I’ve been spending more and more time thinking about this conundrum of the suits versus jeans brigade, or Bordeaux versus beer if you prefer. If you haven’t caught the drift, it’s all about fintech and how banks (suits) come to work together with tech (jeans).
It’s something I’m seeing more and more and my latest two-penneth, for what it’s worth, is related to how we can integrate these two disparate groups.
This is because the tech guys have a simple focus:
Design + User Experience (UX) + Simplicity = Creative Coding
That’s one important area. The tech focus is upon making the customer happy through creative coding. The coding brings together all aspects of design and simplification to ensure the user experience is the best it can be. This is why coders are the new rock stars of banking.
But it takes more than good coders. It also needs good bankers. Bankers also have a focus, but it’s slightly more complex:
Security + Regulation + Compliance = Better Banking
People trust banks because they are secure vaults for money and now other values, such as storing data. Banks are trusted as secure vaults because, if they ever get broken, they are licenced by regulators to ensure that they payback. That is why there is so much regulation but regulation alone is useless if it is not complied with.
Hence, you need to have a licenced institution that complies with its regulatory mandates to be secure and, assuming all of this works well in the future, we will have better banking. Banking focused upon the customer and society, in other words.
So there you have it. As the suits and jeans create a merged fintech view, we get creative coding delivering better banking.
I hope that’s what we get.
Of course we might get better coding delivering creative banking, and I think we’ve had just about enough of that for the moment.
Chris M Skinner
Chris Skinner is best known as an independent commentator on the financial markets through his blog, TheFinanser.com, as author of the bestselling book Digital Bank, and Chair of the European networking forum the Financial Services Club. He has been voted one of the most influential people in banking by The Financial Brand (as well as one of the best blogs), a FinTech Titan (Next Bank), one of the Fintech Leaders you need to follow (City AM, Deluxe and Jax Finance), as well as one of the Top 40 most influential people in financial technology by the Wall Street Journal's Financial News. To learn more click here...