What do Terry Gilliam’s 1985 dystopian movie Brazil, ‘turtles all the way down,’ the power of plumbing, engineers and delivering fundamental digital transformation have in common? They all come together in a Financial Services Club webinar delivered by Dr Leda Glyptis, 10x Future Technologies’ Chief Client Officer
Leda recently joined Professor Michael Mainelli, Executive Chairman at think-tank Z/Yen for a webinar headlined: Tuttles all the way down - Digital plumbing upgrades essential for financial services to progress.
In a presentation and Q&A, Leda speaks about the breadth of global infrastructure that needs to change to support improvements in terms of how financial services, technology and culture can support banks.
She covers the past, present and future around how best to digitise a business or bank starting from: Turtles all the way down – an expression of journeys never ending.
Along the way she touches on the movie Brazil and the character Tuttle, a rogue heating engineer played by Robert de Niro out to solve people’s real-world plumbing problems, and how delivering digital transformation is not just a matter of layering a new array of digital pipes and pathways on top of others.
At the core of Leda’s argument is the view that banks need both plumbers and Tuttles. The former are people within an organisation "who really understand how something works, including all the ways that are invisible" and Tuttles: “Someone who can take you from where you are today to where you need to be tomorrow without setting the building on fire.”
Michael asks Leda where 10x fits in this landscape.
“We are plumbers. We are creating a cloud native core banking system in the belief that the utility part of the rails should be ubiquitous, scalable, flexible and available so that the banks can focus on creating their value-additive propositions on top of it.”
Leda says a positive sign of banks' willingness to change is seeing how many have set up Site Reliability Engineering teams, which reassuringly shows they understand the importance of DevOps.
Banks need to address how they really marry innovation with their business imperative – asking the question how they will survive and what they are doing to make sure that change is not only for the better but reflected across an entire organisation, she adds.
“ We are on borrowed time because the pace of change around the banking institutions has been much faster than the pace of change within them. This is not a world that will await for approval and buy-in from the banks.”
Click on the video link below to watch the Financial Services Club webinar with Leda and Michael.