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***Warning – Dry, heavy, serious, occasionally contentious and pensive post about IT, Culture and DevOps observations***

A couple of months ago at Temenos my team had the chance to think up, build and launch a new product. I would say it is a hybrid tech and knowledge product. It’s called the Innovation Acceleration Platform and it’s meant to speed our clients up in their innovation and ensure they get to the consumer with some of the magic value prop our platform’s FinTech providers bring, fast and before others.

I’ll spare you the details as to what it contains but in essence it’s a box inside which, any Bank Innovation team finds two of the only ingredients they need to accelerate their efforts and test cool propositions – the Tech (near production ready environments at the drop of a hat preloaded with the right kind of data) and the Know-How (access to curated cream-of-the-crop FinTech and to those that did the curating).

Now I’ve taken this box to bankers and boy was I pleased to see where we are today as compared to the days of dry, in a vacuum, self-indulgent innovation labs of yesteryear. These guys are on the ball! Not one still does useless pilgrimages to the Valley “to see where technology really is”; no proud walls of posters preserved for eternity and no obsessive focus on hipster premises.

It strikes me like there is a lot more value being created these days. A lot less focus on form in lieu of substance and a real sense of urgency for making some of the digital promises happen before it’s too late.

It was always the job of the Innovation or Digital teams in banks to be frustrated to no end by the Business Prevention Departments (J.P. Nicols ™) but for many years that frustration seemed to stop at man-buns and long beards starting to sport greys and to revolutionary new FinTech StartUp pipe-dreams being laid in front of terrified other CanaryWharf patrons every Friday afternoon.

These days that frustration seems to have shifted into pushing these modern day banking renegades to roll up their sleeves and take the battle with those departments heads on.

Over the last few years we’ve seen some fractions of valiant bankers tackle Regulation Business Prevention with every weapon from hackathlons to lobbying for a new set of people dictating it, who they knew to be capable of understanding FinTech.

We’ve seen them then fight the Procurement “Computer-Says-“NO” corporate inertia that disallowed them from engaging with promising new propositions with weapons ranging from low-key sponsorship of incubators and accelerators to full ownership of these.

We’ve seen them try and better the culture at times with long, arduous, inside-education battles setting up programs to get the whole organisation at the same level of knowledge and thirst for technology such as my Build-a-Voice Emotional Banking ™ programs. They educated not only exec teams but departments that were adamant they had nothing to do with all this FinTech marklary such as Operations or HR because they knew that the more people that see the promise, the more likely it is to get there.

Over the past few years of the struggle Innovation teams had in banks there was one department that never let them down. That always seemed to know enough. And (lowkey) care enough. A department who was not only a sine-qua-non ingredient in trying to get anything new in front of a consumer, but was also, mercifully, poised and ready to make any of the digital dreams happen as soon as the Business Prevention Departments stopped trying to impede progress.

That department was IT.

I’m afraid I’m here to say that I have a feeling that it’s over. That along the way, over the past few years, that department stopped being an ally. That they no longer are poised and ready to help. That they have become one of the Business Preventers. Let me tell you why.

For those of you reading this who are not in banking, this is of course a generic abstraction, “The IT Department” is comprised of tens -if not hundreds- of other departments and teams tasked with technology maintenance for lack of a better description.

As soon as they went digital, banks have become, whether they like it or not, if not technology creators (depending on whether you want to call ugly hacks and desperate fixes keeping it all together – “creative”) at least technology maintainers with systems that grew so complex they need immense operational effort expenditure.

Over the past few years, not only has technology exponentially grown inside banks but it has even faster developed outside them. Software development has undergone more change than they acknowledge for such a new discipline. Due to the very nature of the industry, they constantly challenge their method and process and try to better themselves immediately and measurably to get better output. Which makes everything potentially faster and better but effectively more complex.

These days, software houses everywhere struggle with maintaining vision and direction while adopting new methods and technologies every week to create faster. This would be disruptive to any line of business leave along one that now underpins the fabric of society. They cope by the grace of the fact that many are of a manageable size with a clear profitability goal and they can adapt internal culture to be permissive of uncomfortable rapid change and open to testing and developing.

