Large banks have an entire universe of challenges that don't impact firms like Netflix or Google. I've worked with enough of them and seen many high speed engineering folks from FAANG companies flounder for months as they try to recalibrate for the highly regulated environments.

I'm not saying banks are great at tech, because on any individual metric it would be really hard to find an example of where they lead, but they (and other highly regulated industries) have a lot more to solve for along the way.

Or just have customers who mostly can't grasp authenticators. A friend worked for a company that implemented 2FA with the authenticator app. They removed it in a day as it ground the company to a halt.

I think it is pretty easy to define tech company.

Is the IT/Software Dev a profit center or a cost center, easy as that.

What about companies that aren’t remotely profitable at all? Isn’t that a huge portion of notable tech companies?

Better term would probably be revenue driver, which is typically what is meant by "profit center." In other words, IT brings sales contracts through the door.

For banks, online banking is a huge driver of business. Some banks have even started claiming (I suspect mostly for recruiting purposes) that they are "in tech sector".

Similar Point: "Hedge" and "Edge" share a lot of letters and semantics. If you are really good at dealing with tail risk (Pandemics, perhaps...) this not only allows you to rugged-ize and preserve your internals structures and practices in extreme circumstances but also potentially massively outcompete your competitors.

For a modern information-centric company, what does that mean? Get the technology right. Pay some smart people to get your internals ship-shape and reproducible, for example.

I also tend to think the distinction is related to compartmentalizing all technical activities into an IT suborganization. A tech company performs all these activities as a matter of the regular course of business, within the lines of business organizations. A bank would have a dedicated IT organization, a few layers of 'governance' and human orchestrators to slow down your builders, and you get all the dysfunction you describe.

Banks are run by the bankers and the tech team is typically very second fiddle. I work in fin tech.

Isn't that his point?

This varies greatly by size and age of the bank.