[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.