I work for a large healthcare system, and the "we're not a tech company" line is often heard. At many levels, I agree—we're in the business of delivering healthy outcomes to our communities, so we need to make sure that efforts across the enterprise support that—but it is often applied in ways that stifle us from delivering what we feel would be the most impactful and cost-effective solutions.
I like to respond that Netflix isn't a tech company, either—they're in the business of delivering entertainment. Their position and reputation allows them to build a stronger engineering culture, but their technology still is subservient to their non-tech business goals. While "software is eating the world" has been quoted to the point of being a cliché, the organizations that recognize software as a competitive differentiator—rather than merely a cost center—definitely have an edge against their tech-averse competitors.
I work in technology for an investment bank and i hear “we are not a technology company” every quarter. Ironically, the tech we develop is a major factor, if not the only factor, for revenue. My motivation is instantly shattered when i hear that.
It looks like Goldman has no tech people among their top executives. I would have expected at least a CTO or CIO. I don't see this working out for them.
A major reason why upstarts like Netflix could successfully disrupt old guards, while banks and healthcare industries are still largely immuned despite huge inefficiencies in the way they operate, is the trust factor.
People don’t mind trying out a new entertainment service by a small startup especially they get a free trial month. If it breaks, so what? The same cannot be said about places they choose to manage their finances or health.
Perhaps it might be more promising for a new partnership by big-names in adjacent industries, such as the Amazon-Berkshire Hathaway-JP Morgan healthcare initiative, to disrupt these trust-based industries.
If there is a good way to accelerate the process of consumer trust building, it might allow more newcomers a chance of disruptions. It should result in lower costs and economic surpluses for the consumers. ‘How?’ is the 64-million-dollar question.
Can't you play this definition game with any company though?
I kind of think that if an organization views tech as a competitive advantage and core competency, they are a tech company. E.g. Netflix may be in the business of entertainment, but they are also a tech company. Google may be in the business of selling ads, but they are also a tech company.
>but their technology still is subservient to their non-tech business goals. While "software is eating the world" has been quoted to the point of being a cliché,
Better to say "software ate the world, but netflix has eaten the software" by almost singlehandedly wiping all its upstart competitors from "indigenous tech companies."
To some extend, Netflix deserve some credit for tech. A non-dotcom running tier one CDN is not a small deal.
Yet, they are still a small fish "in the bigger picture of things" though.
I'm of the opinion that all banks should be technology companies, in that pretty much all of their operations rely on computing, so the better they are at developing and operating computer systems they better they'll be able to do business.
Of course there are ranges of new banks (the UK has a range of challenger banks most of whom take a more tech-focused approach) to challenge the "traditional" approach, and it'll be interesting to see how that shakes out...
100% agree. My wife works in private banking, and her descriptions to me of the IT/software environment they have to deal with are absurd.
Recently, the integration of a new loan management system was badly botched and several clients have been hit by it. Bills not going out, therefore not being paid, therefore money being taken forcibly from their accounts without notice. And these are customers with millions each in the bank. This has been ongoing for a couple of months now. The client managers themselves are irate--they've been cultivating these relationships for years, and it's all been jeopardized.
How can so many banks be so blind to the fact that everything they do depends on getting the technology right?
I worked for a bank in the UK that's a US bank that has no retail presence in the UK (that probably narrows it down a lot) but much of the IT operations were being run and managed from the UK. The headcount in the global IT organisation was about the same as the headcount of Apple at the time. I've always known banks has been relying on computers for decades and probably longer than most industries and from my experience this bank was particularly progressive when it comes to technology and happy to innovate and experiment. When working in other parts of the financial industry in the UK it wasn't quite the same as this. I think there's certainly a stronger engineering culture in the US and the benefits of technology delivering productivity at scale is appreciated. The UK also has a legacy of a lot of well paying functions in the financial industry that wasn't relying on technology with people who don't have an aptitude for technology.
The problem is legacy culture & systems. Theres almost no chance of a transformation unless a paradigm shift in senior management thinking takes place.
Maintaing their mess costs massively and large projects carry risks and a bad track record no one on top can support.
