Let's Have a Real Conversation

One of the more interesting people I met at Sibos (someone from a large data vendor) sank into a couch opposite me in the press room in a moment between the dizzying round of meetings and drinks and trying to find this stand or that session, and said, ‘Can we please, please just have a real conversation?'

I knew what he meant. After a few days of looking for the insight among the spin and the marketing, a real conversation felt like getting a solid restaurant dinner after a week of subsisting on press room sandwiches. Why are authentic conversations so rare in the financial services and technology industries, notoriously jargon-prone and obfuscatory as they are?

The world is full of stories, and finance and technology, for all that they seem to be uber-rational spaces of numbers and models and graphs, are no different. All humans like telling stories; it's how we make sense of the world. Take the retail FX markets, as soaked in rumor as a sewing circle: technical analysis seems like math, but it's really the market moving on what other traders are saying, not purely the non-farm payrolls or Fed rate cuts.

Authentic conversations are ways of telling stories about your experience that don't try to smooth over the nitty gritty or the challenges you're facing. And people respond positively to them—it's almost a wired response. When we have something real to say and we aren't afraid to say it, the signal cuts through the noise. You've seen it at industry events, when in the after-lunch torpor someone stands up and says something everyone's really been thinking and suddenly all those day-dreaming delegates stop playing surreptitiously on their iPhones and snap to attention.

Speaking to stakeholders and regulators about the upcoming AnaCredit regulation, a common refrain from many (most of whom don't even want to go on record saying it) is the lack of communication—between banks and vendors, between everyone and regulators. And—perhaps I'm showing my hand a bit here—between everyone and journalists. As a result, AnaCredit, which by all accounts looks to be a pretty hefty addition to banks' regulatory burden, is barely getting any attention, despite the short runway to implementation (first phase needs to be complete by January 2017).

I'm not saying let it all hang out. There are processes, intellectual property and reputations to protect, obviously. But nonetheless, I think there are common experiences and uncommon expertise that can be shared for the benefit of all.

A strong theme to emerge from Sibos, at least from the perspective of reference data professionals, was shared services: utilities for client data, third-party due diligence, product reference data and so on. Their utility (as it were) has yet to be proven, but nevertheless, perhaps they are a good metaphor for what can be achieved when the industry comes together and shares expertise, effort and intelligence.