Fintech visionary Leda Glyptis, a true Sibos Insider, is the resident blogger for Sibos 2020, offering her unique take on this year’s event. Read her last blog, part of a series released daily throughout the week.</em> </p> The (Big) Boys Are Back in Town</h2> I’ve been in Banking long enough to have had the Conversation. In every permutation imaginable. In all its forms and all its glory.It went like this:We are a regulated business, young lady. Easy with the hunger for change.This is the Big Kids Table: big decisions, big responsibilities, big risks. Big Boy Pants. This was consistently given as the reason why things were not happening. Or were happening so slowly as to be invisible to the naked eye.And some of it was fair.The Big Boys (and girls, sure, work with the metaphor here) face pressures and scrutiny that make caution understandable. They have clients, regulators and shareholders who expect prudence. And they have humans within their walls that are expected to perform, parent, learn, change, lead and evangelise all at the same time and, let’s face it, not everyone is equally good at all that, all the time. So the Big Boys have been slow. They have paid lip service. They have tried to get away with as little as they could.And why not? More than necessary is wasted effort.Thus spoke my friend who told me that anything more than a pass grade at university was wasted effort.Well.That made no sense to me in the year 2000 and it makes no sense now. But that doesn’t mean people and organisations don’t live by it. And that’s ok. Because our mission, as the resident agitators, was never to make people do more than necessary in order to make a point. It was to highlight that what the Big Boys thought was enough… wasn’t.</p> So I did the rounds of the Big Boy presentations for a temperature check.And what they said was stuff we’ve heard before.But they also said stuff that made me think… hey… these last 10 years… they have been listening. How about that?</p> They said…</strong>Cathy Bessant, Chief Operating and Technology Officer at Bank of America said tone matters. She said accountability matters. She said she’s had diversity targets for over 10 years. And honestly, it’s all good and true. But I’ve heard it before.</p> They also said…</strong>But she acknowledged diversity exists within our organisations and it doesn’t make it to the top. And to allow for that transition, we need deliberate, intentional leadership. Leadership that will proactively look to promote from the base of the pyramid to Mahogany Row. Leadership that will experiment with different different kinds of assignments to get a different kind of outcome. It’s not a statistics game any more. The path ahead is long but the window dressing is not the whole story any more. Far from it.</p> They said…</strong>Steven Van Rijswijk, CEO of ING, talked about digital transformation as an imperative and come on now, that’s old news. He talked about the need to stay relevant and I say yeah sure true… but we’ve heard this before. He talked about the need to nurture new skills and new people and I thought, we are getting warmer here. </p> They also said…</strong>And then he talked about the need for a robust data infrastructure to support this ambition. He said ‘we use data lakes but we also use Esperanto and this is why’. He talked about what achieving the next stage on the bank’s digital journey looks like in a language that showed he talks about this at work, he didn’t just memorise lines for his Sibos fireside (and yes, it happens). And I can tell you for free that CEOs who choose to learn the lingo to this level we have not really seen before. And we need them. And I am listening.</p> They said…</strong>I listened to Chairman and CEO of State Streett Ronald O’Hanley (a flutter of disloyalty to my BNY Mellon days firmly felt). He said what I thought he’d say. He said opportunity is defined by what clients need. And what they usually need is an attractive fee.</p> They also said…</strong>But then he said that the custodian’s role is to support clients who face immense operational and IT complexity because of the antiquity of their offering and the challenges this poses in terms of legacy infrastructure. That’s not the surprising part. The wonderfully fresh part was the articulate way in which he described what fixing this looks like.With systems of mixed age and complexity, clients with sophisticated needs have to consolidate tech for operational efficiency and render their data usable in the process. That looks like automated reconciliations for data integrity enabling us to use data across the investment lifecycle: data sets feeding back into the process during the day, informing trades you may wish to make later, increasing visibility and therefore usability.You know what that is? Music to my ears, that’s what it is.</p> The point I am making is we’ve been talking about all this for the past ten years. From innovation centres and the Innotribe pods. Impassioned presentations and desperate partnerships. Anything to get the Big Boys to listen. Understand. Change. It’s been a long ten years for all of us as people. But for an institution like the ones quoted above and so many like them, 10 years ain’t that long.We’ve been preaching to the Big Boys for ten long years.Get with the programme, we said. You need to do things differently, we said. You need to engage more deeply, we said. You need to learn and think and act, above all, you need to act, we said. There is a new sheriff in town: what you used to do isn’t enough to keep you in this party, we said.Well. Looks like they were listening. This won’t be fast and it won’t be easy. But however long it may take, it sure looks like the (Big) Boys are Back in Town. And mean to do things differently. And I am all eyes and ears. </p>