Too bad the fintech revolution lost some of its momentum challenging the profitable areas of banking
Most of what you say is true. But the reason they see IT as overhead is because their budget accounts for building the technology and find that supporting it may cost just as much. So they try to get rid of the overhead of Engineering the system to make room for Supporting the system they built. Now, they seem to quickly forget that you still need Engineering to build your next project. And that is why a lot of these companies treat IT Engineering as a disposable asset and then heavily out source the building of these projects to disposable IT Engineering consultants.
On the other hand, it would be great for consumers and those wanting to offer software in the banking ecosystem if there were more standardization in the banking industry. I'd be surprised if anything a bank does is so unique that it requires all their software to be bespoke. Perhaps we could get better security and usability if there were some large providers that offered key software to almost everyone in the industry.
One of the large trends in financial technology development that I've seen is that banks seem to heavily prefer that their staff leave and form third party software service providing companies than hire and allocate resources to internal teams. This means transaction costs are driven up massively, but the leading industry players typically deploy innovations in tandem with their competitors.
My banker friends have big problems trying to modernize sections of their operations on the basis that too much political capital is needed to liquidate entire floors of staff - but that restriction only lasts until someone has an off-the-shelf solution offering 25M in labour savings per quarter.
These inefficiencies and cultural issues hamper execution leading to poorer client outcomes, lower margins, and weaker strategic positioning.
I'm glad that some banks are pushing forward to gobble up that easy ROI, but I am concerned that the net effect of this type of automation is systemic risk, as the industry begins to bifurcate between low and high margin banks, and the latter are afforded accelerating capability to consolidate the former.
Less players. More capacity. More reliance. Less redundancy. Not necessarily bad for John Q. Everyman, but if he's ultimately carrying that risk while pocketing none of the efficiency gains...
This sounds like marketing baloney. I would bet most of that "engineering" headcount is actually just analytical headcount. not a bad thing, but it's not what we used to call engineering.
This is part of an ongoing trend to describe everything as some form of "engineering."
Honestly, if I'm going to Goldman for M&A - I want a human relationship. That relationship may be buttressed by research and analysis using "big data" and "machine learning" - but that's not engineering, that's just good research using the latest useful tools.
I'm only addressing the actual investment banking component of GS. Sure, the consumer banking stuff requires technology and "engineering" but there's absolutely nothing new about this, it's just that consumer banking has lagged horribly behind in consumer-friendly technology.
Goldman makes about half its revenue from market execution, which is basically an entirely engineering driven business. Only about 20% of it's revenue come from the "investment banking" sort of equity and debt underwriting type of activity.
Investment banking is not just advice. They also finance deals (i.e. come up with a few billion to make it happen) and execute - buy all the outstanding shares, or sell new ones in your IPO.
And since those kinds of deals don’t come along every day, they maintain the capability by executing as broker and dealer all the rest of the time.
(I know, I’m simplifying a lot. Hope it helps get the idea across)
The idea that companies can be defined as a binary "tech company" or "not a tech company" is a trope created by tech VCs/entrepreneurs as a means to signal that they are "special" from businesses that we created more than 15 years ago.
Most of my clients (mainly PE investors) typically define companies as either "Tech enabled", "tech lead", "nothing". This means usually two things to them: (1) the more tech enabled the higher the margins (EBITDA) I can achieve and (2) the more tech enabled the higher the multiple I can achieve.
That being said I wouldn't say Goldman is your typical bank. Other banks are much slower at embracing automation and software development is more often than not considered as a non strategic commodity which budgets and headcount fluctuates up and down based on how much is available for discretionary spending. And the statements from its senior management are also too often aspirational and disconnected from the reality of the organisation.
Really? Sounds like the author has never worked in either, and just reads news sites. Having worked in several of both 'MegaBank LLC' and 'A Small Tech Company', they're utterly different beasts. Just because both mention blockchain doesn't mean they're the same.
Culturally, they're worlds apart. Banks offer a career path up and away from technology so you get unmotivated developers joining who are just looking for the next leg-up the career ladder.
Banks are only driven to make money, and the "worst" of the employees are utterly driven by the end-of-year bonus, and to hell with anyone that gets in their way.
While I do agree with your sentiment, switch "Banks" with "VCs" and "end-of-year bonus" with "IPO" and many people would consider your last paragraph an accurate description of the tech startup scene.
