Tim Bourgaize Murray: A Newer World

As I depart this magazine after almost four years, I return to the lines from Lord Tennyson’s Ulysses I read for a graduation speech years ago, perhaps because we all search for grandiloquent ways of leaving and often lack the words to do so. Or perhaps because this poem was so drilled into my brain that I can recite most of it in my sleep? TS Eliot called it “a perfect poem.” Robert Kennedy frequently used it in his rhetoric. Dame Judi Dench even recites it as M in one of the more dramatic moments in the James Bond film Skyfall. Those four simple declarations Ulysses ends with—“to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”—make for a strong choice of parting words.

So I ask myself: what to remark upon or emphasize? What can be done better? Luckily, my time at Waters proved financial services and its technology beg for this kind of reflection and advice.

Much Change

Much has changed since March 2012. When I walked onto the scene—sporting one of the more ill advised mustaches of all time—it’s fair to say that the industry was still shocked by the aftermath of 2008; every argument, whether smart or facile, began with “The crisis; ergo…” My first Waters feature predicted swap execution facility (SEF) consolidation and aggregation before many SEFs were even operational. I’ll pat myself on the back for that one. About six months later, I wrote that corporates were just about ready to go fully electronic. We’ll politely note that I was dead wrong (or at least two years too early) but, as the caveat often goes, I was far from alone!

Fast forward to today and especially over the past year, things have become markedly different. Rates are about to go back up. Cyber-security is a top-line operational risk. Fintech might actually be overheated by venture capital. Robo-advisors now manage billions. Flash Boys might yet get a movie treatment. And crypto-currencies and blockchain—things the capital markets wouldn’t have touched with a ten-foot pole a few years ago—are all the rage. The point is, the crisis is over, but maybe the “post-crisis” period finally is done too. In fact, I’m happy to declare it so.

If there’s one piece of advice I can give, it’s this: Let’s raise the level of rhetoric to match the new environment.

This is all good news to a journalist who came onboard and found—if I may hyperbolize just a bit—a rather moribund scene. Today’s challenges are multi-vector and aren’t just solvable with a new data warehouse or reporting add-on; they’re puzzles evolving on their own whose stakes reach well beyond an enforcement action or fine. Just the same, new solutions aren’t just testing the laws of physics but are smartly applying them, and take leads from technical advances in industries far removed from our space. After years of preoccupation with regulation and mostly looking inward, fintech is getting back in sync with the rest of the world. It’s dynamic, which is great.

Advice

That said, if there’s one piece of advice I can give, it’s this: Let’s raise the level of rhetoric to match the new environment. It’s the fate of any financial journalist to run up against and cut through industry speak and marketing hype on a daily basis. But my best sources were those who wouldn’t parse words or settle for incrementalism; my favorite stories, likewise, staked out genuine and, at times, even impassioned positions on both sides, rather than presenting two views but ultimately meekly resolving, “well, it’s a bit of both.” It’s a comfortable instinct to hedge or moderate; many chief technologists have ridden this very strategy to great careers, and just as many vendors thrive on it too. But that’s not what’s needed to truly push things forward.

So it is that I leave for greener pastures with a different thought from that same Tennyson poem—though this one is an invitation rather than a declaration, and is suitably posed right in the middle of the poem, rather than as a valediction. “Come my friends,” it asks. “’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”