[shreyanshd]

I work in technology for an investment bank and i hear “we are not a technology company” every quarter. Ironically, the tech we develop is a major factor, if not the only factor, for revenue. My motivation is instantly shattered when i hear that.

[hamstercat]

I used to work in another financial-related company and "IT is a cost not a revenue center" was thrown around as often as possible. Raise, promotion, formation, a computer made in this decade, anything really would get us that answer. Not only from my boss, but from the IT's top director in various meetings and one-on-one. I used to find it highly frustrating and unfair given that the company would cease to exists without our software, and that all new customers were acquired through new development in our software.

Now that I'm older and not working there anymore, I understand that it's a culture problem and that management just didn't know any better, but I've come to accept the fact that it was a great way to cut costs and get away with it. After all, they still have many employees and manage to make more profit year after year. It just made for a very demotivating environment.

[nostrademons]

The old "We are a tech company, we just happen to do retail/advertising/communication/movies/hospitality/transportation/payments better than you idiots" seems to be working pretty well for Amazon/Google/Facebook/Netflix/AirBnB/Uber/Lyft/Stripe.

[MR4D]

This makes me both sad and happy. Sad, because that’s such a shortsighted view; happy, because I run a small financial services company and we compete with them.

We’re prudent, we don’t like to waste money, and we analyze investments from every angle we can think of.

But we look at Tech (we don’t call it IT) as a profit center. We don’t invest in anything unless it can drive down costs, increase revenues, or is needed for regulatory or security reasons.

And when we pull the trigger, I want to make sure that we’ve got the best stuff on the market. Everyone uses either Macs or PCs (we’re agnostic), and run as many monitors as they need to feel productive. Everyone has an iPhone and an iPad. When the hurricane hit Houston, our office building was out of commission for over a week, but we kept running the business.

I want to make sure that Tech allows us to multiply our capabilities. We have a paperless office where any paper is scanned at hi-res, put into our systems and linked to client or regulatory records. Everything is shredded afterwards.

Long ago, I worked in IT, and was dumbfounded by the shortsightedness I saw inside companies who don’t know how to utilize IT. I love competing against those idiots now, because my capabilities are way higher and our cost structure is lower. If we didn’t have all our paper copies scanned in when the hurricane hit, we would have been dead in the water (sorry for the pun).

So, I really feel sorry for all those people who work for morons like the Parent describes, but here’s my recommendation: go start a company and run with your vision. You may fail a couple times (I did), but once you win - and it only takes once - you will never look back.

[caseysoftware]

THIS. This is the kind of company we should strive to work for.

Appreciating something just because it's novel is bullshit. Appreciating something that solves an actual problem effectively.. that's where I want to be.

[mmcconnell1618]

The IT-Business Maturity model fits here. Considering IT a "cost center" that takes orders is a Level 1 organization. Level 2 is about optimizing IT processes and Level 3 is the partnership of IT and Business on strategic goals. If a financial firm is treating IT as a cost instead of partner, they have some maturing to do.

http://formicio.com/index.php/archives/765

[Spooky23]

It’s funny that in the .gov space, I’ve seen management in agencies ranging from corrections to taxation to social services envision themselves as software companies, because it made sense. Every dollar invested in strategic tech produces $3-10 in outcome.

Ironically, the orgs responsible for technology “get it” the least, as they are in the business of ITIL bullshit and order filling. IT bureaucracy will spend $10,000 to save $0.10.

[samstave]

>I used to work in another financial-related company and "IT is a cost not a revenue center" was thrown around as often as possible

This has literally always been the case with IT; they were always seen as cost-centers, not profit.... which is largely due to IT departments historically falling under the CFO....

CEO: "Keep these motherfuckers from spending money"

IT: if "You want this [project] to meet your requirements of [XYZ]?, then == $2000000

CFO: "Fuck you, lets do it for half that and drop security and accessibility as a result"

[perseusprime11]

We actually dropped the CFO and life is beautiful.

[a012]

It's a common concept that many managements see IT/infrastructure as cost center, even their tech to be used to generate revenue. It boils down to minimize the systems to maximize shareholders value but requires high uptime.

[bunderbunder]

Funny, I go the other way, somewhat. Last time I was interviewing for jobs, one line I heard from a whole lot of financial companies was, "We like to think of ourselves as more of a tech company than a bank."

It's an instant turn-off for me when I hear something like that. These are companies that should be thinking of tech as a means to an end, and not an end in an of itself. Even when I worked at a major software vendor, the tech was still just a means to an end.

[lev99]

If (good) tech companies use tech as a means to an end, and a bank wants to think of themselves as a tech company, that means that a bank thinking of themselves as a tech company doesn't necessary think of tech as an end in of itself.

Companies too invested in tech tend to spend themselves into bankruptcy. Companies not invested enough in tech tend to be overcome by companies with better tech more slowly.

[somberi]

There could be multiple reasons for this, two of which come to my mind:

1. The person who said it may be fancying his own role as tech-heavy and might relate to his/her imagination of what tech-pure companies do. Saying, we are like Google, appeases the person saying it, and satisfies their ego.

2. Often candidates like listening to this. It may not have worked for you, but for the candidates who like hearing this, this works wonderfully. If I were to wager, this line works for more candidates than it pisses off.

[adrianratnapala]

> It's an instant turn-off for me when I hear something like that.

While I can see why you find it grating, I think I would forgive them. Whatever else they are, interviews are also those awkward social moments when new acquaintances are just trying to push beyond small talk while trying to please each other. At this stage, it's normal for people to try a little too hard.

[bunderbunder]

You're right that it's could just be a recruiter being over-eager and/or missing the mark on what would attract me personally. But that doesn't really change my stance on the subject.