Odd, I was just talking to someone yesterday about this because there was a lamentation of not enough "tech companies" in our area to work for.
I pointed out that in the DevOps Handbook one of the lines I highlighted was that in 2013, HSBC (a very large bank) employed more software engineers than Google.
So I went to search other tidbits like that and found that in 2015 Goldman Sachs employed more software engineers than Facebook.
Banks aren't companies that have tech, they're tech companies that do banking.
I make significantly more at GS than I did at google. The difference is that the majority of my compensation comes from the yearly bonus - a quirk in finance.
Sometimes in the early stage of their careers people make mistakes (including myself) to move from tech company to a bank. Never doing this mistake again. I've never seen so much legacy code, poor engineering decision and code standards in my career so far. Of course this could be limited experience to my department, but given the comments here it feels like this is a standard situation across the "tech" in the financial world.
Have they dropped "corporate" solutions that barely work, sold in golf courses to people that are not affected in the least by their decisions?
Are they still using XML (or even worse, CORBA) as duct tape tying everything together?
Have they dropped waterfall?
Do they allow developers to have their say on architectures and solutions to use? Can they experiment with, let's say, Scala, Elixir or are they stuck with some old Java version and don't even think of adding a library besides the approved ones?
Tech and finance are two very broad brushes that both paint a large swath of the business landscape.
When speaking of finance there is everything from regional banks or loan originators to investment banks and trading firms. They are often very far apart in terms of culture, abilities, and pay.
On the higher end in tech you get front desk trading, and they are most definitely a tech subsidy inside a larger institution. Some of the best tech teams I've ever been exposured to. I would take the best team GS over the best team from Google any day of the week. Even a mediocre front desk team are far far above average for the industry because they focus on getting the best talent.
Even companies like Bloomberg that you wouldn't really think of beyond their news service is a massive tech company on the back end. They also have trading and low latency data infrastructures. One of the best teams i ever met was the core bond team at Bloomberg. I was blown away at how good they were.
All these places know they are tech companies and pay appropriately. On the other side you have regional banks or even old school trading firms where they aren't really tech companies, but are mostly admin work with average pay.
I've worked at tech companies and finance (hfts, algo trading, dark pool, banks), one thing i really like about finance is how difficult and interdisciplinary it can be. The tech problems I've encountered at finance firms have been so much more difficult than any other place. Google scales by throwing more machines at it, as most other web tech firms. Many times you don't have that luxury in finance. You have to be smart about it.
Remember, Google gives it developers Go because it considers them above average cogs. Finance firms gives it developers APL/A+/KDB :) I jest a little, but I think there is definitely something telling in what is expected of you.
You can go into a big bank and be a 9 to 5er in an auxiliary role. Or you can go in and workn your tail off and move up. But be prepared to work a lot for those bonuses.
I wish banks would learn what a "transaction" is. I have repeated problems with electronic banking where one party to the transaction shows it as a "success" and the other party shows it as a "failure". These problems tend to be tough for me to resolve as both parties insist on their end.
I'm almost ready to go back to writing checks by hand. Waving a cancelled check around has always worked well to resolve transaction disputes. There's no paper trail with electronic banking.
I think the headline should be "It's Getting Harder to Tell Goldman Sachs from Tech Companies"...
Insinuating that all banks are becoming tech companies is being a bit too generous.
EDIT: I am pretty sure Bloomberg does A/B testing on their headlines to see which get more clicks. The URL of the article indicates that the headline may have been different to start out with. I've also often observed the same article on the web and the Bloomberg Terminal with different headlines.
I think another interesting paradigm is breaking up companies by:
1. embracing technology early
2. chasing technology
3. last movers
Recent examples of last movers that still have been extremely successful have been TJMaxx and Costco, both functioning with very little e-commerce presence. Why does this make some intuitive sense? The first mover has to break ground and if they are successful in applying innovative technologies, they reap the benefits. Meanwhile, several companies chase this innovator, building out similar systems, but these companies are unable to catch the leader, yet still spend a ton in R&D to develop the technology or spend too much acquiring it. Eventually, third-party software is built, commoditizing much of the associated costs. At this point, being the last mover is actually beneficial since the last mover can make the same technological shift without the associated costs that the chasers faced. In 2018, every company pretty much needs cloud instances, notifications, websites, etc. just like companies in the 1970s needed switchboard operators, fax machines, etc. I think its more a question of what companies quickly adapt fundamental new ways to think about an industry than whether the company employs a bunch of developers.
