GS has had a centralized risk/pricing system for over 20 years now that is pretty powerful [2]. Fun fact: GS was able to calculate their total exposure to the Lehman collapse 12 hours after it happened using this.
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-buy-financial-... 2. https://news.efinancialcareers.com/uk-en/276170/secdb-quartz...
The company wasn't very successful, we just couldn't convince portfolio managers to pay for our software. Even the analysts at hedge funds didn't like to use our software. My theory is that a bunch of analysts need to justify their jobs with incredibly inefficient and error-prone excel workflows. Our software would have eliminated a lot of what they do in a day, and therefore, would eliminate their jobs as well.
It is terrifying that trillions of dollars of assets are run on excel, but the inertia is too strong.
Even if you're right, pretty much any company whose customers aren't 100%, unimpeachably good is going to fail.
Another way of thinking of it is, as soon as they became even slightly an antagonist (think Disney rivals, less Autobots), it was doomed.
As an aside, an alternative interpretation would be that Excel workflows are more intellectually stimulating, so as a side effect they come up with better models. So even if your software had a superior UX for the task at hand, the objective of making money is better served by people using their brains harder generally.
After all, a lot of people practice violin and play chess because it feels good, and then those people make a bajillion dollars on the stock market. Consider that if Excel even remotely reenacts the patterns of those activities, which is almost certainly does, it makes money in ways besides calculating numbers in a user-accessible way.
Our software didn’t have that feeling, it didn’t make you feel powerful in the same way that excel does (I lobbied hard for us to make a desktop app, no one likes how web apps feel. But nobody listened)
Giving up that control is hard.
One cyber-breach and all that really nice clean code is readily understandable to your competitors.
But what they really wanted to say is "we will have to repurpose 200 staff who process these checks and mail out statements, and they're all 30 year veterans, and I don't have the heart to tell them they're fired even though they are the sole reason we lose money"
There are so much sunk costs ( decades of excel worksheets and decades of technical know-how ) that most companies aren't going to switch to another spreadsheet and migrate all that data and retrain their employees.
When did software devs lack the power to write trading tools? The issue is that the traders had the knowledge and wrote their ideas into a spreadsheet which was not only maintainable for them but easily extensible. I cannot overstate that second part. They become spreadsheet behemoths because it's trivial to make them do that one extra thing (at least for the first fifty or so features).
Probably when the IT peeps in finance believe that the problem with spreadsheets is their speed. As the fundamental problem of spreadsheets in finance has absolutely nothing to do with their speed, this may take a while.
These spreadsheets are truly amazing, I've only seen glimpses of these spreadsheets but they were massive, nothing like needed to have servers in the local network cabinet and running cables for keyboard, video and mouse, because you needed 1/2 a Tb of ram in order to open the spreadsheet.