I was at a large bank’s wealth management conference recently, where the CEO was being quizzed about various areas including a lot about technology and FinTech. He made several statements that I noted with interest:

“Roboadvisory services improves our speed-to-market and human productivity, but does not replace humans. In particular, I can see that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning makes it far easier for us to comply with and implement regulations and deal with regulatory change in the back office.”

“I don’t believe that AI and FinTech will replace human advisors. It will just make them more effective and efficient. In fact, the real gamechanger will be what goes on behind the human advisor, behind the scenes, in the back office.”

“I don’t believe in bitcoin or other new cryptocurrencies, but I do believe that existing fiat currencies will move to be fiat digital currencies over time. I don’t see a new cryptocurrency taking over.”

“Client data needs to remain confidential and should only be exposed to those who need to know. The issue is that regulatory change over the years has made those who claim they need to know to rise exponentially. That is an issue that technology can help us with and to not only reduce the number of those who need to know, but also record every access to client data which allows us to capture any access that was not authorised.”

Now I don’t disagree with the comments above … except that it made me think that they were slightly narrowly focused upon making faster horses (see my earlier blog about this).

The issue is that most banks and bankers are product-focused. They’ve grown up in a culture of pushing products through channels, and it’s hard to break out of that thinking. Now this particular bank is quite forward thinking about technology, and is an early adopter of things like blockchain and AI. Even then, the idea that most of the new tech is focused upon back office improvements in support of human front-end is narrow thinking.