Is this an entire article based on a subtitle on the summary page of the CEO's presentation? Not a bad advertisement for GS but come on, this is incredibly light on content, by which I mean there is absolutely zero content.
Banks are tech companies. When other countries say that they trust the US dollar, what do you think that means? It means they trust that our IT systems which manage the dollar are correct. They trust that when we say Warren Buffet has eleventy billion dollars, it actually means something tangible.
And when they discover that trust is utterly and entirely misplaced, that our IT systems have been run as cost centers and endlessly rushed and slapped together and subjected to every form of intellectual rot that modern business practice could infuse into it.... well then things will get interesting. What if Walmart goes to pay off a supplier and the supplier asks for proof that the numbers Walmart is sending over the wire are actually backed by something and not just computational funny money? Well, we do have a form of money that's actually verifiably real and non-counterfeitable and doesn't just rely on some garbage IT....
if you're thinking of some bank's propensity to ask for specific characters of passwords (rather than the whole thing) meaning they can't have hashed it, it's worth noting that many protect the passwords with symmetric encryption and then store the keys in an HSM to mitigate the risk of unauthorised access.
I was just at a dev mixer and ran into an engineer at Bank of America. He told me they have 5000 Python developers on staff. I almost fell out of my chair - never would have guessed it. I know there's competition for top talent in NYC, but that's still a surprising number.
[+] [-] organsnyder|8 years ago|reply
I like to respond that Netflix isn't a tech company, either—they're in the business of delivering entertainment. Their position and reputation allows them to build a stronger engineering culture, but their technology still is subservient to their non-tech business goals. While "software is eating the world" has been quoted to the point of being a cliché, the organizations that recognize software as a competitive differentiator—rather than merely a cost center—definitely have an edge against their tech-averse competitors.
[+] [-] shreyanshd|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johan_larson|8 years ago|reply
http://www.goldmansachs.com/who-we-are/leadership/executive-...
[+] [-] oblio|8 years ago|reply
You'd be surprised how many people don't know :)
[+] [-] nopinsight|8 years ago|reply
People don’t mind trying out a new entertainment service by a small startup especially they get a free trial month. If it breaks, so what? The same cannot be said about places they choose to manage their finances or health.
Perhaps it might be more promising for a new partnership by big-names in adjacent industries, such as the Amazon-Berkshire Hathaway-JP Morgan healthcare initiative, to disrupt these trust-based industries.
If there is a good way to accelerate the process of consumer trust building, it might allow more newcomers a chance of disruptions. It should result in lower costs and economic surpluses for the consumers. ‘How?’ is the 64-million-dollar question.
[+] [-] justjico|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sbov|8 years ago|reply
I kind of think that if an organization views tech as a competitive advantage and core competency, they are a tech company. E.g. Netflix may be in the business of entertainment, but they are also a tech company. Google may be in the business of selling ads, but they are also a tech company.
[+] [-] tmaly|8 years ago|reply
You simply cannot exist if you are not a tech company due to the complexity of the regulations.
[+] [-] baybal2|8 years ago|reply
Better to say "software ate the world, but netflix has eaten the software" by almost singlehandedly wiping all its upstart competitors from "indigenous tech companies."
To some extend, Netflix deserve some credit for tech. A non-dotcom running tier one CDN is not a small deal.
Yet, they are still a small fish "in the bigger picture of things" though.
[+] [-] _raoulcousins|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] samstave|8 years ago|reply
knowing multiple people from netflix; this is literally a very-uninformed comment...
Much of what you even KNOW about cloud-computing, spot markets, streaming, CDNs, etc was pioneered by netflix.
They are secretive, but innovative as heck. So, your comment is a big NOPE.
[+] [-] raesene9|8 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, many banks (at least in the UK market) seem to see IT as some kind of overhead, to be minimized in cost and/or outsourced (e.g. Lloyds outsourcing to IBM https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/06/lloyds_confirms_ibm...)
Of course there are ranges of new banks (the UK has a range of challenger banks most of whom take a more tech-focused approach) to challenge the "traditional" approach, and it'll be interesting to see how that shakes out...