Banks’ IT Departments are a lot like software houses. One would argue they are software houses.

What they are not is creators. What they are not is agile. What they are not is, in possession of a culture that sees sense and is unencumbered by Banker-Guilt ™ and ready to be truly agile in the name of a firm profitability goal as the private software houses so they don’t cope.

They too used to feel the Innovation team’s pain and frustration and wanted to build top propositions back in the day. After all, the IT Department is made up of a bunch of uber-smart geeks perched for technology advance. But as opposed to their younger Innovation brother in arms who, while prevented effectively, is at least mandated appropriately, the IT Department was never appointed by the business as the creator, just the custodian. So that frustration has never turned into creative tension and gusto for the end goal of the business.

A few years of having been discouraged, disillusioned and disrespected has led Bank IT Departments to becoming a Business Prevention department themselves.

These days when the all-grown-up-and-now-taken-seriously Innovation team turns to them for help to make happen the dreams they once had together, they often see they’re left behind. Unwilling to try new things, complaining about infrastructure challenges, crippled by the many “No”s they heard.

Say the Innovation team finally finds the killer app that will make our mobile banking less “meh” and they have finally been allowed to engage if not even purchase it by the Regulator and Procurement Preventers, and they’ve educated the exec team enough not to try and stop them, they’ll run back home to their old playmate the IT Department, to help them prove it or even help them bring it to market in their propositions and they will find a new breed of “Computer says “No”.

Security concerns they would have helped explain and alleviate to the rest of the business in the olden days are suddenly being raised. Resources whether it’s developers or testing environments or data are always impossible to reach and all tied up for eons. Proof of concepts are impossible to organise, integration would only be doable post a major transformation process, and working with the new fanged FinTech provider is nary impossible when they insist on all those fancy dev tools and protocols that don’t match theirs.

So now nothing fast and cool is possible. Again.

We built the Innovation Acceleration Platform for an extra push. Thinking it would supercharge banks proposition creation at a time when they need to hurry up and bring compelling new ideas to consumers faster than ever. We didn’t think it would be as necessary or even in places, mandatory as it is. That the very part of the business that ran faster than the entire organisation has been brought to crawl over the past couple of years, ironically, partially halted by its own complexity in addition to the organisation. That’s truly sad.

The good news is that there is enough thirst for awesome tech out there and Innovation and IT seem to become interchangeable in some places Some banks have merged the two as they should have to begin with. Some have appointed DevOps wizards as Chief Innovation Officers and some have taken previously disillusioned IT heads and COOs and asked them to design Open Banking business propositions.

Now that the Business Prevention departments are losing their grip the only prevention is in your ability to execute and it’s becoming clear that to drive cool and exciting props in banking you can no longer design what you want to make but how to make it as well. The lines are getting blurred, teams are working together and there is plenty of tech smarts and good will to go around and make things happen.

Change is not only uneasy but sometimes sad, but it’s happening in our industry and it’s happening fast and those that learn to ride with the wave will certainly see exciting results and as usual, if they do, so will the Money Moments consumer.

Catchy title, isn’t it? Not my idea of sensationalism this time – it’s what the press called this article last week about the mayor of a village whose local bank branch is closing despite a promise that they will stay.

The article is so hungry for a spectacular sob story it’s full of idiosyncrasies and contradictions. The mayor says she has changed banks 3 times in 18 years already (likely making her the most prolific switcher in the UK!) chasing the elusive brick-and-mortar banks and with Barclays being the last remaining one in town, the sense of doom and gloom should be overwhelming, yet despite that, she says she will use Barclays online banking from hereon.

She goes on to say a lot of “the older people” will not feel safe doing so as well “even if they have internet access”.

Now, if we ignore the rest of the article, that proceeds to meander in and out of intelligent discourse by naming the local Postal Office as the only saving grace as it will continue dealing with cash and cheques and has a thriving ATM but goes on to say local businesses that still deal in cash are likely set to perish as they will have to travel to deposit their earnings to other bank branches as if the authors never heard of deposit machines, we are still left with this important piece of the puzzle to ponder:

“Barclays says the Llanidloes branch is closing because of falling use. It says only 104 regular customers use it exclusively for their banking.”

