It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies

Re:It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies by cm2187 on Thursday February 15, 2018 @11:49AM (#16385481)

That being said I wouldn't say Goldman is your typical bank. Other banks are much slower at embracing automation and software development is more often than not considered as a non strategic commodity which budgets and headcount fluctuates up and down based on how much is available for discretionary spending. And the statements from its senior management are also too often aspirational and disconnected from the reality of the organisation.

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Re:It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies by mipmap04 on Thursday February 15, 2018 @12:01PM (#16385581)

As someone who works in the regtech / fintech industry I totally agree. Large portions of even the biggest banks are severely underserved technologically. There is a lot of wide open space here for technology that improves efficiency and accuracy related to compliance and general operating activities.

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Re:It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies by wgerard on Thursday February 15, 2018 @11:57AM (#16385545)

That's interesting to hear! I'm going through "Flash Boys" right now, and it (to me at least) paints GS in a pretty negative light wrt their engineering culture.

Granted the book mostly focuses on HFT firms, so I could easily see that GS is way better than most large banks but a bit lacking behind, say, Citadel.

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Re:It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies by dsacco on Thursday February 15, 2018 @01:35PM (#16386360)

> That's interesting to hear! I'm going through "Flash Boys" right now, and it (to me at least) paints GS in a pretty negative light wrt their engineering culture.

As an aside, if you’re not planning to already, please read Flash Boys: Not So Fast when you’re done.

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Re:It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies by ionforce on Thursday February 15, 2018 @12:08PM (#16385634)

Is there a way to express/model technology so that it isn't considered this accessory but something that is core to their values/mission?

Have we not done a good job of proving that investment in technology is a force/profit multiplier?

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Re:It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies by 123212321 on Thursday February 15, 2018 @12:11PM (#16385661)

The truth is tech is not a force multiplier in finance, except for HFT. A few firms do pay a ton for engineers (higher than google level comp), but there are probably less than 5000 of those engineers in NYC.

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Re:It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies by nissimk on Thursday February 15, 2018 @12:23PM (#16385753)

No. Many smaller financial firms derive their advantage from technology. There are many areas of finance aside from high frequency trading and they all benefit from significant force multiplication from technology. Even in the lowly area of operations automation there are firms that achieve significant scale with a small number of personnel through technological advantage. Granted this is sometimes achieved with a combination of in house and commercial technology packages, and sometimes the overall system design is done by non-technical people who just manage grunts to do all of the work, to say that these companies are not benefiting from force multiplying technology is foolish. There are very few financial professionals left who are not technology people in some sense of the word.

Many firms benefit from better data. All that data needs to be acquired and managed. Many firms benefit from better analytics and models. Those models need to be tested and implemented.

Your number is low.

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Re:It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies by 123212321 on Thursday February 15, 2018 @12:28PM (#16385792)

Source is I work in this field. There are positions with big data and data management that pay well. But the ones paying 350k+ are way harder to get than working at a top tech firm. Theres a quant trading firm called engineers gate that has a bunch of ivy league programmers, the top of the top. They havent made a nickel off their technology. They have a had a huge outflow of talent to Google and FB. People do get paid 500k+ to manage a firms data, but thats because the firm makes so much that the money splashes around, not because its a huge component of their profitability.

Even at Two Sigma, the engineers are second class to the quants.

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Re:It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies by jnordwick on Thursday February 15, 2018 @01:21PM (#16386259)

If your cutoff is $350k, I'd definitely say your NYC 5k headcout is way too low. By at least an order of magnitude. Even the smallest trading firm will have 5 tech people (devs/data scientist/quants) making that much after bonus.

Edit: maybe $350k is at the border for that 5 each estimate. But i still think you're of by an order of magnitude in nyc in general.

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Re:It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies by whatok on Thursday February 15, 2018 @12:40PM (#16385902)

If "data scientists" working at Google are considered tech roles then finance quants should be as well, right? I agree that there's a distinction between data engineers and quants but to me they're all tech roles essentially.

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Re:It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies by 123212321 on Thursday February 15, 2018 @12:45PM (#16385940)

The difference is that quants make way more than regular engineers in finance. At google, an engineer working on the next generation database can make a ton of money, his work is extremely valuable to the firm. Engineering innovation is central. In finance, engineers in HFT did make a ton, but HFT is no longer very profitable.

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Re:It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies by user5994461 on Thursday February 15, 2018 @03:22PM (#16387257)

Quant is not a tech role. Quant is about maths and statistics.

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Re:It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies by zjaffee on Thursday February 15, 2018 @02:10PM (#16386619)

This is absolutely false, tech is a force multiplier in nearly every business even if it doesn't require onsite software engineers to get that productivity bump. Look at the Bloomberg terminal in finance, Salesforce/CRM in sales, Epic in healthcare, Westlaw in legal work, the list goes on.

Now a lot of the time, firms can get a better product by purchasing one than trying to build something in house (where anyone producing HFT tech won't sell that product because it's an immensely valuable trade secret). This said, I'm sure there are forms of intelligence gathering that is also built in house by firms that allow them to implement market beating strategies.

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Re:It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies by AzzieElbab on Thursday February 15, 2018 @04:30PM (#16387823)

I am only familiar with these three "Bloomberg terminal in finance, Salesforce/CRM in sales, Epic in healthcare" and these products are not what I would call a good tech

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