I found it fascinating to spot this TikTok interview highlight with Ford, the car company, CEO Jim Farley explaining the challenge they have with software updates.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/HrNN6goQe50
What he is describing is the path that many banks are taking and which, tbh, I have been promoting, which is curating the ecosystem on the platform. The issue with doing that is that you then have a number of suppliers who don’t talk to each other and have no integration, so you have to integrate it yourselves. What Jim seems to saying is that you should therefore insource everything back into the company, and write all the software yoursevels.
I’m not convinced.
Bearing in mind that no-code and low-code is the nature of today, why should a car manufacturer or a financial service provider develop code themesleves? Surely, ti would be easier to just assemble code.
This is what car companies do well. They assemble components, many of which are common to all car companies, and they just make them into different shapes and forms. That’s what banks and other companies should do. Just assemble code into different shapes and forms for different audiences.
But then the question is how to co-ordinate so many different pieces and players across so many systems and structures. That’s where Jim’s coming from. Is it easier to manage everything internally or integrate many providers externally?
Well, I’ve thought about this for years – see Build or Buy or Build and Die? from 2017 - and truly believe that the key is to be agile, nimble, lean, mean and clean.
Therefore, where Jim is getting it wrong is to talk about the fact that he cannot control upgrades and changes amongst Ford’s many suppliers. He cannot get Ford’s many suppliers to tlk to each other, work together and deliver the requirements to ensure everything moves at the same pace.
I would reply that this is Ford’s management’s job. Ford’s management – and the same is true of bank management – is to co-ordingate and integrate best-of-breed open apps, APIs and analytics from the global platform systems, and make them work together for the best-of-breed customer experience.
The only caveat to all of this is obviously avoiding any outages.
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...