[+] [-] tvanantwerp|8 years ago|reply
Recently, the integration of a new loan management system was badly botched and several clients have been hit by it. Bills not going out, therefore not being paid, therefore money being taken forcibly from their accounts without notice. And these are customers with millions each in the bank. This has been ongoing for a couple of months now. The client managers themselves are irate--they've been cultivating these relationships for years, and it's all been jeopardized.
How can so many banks be so blind to the fact that everything they do depends on getting the technology right?
[+] [-] kokey|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malthaus|8 years ago|reply
Maintaing their mess costs massively and large projects carry risks and a bad track record no one on top can support.
Too bad the fintech revolution lost some of its momentum challenging the profitable areas of banking
[+] [-] jonjojr|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oblio|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curun1r|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ABCLAW|8 years ago|reply
My banker friends have big problems trying to modernize sections of their operations on the basis that too much political capital is needed to liquidate entire floors of staff - but that restriction only lasts until someone has an off-the-shelf solution offering 25M in labour savings per quarter.
These inefficiencies and cultural issues hamper execution leading to poorer client outcomes, lower margins, and weaker strategic positioning.
I'm glad that some banks are pushing forward to gobble up that easy ROI, but I am concerned that the net effect of this type of automation is systemic risk, as the industry begins to bifurcate between low and high margin banks, and the latter are afforded accelerating capability to consolidate the former.
Less players. More capacity. More reliance. Less redundancy. Not necessarily bad for John Q. Everyman, but if he's ultimately carrying that risk while pocketing none of the efficiency gains...
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tryitnow|8 years ago|reply
This is part of an ongoing trend to describe everything as some form of "engineering."
Honestly, if I'm going to Goldman for M&A - I want a human relationship. That relationship may be buttressed by research and analysis using "big data" and "machine learning" - but that's not engineering, that's just good research using the latest useful tools.
I'm only addressing the actual investment banking component of GS. Sure, the consumer banking stuff requires technology and "engineering" but there's absolutely nothing new about this, it's just that consumer banking has lagged horribly behind in consumer-friendly technology.
Not much to see here.
[+] [-] xkjkls|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dgellow|8 years ago|reply
Imagine the left-pad incident in a different engineering domain.
[+] [-] bboreham|8 years ago|reply
And since those kinds of deals don’t come along every day, they maintain the capability by executing as broker and dealer all the rest of the time.
(I know, I’m simplifying a lot. Hope it helps get the idea across)
[+] [-] mbesto|8 years ago|reply
Most of my clients (mainly PE investors) typically define companies as either "Tech enabled", "tech lead", "nothing". This means usually two things to them: (1) the more tech enabled the higher the margins (EBITDA) I can achieve and (2) the more tech enabled the higher the multiple I can achieve.
And that's just it. Everything else is marketing.
[+] [-] cm2187|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DrBazza|8 years ago|reply
Culturally, they're worlds apart. Banks offer a career path up and away from technology so you get unmotivated developers joining who are just looking for the next leg-up the career ladder.
Banks are only driven to make money, and the "worst" of the employees are utterly driven by the end-of-year bonus, and to hell with anyone that gets in their way.
[+] [-] ptc|8 years ago|reply
> (Disclosure: I used to work at Goldman designing derivatives, not apps. Also I have a Marcus savings account.)
[+] [-] s73v3r_|8 years ago|reply
"Banks are only driven to make money"
If you don't think tech companies are the same way, you're sorely mistaken.
[+] [-] joejerryronnie|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thebouv|8 years ago|reply
I pointed out that in the DevOps Handbook one of the lines I highlighted was that in 2013, HSBC (a very large bank) employed more software engineers than Google.
So I went to search other tidbits like that and found that in 2015 Goldman Sachs employed more software engineers than Facebook.
Banks aren't companies that have tech, they're tech companies that do banking.
[+] [-] 123212321|8 years ago|reply
The flow of good engineers is always banks -> tech companies and never tech companies -> banks.
[+] [-] vonmoltke|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xaybey|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ionforce|8 years ago|reply
crappy software company << bank << startup
So depending where you are in the software world, you can still be making a ton of coin at a bank.