104.

How many employees in that branch? 4-5? Let’s assume it’s much less than that. Let’s assume it’s 2. They each serve 52 people. Wow. That’s quite the luxury. Don’t get me wrong, Barclays has posted quite the handsome numbers over the last few years but they are sure squandering it by blurring the line between Retail and Private Banking with what looks like involved, personal service. Perchance they imagined a new service model and are charging these online banking mistrusting ageing population a hefty fee for their customs so they can afford to keep serving them.

Only they can’t. Afford it, that is. They can’t afford serving the 104 Llanidloesilites any more than they can afford serving a vast majority of their retail banking customers really but that’s a story for another stormy night. Do you know who can afford that ratio of employee per customer? These guys. Even they couldn’t sustain offering much for cheap to the Dick and Joe with under £250,000 and had to hike their annual fees for a mere current account to £900 a few months ago.

The harsh reality is that the business models that retail banking engages in today have been skimmed of margins to where they only make sense in digital circumstances and while some brick and mortar will always remain, either as cost of business and brand museums or as community smart hubs such as the stat-of-the-art one BOI has in Dublin’s Grand Canal unless banking pulls up its socks and grasps at the opportunity to become the information and financial hub of a customer’s life by applying business models transcending traditional products and imagining new ones centred around people’s true money needs, we will all have to accept a local branch is not an immutable human right but a luxury.

Llanidloes is surely a  very nice place with 104 nice branch goers but sadly, they will have to add “local bank branch” to the long list of things they can’t have such as a Primark shop or an Opera house.

We were discussing Emotional Banking ™ last week on the FinTechMafia when this throwback nugget came up.

It’s an article from our very own Ron Shevlin about Financial Services Firms being “emotionally tone deaf”. You could have knocked me over with a feather! I’m one of Ron’s biggest fans and I had thought I read most of what he wrote over the years, but here I am not having read something that goes straight to the core of what I advocate.

I’m not going to go into the article in itself as you should read it, and I may not agree with the exact definition of the emotions a bank should investigate but that’s irrelevant, what counts is that Ron was saying this in 2008! TWO. THOUSAND.AND. EIGHT. A well respected analyst. Speaking to banks from a worldwide, well respected digital platform such as TheFinancialBrand. Even making it a point to outline that paying attention to the blind spot will see numbers suffer. In true Ron Shevlin tradition, solid banker-carrot-and-stick – research translated into numbers meant to either inspire or terrify.

Surely that should have even moved the needle before I got there and encountered the dessert land of utter lack of research and true intent to study consumers’ feelings about their money that I did in 2010. And if not that, surely that needle is moved now, nearly 10 years later.

For the record, this is not about attribution – Ron Shevlin and Chris Skinner and all the other handful of thinkers who arrived in the industry and started writing and turning things into their heads long before I did, had already started to conclude banks were doing their consumers an injustice by not examining their emotions while shortchanging themselves in the process. We’ve all invented the same wheel. We just said it differently, at different moments of time and proposed different solutions.

One could argue the FinTech titans only pulled alarm signals and wrote things about it before returning to all the other facets of the industry they focus on but didn’t provide a path to make it worthwhile. But others who took this seriously, did.

There are Human Centered design and CX firms out there –few and far between as they’d rather focus on industries who care such as retail- who have been fighting to explain the core of designing for experience and feeling; there are even valiant bankers taking it to heart such as the extraordinary Louise Long at NAB and modesty aside, my own work to get banks to recognize the value of being a brand and then show them concrete ways to change the culture to accomplish that, as I’ve done over the past few years with the Emotional Banking ™ methods has made a dent. And it’s all going to get better, too. The discourse is turning towards “people not tech” across the board which is amazingly positive. Finally.

Still here we are. Nearly 10 years later, at best collectively mildly-titillated intellectually by the idea that we should do more to focus on emotions but self-congratulatory that we just haven’t gotten around to the fluffy stuff yet, that we’ve all been serious and doing numbers and tech for day jobs instead.

