
It's Getting Harder to Tell Banks from Tech Companies - severine
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-02-15/lloyd-blankfein-wants-goldman-sachs-to-push-technology
======
organsnyder
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.

~~~
shreyanshd
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.

~~~
hamstercat
I used to work in another financial-related company and "IT is a cost not a
revenue center" was thrown around as often as possible. Raise, promotion,
formation, a computer made in this decade, anything really would get us that
answer. Not only from my boss, but from the IT's top director in various
meetings and one-on-one. I used to find it highly frustrating and unfair given
that the company would cease to exists without our software, and that all new
customers were acquired through new development in our software.

Now that I'm older and not working there anymore, I understand that it's a
culture problem and that management just didn't know any better, but I've come
to accept the fact that it was a great way to cut costs and get away with it.
After all, they still have many employees and manage to make more profit year
after year. It just made for a very demotivating environment.

~~~
nostrademons
The old "We _are_ a tech company, we just happen to do
retail/advertising/communication/movies/hospitality/transportation/payments
better than you idiots" seems to be working pretty well for
Amazon/Google/Facebook/Netflix/AirBnB/Uber/Lyft/Stripe.

------
raesene9
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.

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...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/06/lloyds_confirms_ibm_cloudy_outsourcing/))

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...

~~~
malthaus
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

~~~
raesene9
I'd agree that a paradigm shift is definitely needed to address the problem.
Banks need to see that constant investment not "put it in and let it run for
10-15 years" is what's needed.

And yes the point about risk of new projects... who wants to lead a project to
replace a mainframe system that's been running successfully for the last 30-40
years and if it goes wrong you're guaranteed to be on the front page of the
papers...

I wonder if a pattern will emerge where big banks let the challengers develop
the tech, then they buy them and move across to it, once the kinks are all
ironed out.

------
ABCLAW
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...

------
tryitnow
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.

Not much to see here.

~~~
dgellow
To be honest Software Engineering looks like child play when compared to
actual engineering work.

Imagine the left-pad incident in a different engineering domain.

~~~
ro_sharp
It's a bit disingenuous to draw parallels between 24x7 electronic trading
operations and javascript web cowboys.

------
mbesto
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.

And that's just it. Everything else is marketing.

------
cm2187
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.

~~~
wgerard
That's interesting to hear! I'm going through "Flash Boys" right now, and it
(to me at least) paints GS in a pretty negative light wrt their engineering
culture.

Granted the book mostly focuses on HFT firms, so I could easily see that GS is
way better than most large banks but a bit lacking behind, say, Citadel.

~~~
dsacco
_> That's interesting to hear! I'm going through "Flash Boys" right now, and
it (to me at least) paints GS in a pretty negative light wrt their engineering
culture._

As an aside, if you’re not planning to already, _please_ read _Flash Boys: Not
So Fast_ when you’re done.

------
DrBazza
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.

~~~
ptc
From the article:

> (Disclosure: I used to work at Goldman designing derivatives, not apps. Also
> I have a Marcus savings account.)

------
thebouv
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.

------
123212321
This isnt really true. Banks dont pay anywhere near tech salaries. Its all lip
service.

The flow of good engineers is always banks -> tech companies and never tech
companies -> banks.

~~~
xaybey
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.

~~~
123212321
As a regular engineer? Or is there a math heavy component?

My understanding is that I could get about 200k base at goldman and maybe a
20% bonus, this is for working in a high in demand field. Google/FB/Other job
I can get 300k+ while working less hours, paid for lunch, better treatment,
more respect.

~~~
southphillyman
That's a realistic compensation package for a normal Sr engineer role at a big
bank ime. No, it's not Goog/FB pay but a lot of the jobs are available in LCOL
areas like Delaware and the Triangle fwiw.

~~~
freehunter
That's the biggest thing some people don't take into account when it comes to
salaries: cost of living. $300k is not always more money than $200k.

------
raverbashing
Do they?

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?

~~~
suddensleep
Disclaimer: I work as a data scientist at a large financial institution based
in the US; to be fair it is one that has a reputation for being on the
"cutting edge of tech", FWIW.

The data teams I work with don't know SAS and some members aren't even that
facile with Excel, opting to use Apache Spark (mostly Python, but also Scala
bindings) or pandas instead. Almost no one does serious data work on their
local machines, and there is a big push to store all of our data off-prem.

The dev teams I work with actively experiment with different cloud-based
architectures, devops automation tools, database solutions, etc.

From a product perspective, lots of teams use agile workflows, but each team
is allowed to (and encouraged to) choose their own style of getting work done.

This is not meant to imply that banks have largely moved to this model; I
think that we are the exception rather than the rule. This is _also_ not meant
to imply that top-down corporate "solutions" don't affect us, and that greed
has been completely factored out of the equation. But I've been pleasantly
surprised by how much leverage and freedom we have as the "tech department".