[+] [-] vincentv|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samfisher83|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raverbashing|8 years ago|reply
Have they dropped "corporate" solutions that barely work, sold in golf courses to people that are not affected in the least by their decisions?
Are they still using XML (or even worse, CORBA) as duct tape tying everything together?
Have they dropped waterfall?
Do they allow developers to have their say on architectures and solutions to use? Can they experiment with, let's say, Scala, Elixir or are they stuck with some old Java version and don't even think of adding a library besides the approved ones?
[+] [-] jnordwick|8 years ago|reply
When speaking of finance there is everything from regional banks or loan originators to investment banks and trading firms. They are often very far apart in terms of culture, abilities, and pay.
On the higher end in tech you get front desk trading, and they are most definitely a tech subsidy inside a larger institution. Some of the best tech teams I've ever been exposured to. I would take the best team GS over the best team from Google any day of the week. Even a mediocre front desk team are far far above average for the industry because they focus on getting the best talent.
Even companies like Bloomberg that you wouldn't really think of beyond their news service is a massive tech company on the back end. They also have trading and low latency data infrastructures. One of the best teams i ever met was the core bond team at Bloomberg. I was blown away at how good they were.
All these places know they are tech companies and pay appropriately. On the other side you have regional banks or even old school trading firms where they aren't really tech companies, but are mostly admin work with average pay.
I've worked at tech companies and finance (hfts, algo trading, dark pool, banks), one thing i really like about finance is how difficult and interdisciplinary it can be. The tech problems I've encountered at finance firms have been so much more difficult than any other place. Google scales by throwing more machines at it, as most other web tech firms. Many times you don't have that luxury in finance. You have to be smart about it.
Remember, Google gives it developers Go because it considers them above average cogs. Finance firms gives it developers APL/A+/KDB :) I jest a little, but I think there is definitely something telling in what is expected of you.
You can go into a big bank and be a 9 to 5er in an auxiliary role. Or you can go in and workn your tail off and move up. But be prepared to work a lot for those bonuses.
[+] [-] WalterBright|8 years ago|reply
I'm almost ready to go back to writing checks by hand. Waving a cancelled check around has always worked well to resolve transaction disputes. There's no paper trail with electronic banking.
[+] [-] anonu|8 years ago|reply
Insinuating that all banks are becoming tech companies is being a bit too generous.
EDIT: I am pretty sure Bloomberg does A/B testing on their headlines to see which get more clicks. The URL of the article indicates that the headline may have been different to start out with. I've also often observed the same article on the web and the Bloomberg Terminal with different headlines.
[+] [-] cs702|8 years ago|reply
Otherwise, I disagree. Most banks are large, slow-moving, bureaucratic organizations saddled with decades-old technology.
[+] [-] pmart123|8 years ago|reply
1. embracing technology early 2. chasing technology 3. last movers
Recent examples of last movers that still have been extremely successful have been TJMaxx and Costco, both functioning with very little e-commerce presence. Why does this make some intuitive sense? The first mover has to break ground and if they are successful in applying innovative technologies, they reap the benefits. Meanwhile, several companies chase this innovator, building out similar systems, but these companies are unable to catch the leader, yet still spend a ton in R&D to develop the technology or spend too much acquiring it. Eventually, third-party software is built, commoditizing much of the associated costs. At this point, being the last mover is actually beneficial since the last mover can make the same technological shift without the associated costs that the chasers faced. In 2018, every company pretty much needs cloud instances, notifications, websites, etc. just like companies in the 1970s needed switchboard operators, fax machines, etc. I think its more a question of what companies quickly adapt fundamental new ways to think about an industry than whether the company employs a bunch of developers.
[+] [-] pc86|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Pxtl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] otakucode|8 years ago|reply
And when they discover that trust is utterly and entirely misplaced, that our IT systems have been run as cost centers and endlessly rushed and slapped together and subjected to every form of intellectual rot that modern business practice could infuse into it.... well then things will get interesting. What if Walmart goes to pay off a supplier and the supplier asks for proof that the numbers Walmart is sending over the wire are actually backed by something and not just computational funny money? Well, we do have a form of money that's actually verifiably real and non-counterfeitable and doesn't just rely on some garbage IT....
[+] [-] curuinor|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raesene9|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] djtriptych|8 years ago|reply