Leda Writes for Fintech Futures: Necessary conditions and sufficient convictions

Every Thursday, Leda Glyptis, CEO of 11:FS Foundry creates #LedaWrites. This week, she tells us why system capabilities should never overshadow a bank's propositions.

Picture this scenario. Tomorrow morning, I wake up feeling generous and give every bank – big, small, conventional, challenger – all of them access to Foundry.

With the flick of a switch and a few lines of code, they all have a core that is scalable, secure, agile, capable of real time configurations and all sorts of witchcraft. It is robust. It is what dreams are made of. And they all have it. Do you think that means now every bank is equally good?

Of course not.

Because this incumbent over here is still fighting over which P&L should own the new infrastructure and which legacy products should get released on the new core first and that challenger over there is going down a rabbit hole of irrelevant gamification.

They can both do things much faster but that doesn’t help much if they are the wrong things. Propositions matter. The customer’s job to be done, matters. What you choose to do matters.

Whatever you do on top of the plumbing is what the future will be made of

I know we have spent decades as bankers (yes, I know I am not one any more, but still) limiting our aspirations to our systems’ capabilities but that era is over. Foundry and others like us are solving this problem for the industry. Your core need no longer hold you back. Now what?

A core banking infrastructure that can sustain your digital aspirations is a necessary condition for our desired future. I get why banks who don’t have it agonise over it.

Without it, you are nowhere.

But it is not a sufficient condition. Alone, it will not produce your desire future. That is on you. Whatever you do on top of the plumbing is what the future will be made of.

And don’t look so disappointed, if the core was differentiating you would do it yourself. The whole point is that is is not. It can kill you, if it’s neglected. But it won’t save you on its own. It is necessary but not sufficient.

What you risk reveals what you value

Jeanette Winterson said that, and I doubt she expected to be quoted repeatedly in a banking blog but here we are.

She was talking about love but it applies equally well to survival.

When we are looking at radical transformation and all the cost, effort and decisions that entails, the words hold true. And what we throw, what we keep and what we change are heavily emotional decisions that reflect both our motivations and our convictions of what matters. Of what is negotiable. Of what we value.

Read the whole story at Fintech Futures.