If
it’s Sydney, it’s meetings, ethics, and infrastructure and if we want to move
the needle a bit further along, then I suspect even more meetings will be held …
The weather has distinctly turned warmer in Sydney. The
formal meetings of last week are now behind me and it’s been a week of heads
down typing as I catch up with numerous commitments, but the many meetings with
which I was involved took me back in time when almost every hour included one
meeting or another. Perhaps it had to do with the positive nature of communication
– when gathered together, ideas seemed to take on form more quickly and what
started out as just a couple of threads developed into a full-blown tapestry in
no time at all! On the other hand, perhaps it was just the enjoyment I derived from
the free flow of ideas that would happen and how, from nothing at all the gem
of a really good idea appeared.
As I was walking the floor of the exhibition halls at SIBOS Sydney 2018 last week and yes, exhibitors were spread across two floors at the Sydney International Convention Center (ICC), I couldn’t help but notice that when you throw together a bunch of banking executives, they like to talk, or as ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott remarked without any apparent remorse, “I like to steal ideas” that he hears at events like SIBOS. Then again, this is what you would expect at such a conference where a substantial representation of the global banking community was in residence for the week.
However, the meetings conducted at SIBOS had a lot to do with AI. Of course, as we get more engaged in discussions about AI, ethics becomes a popular topic and at SIBOS, it quickly drew a crowd. And then there is open banking and the open bank platform that held the attention of audiences each time people met.
While I am not at all confident bank leadership fully understands what they are saying or the likely ramifications of becoming software houses themselves, nevertheless the push for open banking seems unstoppable at this time, but you had to sit through a lot of meetings before you got a complete picture of what bankers expected to win from open banking.
AI with a healthy dash of ethics, and open banking often took us into discussions on infrastructure. Bankers want infrastructure that is flexible and capable of better integration with the banks planned rollout of new applications. As much as AI, deep learning, ethics, open banking and the like stimulated conversations among the bankers drawn into impromptu meetings, it was the ever present need to turn conversations back to infrastructure that was hard to miss no matter where you were in the ICC.
What Sydney is very good at is getting you thinking about infrastructure. As I have commuted to Sydney Central Business District (CBD) almost every day since I have arrived, it struck me that there isn’t a part of Sydney that isn’t under construction. New light rail lines are being laid with a raft of new stations being built. Downtown, the main street, George Street, is completely torn up with a new light rail system going in as well. Then there are tunnels being drilled nearby to better connect one motorway with another (and get heavy big rig trucks off the surface roads) and yes, plans for a whole new city were unveiled yesterday as plans to build Sydney’s second airport continue to move along.
As I was walking the floor of the exhibition halls at SIBOS Sydney 2018 last week and yes, exhibitors were spread across two floors at the Sydney International Convention Center (ICC), I couldn’t help but notice that when you throw together a bunch of banking executives, they like to talk, or as ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott remarked without any apparent remorse, “I like to steal ideas” that he hears at events like SIBOS. Then again, this is what you would expect at such a conference where a substantial representation of the global banking community was in residence for the week.
However, the meetings conducted at SIBOS had a lot to do with AI. Of course, as we get more engaged in discussions about AI, ethics becomes a popular topic and at SIBOS, it quickly drew a crowd. And then there is open banking and the open bank platform that held the attention of audiences each time people met.
While I am not at all confident bank leadership fully understands what they are saying or the likely ramifications of becoming software houses themselves, nevertheless the push for open banking seems unstoppable at this time, but you had to sit through a lot of meetings before you got a complete picture of what bankers expected to win from open banking.
AI with a healthy dash of ethics, and open banking often took us into discussions on infrastructure. Bankers want infrastructure that is flexible and capable of better integration with the banks planned rollout of new applications. As much as AI, deep learning, ethics, open banking and the like stimulated conversations among the bankers drawn into impromptu meetings, it was the ever present need to turn conversations back to infrastructure that was hard to miss no matter where you were in the ICC.
What Sydney is very good at is getting you thinking about infrastructure. As I have commuted to Sydney Central Business District (CBD) almost every day since I have arrived, it struck me that there isn’t a part of Sydney that isn’t under construction. New light rail lines are being laid with a raft of new stations being built. Downtown, the main street, George Street, is completely torn up with a new light rail system going in as well. Then there are tunnels being drilled nearby to better connect one motorway with another (and get heavy big rig trucks off the surface roads) and yes, plans for a whole new city were unveiled yesterday as plans to build Sydney’s second airport continue to move along.
If you have been curious about the photo at the top of
this post depicting the Wells Fargo stagecoach, it was taken on Wells Fargo’s booth
at SIBOS. Not sure about the logistics
and how the bank managed to get it to Sydney but it certainly looked the part
as there was a constant stream of bankers passing by who stepped into the booth
to find out more about the stagecoach. However, it was a tangible reminder of
just how far we have come in terms of infrastructure modernization. It is at
this point that I look at what NonStop is promising today following the
numerous changes that have been made to NonStop. Freed from ties to hardware
and freed too from traditional systems it now fits very well with where meetings
on infrastructure are taking us and where NonStop continues to provide value
for bankers – just think what NSaaS with DBaaS and possibly even DRaaS will
lead us!
If on the other hand you are simply curious about where
NonStop fits in the bigger scheme of things from the edge to the core and
whether in time NonStop will be crucial component of the infrastructure
supporting many more open industry platforms, then I think you may just be
getting your first glimpse of one potential future direction for NonStop.
Definitely, we are headed towards product offerings delivered as a service and
definitely, the potential for NSaaS underpinning other key middleware offerings
like database and D/R are just the beginning. It will only take a couple of
fertile minds to propel these projects deeper into IT and about that I will be
providing more details in the near future.
There was one last item on sighting the stagecoach in Sydney I wanted to touch on as it reminded me that so much of what we do relies on good infrastructure. Whether our daily routines involve jumping on a plane to a faraway destination or simply catching the metro to work, as remote workers (as many of us are these days), it’s often just the opportunity to participate in a simple meeting that gets us out of our remote offices. With the way infrastructure is developing, getting to a meeting is no longer the chore it once was – so yes, over the next couple of weeks I will be joining the commuter crowd too as I head from one meeting in Sydney to another. Believe it or not I am actually looking forward to my next meeting in Sydney – are you looking forward to TBC?
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