> I've worked with some incredibly motivated and talented people and this is not my impression at all.
I worked with some incredibly motivated and talented people too - and saw many of them ground down as basic improvements took literally years to make it through in watered-down form, if they even saw the light of day at all. I was actually amazed by how few people in the financial industry are incompetent in the "couldn't write fizzbuzz" sense, but there seems to be a big-picture insularity where stuff that would be basic and common sense in every other industry (e.g. automated CI) is just not done.
Still, it's an old, large and hugely complex interconnected system made up of literally thousands of banks employing millions of people and several regulatory bodies run by different federal and state administrations.
Such interconnected systems/networks are notoriously hard to evolve, especially given that, as you also noted, people are often extremely conservative when it comes to their life savings. I don't think it's fair to blame the people working in the industry for all of that or even call them lazy.