Quintin Sykes

The Apple earnings warning yesterday reinforced for me a theme that we're going to see this year in banking, and that's slower organic growth which means expense control. A variety of factors are working against banks' ability to improve their net interest margins, with the risks of slower growth, a persistent flat yield curve, and even some deterioration in credit quality seeming the most significant to me.

In my work in helping IT teams improve their performance, I frequently run across cases where the management team's perception of performance of IT doesn't align with output from the IT team. How can an IT group be delivering on both project and service level commitments yet suffer from a perception of poor performance?

There are a variety of answers including misalignment of expectations around project and SLA delivery, poor process in front and back-office areas that reduce the effectiveness of IT investments, and poor communication. I'm going to focus on the latter.

Back in April I assessed the state of the international players trying to enter into the U.S. core market. This time I take a look at the domestic players serving regional banks and offer up some thoughts on what CIOs are looking for from each of them.

There's a little advice for the international and emerging U.S. core vendors as well. Check out the rest of my latest GonzoBanker post for more.

Here's one from the 'where have you been, Q?' archive.

I wrote this last October for Banking Exchange and covers three traits that I see in bankers that 'get' technology.

Three months into 2018, and the year is already shaping up to be the “year that could’ve been” for international core vendors in the U.S. regional banking market (i.e., roughly $10 billion to $50 billion asset range). Some clarity from these vendors would go a long way.

Read the rest of my latest GonzoBanker post for more.

My checkered blog history shows half of my posts are dedicated to relaunching or sprucing up this site. In that spirit I spent some time this weekend refreshing the look and hope to start posting about financial services technology on a somewhat regular basis starting this week. If you see anything amiss as you look around the site let me know.

Everybody wants to call their startup or investment "FinTech" and it led me to start thinking about what a FinTech company is in the first place. Searching Google for some definitions led me to some dated or unsatisfying responses.

So, I took a stab at defining what might be considered a FinTech, company. There is plenty of fleshing out of this model that still needs to be done but I'd like to share version 0.1 (beta!) with the world.

Chris Skinner describes his vision of a two-tiered banking model this morning. Yes, there will be many who are quite comfortable with a digital-only experience. However, Chris notes, there will still be a need to bring "humanity to the digital experience":

And that is where I see the future: not a branch-based one, but one where there is humanity.

I've recently had conversations with a couple of technology providers that believe the next frontier for sourcing could be operations. Recent trends lend some credence to this theory:

• IT leaders have been finding ways to outsource commoditized services for a number of years now, converting their fixed costs to variable
• Some of the branchless bank players that have sprung up the past few years have decided they didn't want to build out a back office, leaving those functions to their technology partners.
• The move to branch/teller capture has prompted some institutions to outsource their entire item processing function along with some of the traditional "Day 2" functions

I learn something new about Bitcoin every day. Eli Durado has a great Bitcoin post on The Umlaut that describes some capabilities of Bitcoin that haven't received as much press as its basic transactional capabilities. Durado also describes the Script language that's used for Bitcoin transactions:

Script is not limited, however, to these conventional transactions that merely transfer coins from one person’s control to another’s. It can evaluate statements, execute conditionally, do math, and move bits around.