The industry is chock full of people who like to proclaim themselves as “doers” but when it comes to what we’ve accomplished in not being “emotionally tone death” as Ron was accusing us 10 years ago, we’ve done nothing. We’ve accomplished nothing. We’ve taken exactly zero honest, deep looks into the psychic of a consumer we are asking to buy life-altering products from us.

Incumbents and challengers alike the world over, there is not one example in the industry of a bank having created at least one MoneyMoment that was a feelings-driven experience – contextual, emotionally charged, significant and addictive- and not just another repackaged financial product.

Who here, reading this, can say they’ve had any moment with their bank where they felt a surge of positive reaction other than gratitude it was not as painful as they anticipated or experienced in the past? One where you could say “Ah! I didn’t even realize there was a financial product or transaction behind this moment of my life! My bank just served my actual needs and it was pleasant!”. They didn’t because they still don’t know what the need is, what the feeling they need to enhance or inhibit is. And I wonder if they’ll ever bother finding out.

We live in an interesting time. In terms of CX for banking something tells me it’s both too late and too early. Our kids will think of banking as we know it as we think of dial-up or landlines.

I do believe they will have the seamlessly pleasant Invisible Banking experience our bank are unable to create for us, but it requires a blank slate to really do away with all existent banking products as we know them and design for truly investigated consumer emotions and people with brains, courage and passion to do so. One could argue it all boils down to which company, whether they are in Financial Services today or not -and my money is on “not”-, has enough of those and the common sense to let them get on with it already.

Recently I’ve had to turn down a couple of interviews and requests to be involved in write-ups or speak because the theme started to severely irk me – the “future of banking”.

It’s not even close to Christmas and everyone wants a run down of the trends, of what we think is coming next, of the next shinny ETH. It’s like picking a new fondant from the box while placing a half-eaten one back in.

Here’s a trend evolution analysis if we must have one. Last year at this time it seemed our world was finally waking up to design. There was lots of buzz over what it can do so that it helps banks quickly take hold of a crucial part of the defense against being obsolete – the relationship with the consumer. That of course involved looking at the proposition and at least sketching a new one. I hear less and less about that. We moved on to the next thing. That is a trend and it’s not a good one.

Now, I’m as much of a SciFi fan as the rest of us and I get it’s infinitely more fun to spend 3 hours imagining in detail what the battle between humans and machines will be like than 30 minutes describing what a current account today.

Our collective imagination in the industry can’t help but shiver with the anticipation of an imaginary future where a chatbot will read our mind and extend our wealth while we build or implement one for the sole purpose of firing the 236 people who only ever tell a client what their balance is over the phone.

I’ve said this many times – ours is an industry like no other. We need to know a lot but can do little. We need to run at the dizzifying speed of technology in theory while crawling at the frustrating speed of banking systems and culture in practice. It creates vast amounts of tension in all of us involved whether we think of it or not.

In a way, this obsession with trends we seem to have as of late, this appetite for completely new propositions coming into the market are a form of escapism from this tension. As long as we keep thinking about the next best thing we can’t be accused of being stuck in the difficult now.

This doesn’t apply to bankers only. While they have painful and real constraints that shackle them to the art of the immediate possible, on the other side of the equation, in start-up world valuations sore every day on futuristic approaches to a business proposition. No one sells a business model anymore, everyone turned into Phillip K. Dick and paints a picture of how electric sheep will access the blockchained banking matrix.

It’s tempting to explain this by referring to how society is moving at the speed of light in every aspect but the difference there, is the gap between status quo and the next best thing is being bridged with every sizeable change science or technology brings in all other industries, whereas in FinTech the gap only grows wider.

Ours is an industry where the gap between what the consumer wants and what the consumer gets is so wide, it doesn’t bear thinking about what they are forced to make do with “now”, so we take refuge into thinking what we could give them “later”. Except, unless we stop wasting time escaping reality and become brutally honest about what is there “today”, what systems or mentalities need to change, that “later” won’t be “tomorrow” but “too late”.