Leda Writes for Fintech Futures: core banking and core principles

Every Thursday, Leda Glyptis, 11:FS Chief of Staff creates #LedaWrites. This week she turns her attention to dudes and core banking.

I was at a conference recently.

And during the panel after the presentations, one of my co-panelists gave an impassioned talk in favour of experimentation. The tech is here, he said.

And it’s cheap, in the grand scheme of things, to set up a digital experiment is cheap and fast.

It’s not like it’s core banking.

Whoa there.

What the dude didn’t get is that the parasitic industry of PowerPoint decks, ecosystem activation workshops and POCs that never see the light of day is not the way things are meant to be.

And before someone assaults me: I believe it is parasitic by default, not design.

Sure, a lot of folks have built careers out of this state of affairs and many consultancies have made a lot of money and I don’t even know that it is a case of cynical opportunism. I am open to believing everyone meant well and things just didn’t pan out as planned. But it’s time to do things differently.

And yet he’s not the only one who needs to keep reality checking. What I can’t afford to forget is how entrenched some mental categories are. How deep some inherited knowledge runs. How ingrained some insidious information is.

Core banking is boring, slow and limiting.

Upgrading it is expensive, painful and potentially career ending. It is there like death and taxes and you live with it and work around it.

Not any more.

But me telling you that it doesn’t need to be so, and showing you what is possible doesn’t mean you will update all your mental files in one fell swoop.

The fact that what I am saying is true and people listen and believe doesn’t mean their learned world has changed ipso facto. The process takes time and it is part of our job to give that time and enable the journey and stay the course.

Read the whole story at Fintech Futures.