Do banks really need thousands of IT people?

 

On his article, “Should banks have more technologists than Microsoft?”, Chris Skinner talks about a bank having 40.000 technologist and he suggest at his article that: “… any bank that boasts tens of thousands of developers, technologists and engineers should first be asked the question: WHY? I don’t know why any bank today needs tens of thousands of developers, technologists and engineers. With APIs, Open Banking, cloud computing and more, a bank could probably run with just ten.”

https://thefinanser.com/2021/06/should-banks-have-more-technologists-than-microsoft.html/

The most important thing for the banks is to deliver best customer experience and for this, the banks need to invest a lot of effort and time to understand customers’ pain points and expectations.

After understanding the pain points and expectations the question comes: “How are we going to deliver the expected level of service and products?”

To answer this question many banks, turn back to their internal IT capabilities and start planning and implementing process accordingly. At the end of the day, often times, whatever is available through the legacy IT capabilities is delivered rather than the customer expectations. Therefore, best customer experience is not delivered.

The banks should look at the ever-improving fintech world and try to find a good solution provider for the delivery of the best customer experience. Rather than trying to develop the solution themselves banks should focus on cooperation with the fintechs. They should play the role of orchestrator instead of developer role.

With the APIs and cloud solutions, banks should be thinking about how they are going to provide seamless service and products for their customers by orchestrating different available services. The banks should worry about creating the API and security standards not developing the products and services on their legacy systems.

The “why do banks need thousands of technologists?” is a very valid question. For purposes of orchestration and deciding about the API and security standards, I am not sure whether 10 technologists would be enough but I know that banks definitely do not need 40.000 technologists.