Interviews aren't really like a casual social interaction. Progressing past the initial phone call typically involves spending from several hours up to to a whole weekend on some cute homework project, shirking on one's current job for more phone calls, burning PTO for on-site interviews and whatnot. I've got precious little time I'm willing to spend on that sort of stuff, so it's in my interest to be supremely petty.

[zokier]

Its kinda fashionable to say such things, I'd think its natural that they do that especially when trying to get good tech people in (I presuming here). Bigger question i8s how far beyond the interview that sentiment truly goes.

[WalterBright]

Maybe you can fix the problem where I want to download all my statements and transactions for the last tax year. It should be a one button push from their web site. But nope, it's always 15 minutes to a half hour tediously downloading things statement by statement, form by form, argghh.

[shreyanshd]

I am sorry you have to spend half an hour downloading your statements. But what you’re complaining about comes under commercial banking tech, which is generally outsourced to IT consulting firms. Our tech platform is generally for institutional clients, who have systems on their end, and our systems interact with theirs to carry out business.

[arenaninja]

Also work in tech for an investment bank but I hear that we are a tech company every quarter. And it's pure BS, no one here cares about development experience :)

[Terretta]

Come work at MUFG, largest bank in free world, $2.7T, which decided we have to be a tech company.

Our head of technology strategy for Americas is on hacker news at quarter to midnight. And hiring, not just for blockchain. (See my “about” text.)

Worth a chat if you’re in NYC or San Diego.

[nowarninglabel]

If you don't mind me hijacking your comment, I'm actually currently trying to solve a problem through which I am trying to connect to people such as you. Essentially, Kiva has served the world's unbanked and underbanked through crowd-funding to some success, but ultimately to reach all the underserved we need to get the data we and our partners have to large regional and global banks so they can price the risk of these potential borrowers and bring in larger amounts of capital.

It would seem if we can get the data to banks such as MUFG in a usable format, then it presents a large opportunity, however how would one even begin to interact with such a large entity to explore it?

[Terretta]

This sounds great.

You’d troll their LinkedIn looking for a title that esonated, read the job description to be sure, and try connecting, exchange enough convo to move over to their bank email, and then share the idea.

In our case, I’m the right guy. You can email me (and connect on LinkedIn if you like) and I’ll reply with my bank email. Elaborate on the idea then.

I’ve got 250 leaders thinking about how they could use new kinds of data, we’ll connect you to right groups. Even I have a team of PhDs looking for interesting things to tie together to better serve communities.

Note though, getting capital isn’t our problem, we’re interested in more ways to give it out, use it, put it to work.

[keithwhor]

I find this statement funny, if only because in the context of Silicon Valley culture, the statement "[x] is on hacker news at quarter to midnight" normally just means "[x] isn't doing any work at quarter to midnight."

(I understand what you're going for and appreciate it, it's just interesting how social signals are interpreted given different industries / contexts.)

(... and yes, me posting this comment does, in fact, mean that I'm not doing any work while I post it.)

[Terretta]

On the contrary, if your job depends on understanding trends in a field, read more:

https://qz.com/668514/if-you-want-to-be-like-warren-buffett-...

Being aware of HN is part of my work.

In my case, we get four key dimensions of value:

1. Seeing trends early is in the job description, and a small slice of zeitgeist is here. I check here, several other self-selecting subgroup sites, a broad RSS list, white paper subscription sites, etc., and typically also read one subject matter book a day. With enough dots of info across a broad array of sources, you can see trends earlier.

2. Finding emerging tech likely able to go ‘enterprise’ is also part of my JD. That often depends on leadership. Some of those leaders are here. You can tell a lot about a company from its founders. I’ve been an extremely early customer of startups found here, years later they lead their segment and we’re already on board. Examples like Hashicorp or CoreOS come to mind.

3. Emerging debates that do matter are often here early, where threads are high quality enough to get exposure to well thought, good logic, alternative views. Being able to absorb more of those improves low data decisions.

4. You can even find talent early. Many met here have gone on to release awesome tools, join or found cool companies, get acquired by BigCos... it’s great to see talented and motivated trajectories and learn it’s not all just luck.

[baldeagle]

I work for a bank... and I hear that, 'we will be a tech company or not a company.' All the time...

[kbenson]

Conversely, I work for a very small company where the owner likes to fashion himself running a startup even though he's been in business over a decade. Technology features heavily in what we do, but I cringe every time he says "really, we're a technology company".

[dopamean]

How could you say that the tech you develop might be the only factor in revenue calculations? That makes no sense to me in investment banking.

[yourapostasy]

If tech really is the differentiator, then hearing that means tech staff won’t get commensurately compensated for delivering that decisive factor to the revenue mix.

The rules of old business still applies in most organizations: the closer you are to the transactional point where money changes hands, the more you make. This many times means sales, then management, then finance, then marketing, then engineering, then back office.

[dopamean]

Yeah I get all that. I guess what I mean is that I just don't believe that the technology at an investment bank is responsible for all of the revenue at the bank. There's no way that's true. There are people who actually go out and do advisory deals and such which are actual people making things happen. Sure, they are enabled by technology, but those kinds of deals have been done for decades.

[bboreham]

Investment banks also do huge volumes of transactional business - dealing in shares, bonds, fx and derivatives of those. And all of those need hundreds of risk reports either for management or regulators.

The deal-makers can get by with a spreadsheet and a BlackBerry, but the rest needs serious amounts of technology.

Ideally advisory business is balanced with dealing and financing, but different houses will be slanted one way or another.

[shreyanshd]

Tech is obviously not the only factor, but it certainly is an important one. One of the main factors in finacial services tech industry is time to market, efficienct algortihms, being compliant, handling huge bursts of volume and accuracy. Our systems ensure smooth functioning of the business across most exchanges in the world. I think the business is practically impossible without robust technology.