COBOL into structured Java. That does seem like a step-up. Hope it suffices to finally accomplish now what 25+ years of prior efforts failed to do.

Whether AI's benefit in this case - "write 22% more lines of code per day" - proves to be Demand Suppressor or Demand Stimulant would depend on whether the business benefits (e.g. more customers or more LTV per existing customer) delivered by the software development project will lead to a reduction or increase in the need for devs in the future. Adding to my post Why ChatGPT Won't Kill Coders.

In ca. 2000, a typical trip from my home in Frankfurt to my customer’s office in Munich traversed a tram (Strassenbahn) in Frankfurt, intercity high speed train (Intercity Express) between Frankfurt and Munich, and underground subway (U-Bahn) in Munich. Even though the three modes of transport were run by three different companies, I could buy a single ticket for the entire journey online.

Nearly 25 years later, I haven’t seen an example of seamless intercity multimodal transport ticketing like that in any other country. Have you?

PS: Last I checked, OysterCard did work across tube, bus, DLR, ferry and all other TfL modes of transport within London but it did not straddle intercity trains or public transport networks in other British cities.

Keep a track of dial volumes by its PWM Relationship Managers is an internal thing but recording client calls is ridiculous. If I'd a PWM account with Citi - which I don't - I'd seriously consider moving it away to some other private bank.

Great post!

Earlier today, I participated in a Twitter Thread on the subject of factoring risk into ROI of software projects.

Keen to know if there's any way to quantify the risk of a bank's online banking portal coming to a grinding halt while it migrates from an old legacy core banking system to a modern core banking system?