Taking a break for family dinner; 35 more coming later.
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75/ Scaling computer systems is scaling computer systems, but an interesting limiting factor in scaling of computer systems in finance is "Does this system have rate limits controlled by human interaction?", in which case scaling from a technical perspective rounds to trivial.
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76/ That didn't used to be the case. Visa volumes used to be big numbers requiring some of the smartest engineers on the planet to use the biggest iron available. But Moore's Law compounds faster than the global birthrate does. By a lot.
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77/ There are still extremely non-trivial scaling challenges in financial systems where computers talk to computers, such as e.g. adtech (which isn't a parallel system of financial exchanges but isn't not a parallel system of financial exchanges), stock exchanges, etc.
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78/ A prediction for something you'll see in the future and think is really weird, but which is virtually inevitable given the economics: Internet celebrities are going to start offering Durbin-exempt debit cards to their tribe, enabled by an underlying platform and bank(s).
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79/ The reason this doesn't happen in the status quo is because it requires too much bizdev by too many people but fundamentally the financial industry wants to facilitate this transaction if you can move 100k of anyone or 10k of the right people to use plastic with you on it.
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80/ Settlement times, much like interest rates, have a natural lower bound of zero... and we will quickly discover that that lower bound wasn't real. In the case of settlement times, it is because you can use T-X settlement as a marketing differentiator w/o all that much risk.
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81/ We're starting to see that from some challenger banks (e.g. Monzo), and the natural response from incumbents is to spend 3 years not noticing it in surveys, 2 weeks doing SQL queries, and 18 months doing a product cycle, then deploying it to 100 million people simultaneously.
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82/ There are substantial opportunities available both within traditional finance and within startups to become a domain expert at the other industry and explain/advocate/plan/etc within one's own industry. (Some folks will end up doing white elephant projects, but not all.)
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83/ Every startup offering financial services has both an integration with their partners and then named people on speed dial who they can call when the integration breaks. Sometimes this by necessity means a lot of people in a lot of places.
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84/ This goes in the other direction, too, and it's both terrifying and sort of beautiful. If a tiny bank in, I don't know, Ireland has a backhoe hit their Internet connection, it is moderately likely that the 1st person in outside world who notices is a little fish in big pond.
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85/ (The general contents of the first phone call would be "Hey, this is your account manager at $COUNTERPARTY. I was just checking and it doesn't look like we got the upload for today... any color for me? Resubmit window closes in...")
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86/ Because large financial firms have competing fiefdoms and organizational subcultures in much the same way that large tech companies do, it makes a lot of difference to strategy and day-to-day operations which fiefdom the CEO/etc came up in, just like in tech companies.
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87/
@cperciva pointed out that I missed two items and duplicated another one, which brings up an important point: despite being the canonical use case for ACID databases, almost all financial firms aspire for (and achieve) "eventual consistency, almost all of the time."Show this thread -
88/ Financial firms are likely to slightly, but not much more than slightly, lag enterprise SaaS with respect to adoption of sales and account management via webinar and 1:1 videoconferencing. This can 5X utilization of advisor while having them be in a cheaper city than client.
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89/ The most interesting thing which is widely deployed in Japanese banks that I haven't seen in US banks, but which will inevitably be deployed in US banks, is phonebooths with videoconferencing software and ID-reading hardware connected to a call center.
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90/ This will be generally good for customers who want more human touchpoints, and will bring down the OPEX of account opening and servicing substantially. It will, less fortunately, further cause deskilling of the branch-based bank employee, which has been ongoing for decades.
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91/ (The availability of backoffice doesn't by itself make branch bankers less capable; it means a business process which historically trained them to answer the range of everyday to sophisticated financial problems encountered by anyone in their area doesn't need to exist.)
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92/ There are many problems in startup financial services which are technical problems, but there are virtually none which are uniquely solved by adoption of an architecture, language, stack, etc. Most of the technical problems are "How do people/organizations work together?"
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93/ You might sensibly say that "'How people work together' is more a management problem than a technical problem" but in this case the controlling abstraction is sometimes *very literally* where you draw the API boundaries.
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94/ People from finance backgrounds and people from tech backgrounds have extremely different ways of looking at the same artifacts, often coming to the conclusion that "This makes no sense and it is impossible you got this far without having some competent adult supervision."
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95/ Although you would think that both finance and tech would naturally cater to the wealthiest members of society and so they would consistently have access to the best services, a combination of Innovator's Dilemma and Worse-Is-Better means that future is present on fringes.
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96/ Examples of this: M-Pesa was one of the world's most advanced (and best distributed in customer set) payment networks within years, and relatively not-too-rich folks using the US->Mexico remittance corridor have much better FX pricing than rich Americans.
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97/ In my experience, more people in the US (and, broadly, Western) financial industries should be paying attention to customer-facing UXes from Asia. QR code payments are probably underestimated, in the same way that QR codes themselves were underestimated.
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98/ Virtually every conceivable subfield on the intersection of these two industries could justify its own hundred tweets blurbing a shelf of books covering a variety of costly learnings. Fraud. Identity verification and management. FX risk. Behavior during financial crises. etc
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99/ All of the professionals in tech and finance who make decisions which affect the systems that your live depends on work on the same Internet you do. Many would be happy to get coffee. Relatively few feel like enough people care about their line of work.
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100/ It occurs to me that in 99 tweets I haven't even mentioned cryptocurrency, which feels appropriate given its demonstrated level of impact. </rimshot> Alright, that was fun. Don't love this form factor, but let me know if subtopics here are worth an essay sometime.
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End of conversation
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