~~~
joncrane
Capital One?

------
jnordwick
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.

~~~
apaprocki
> Even companies like Bloomberg that you wouldn't really think of beyond their
> news service is a massive tech company on the back end

The company's entire founding premise was to computerize tasks still
accomplished by humans and paper in 1981. The News subsidiary was founded
nearly a decade later in 1990. So it's more a case of the tech company
considering News the "News-end" rather than tech being considered the "back
end" :)

~~~
jnordwick
I was at an APL(ish) lecture a year ago that veered off into the early years
of Bloomberg. I thought it was awesome.

------
WalterBright
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.

------
anonu
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.

------
cs702
If by "tech companies" the OP means established technology companies like IBM,
Cisco, and Oracle, as opposed to Silicon Valley upstarts, then I agree.

Otherwise, I disagree. Most banks are large, slow-moving, bureaucratic
organizations saddled with decades-old technology.

~~~
s73v3r_
Using the latest hyped thing does not make one a tech company.

------
pmart123
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.

------
pc86
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.

------
Pxtl
I'd like to see a tech company where the time to process a simple transaction
like a balance transfer is measured in _days_.

------
otakucode
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....

------
curuinor
it is extremely easy to tell a bank from a tech company: tell if they hash
their damn passwords. i'm not even talking salt here, just hashing

~~~
raesene9
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.

~~~
Cyph0n
Unless the HSM is also doing the decryption, the key(s) can still be stolen
while in RAM..

~~~
fgonzag
That's the whole point of an HSM... A somewhat tamper resistant device that
executes all encryption operations. You give it the hash and a reference to
the the key, and it returns the signed data.

------
djtriptych
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.

~~~
denimnerd
There's 100k IT workers at BofA.

The new software engineering stack is JIRA, bitbucket, Ansible, Jenkins,
Artifactory, Sonar, etc. Every team is being trained on SAFe. Aka the
executives choice for "agile" etc

Also the working areas are being transformed from full height or quarter
height cubes to open offices where employees no longer have a laptop and use a
thinclient attached to standing desks. This is a dream for information
security team but personally I hate it as I spent 2-3 hours working from home
every day and the rest in the office. I don't want to develop though a windows
GUI in the browser :/

------
adventured
As witnessed by Bank of America's aggressive pursuit of blockchain technology
& patents:

"[Bank of America] has applied for or received at least 43 patents for
blockchain, the ledger technology used for verifying and recording
transactions that’s at the heart of virtual currencies. It is the largest
number among major banks and technology companies"

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-16/bofa-
tops...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-16/bofa-tops-ibm-and-
payments-firms-with-most-blockchain-patents)

~~~
adamnemecek
I feel like some of the reasons for this are political rather than technical.

------
claytoncorreia
It seems like banks are realizing that they need to become tech companies
faster than tech companies become banks.

~~~
lisper
No, it's that it is much _easier_ for a bank to become a tech company than for
a tech company to become a bank. The barriers to entry for becoming a tech
company are merely technological. They are not trivial to surmount, but they
are surmountable. By way of contrast, the barriers to entry to becoming a bank
are regulatory, and nearly impossible to surmount, at least in the U.S. When
was the last time you heard of a new bank being founded here?

~~~
aianus
There are many, many small banks in the US; you can just buy one that already
has a license. Certainly not insurmountable.

~~~
cocoablazing
None of those small banks are subject to the regulation that large BHC are.
The potential barrier is off by orders of magnitude. The development cycle on
those models is multi year. It would take a massive effort to recruit and
build the quant teams alone, much less the finance, compliance, and legal
personnel with the expertise.

------
jacksmith21006
Really pretty much every company is a tech company in 2018 at some level.

~~~
pixl97
"Software is eating the world", came out 7 years ago and is still as true as
ever.

------
adrianratnapala
It would be helpful to use the full term _Informatation_ Technology to
understand these trends.

Financial institutions and many other administrative orgs have always been
about storing, distributing and processing information. They did this at scale
even before the advent of computers. And they were also early adopters of
computers. Their _core business_ is providing service by using IT, whether
that technology is computers, paper or human brains.

Back in the long ago we didn't call them IT companies, because that designated
a supplier of IT equipment (and we used to think of software as equipment).
But now in the age of SaaS, we think of IT companies providing services using
IT, just as the banks et. al. have always done.

It's the same kind of business, evolved through two different paths, each with
strengths and weaknesses. It seems inevitable that the two paths will merge.

------
colarb2000
I used to work for a bank for a long time. IMHO, this new fascination with
technology is kind of a fad and more of a lip service for marketing purposes.
In practice, we still use MS Excel as per what we have been doing for the past
twenty years.

------
pdeuchler
Any sufficiently large company is a tech company, and any sufficiently large
tech company is a bank.

I'm pretty sure I originally heard that here on HN, I can't seem to track it
down though. Seems to only have gotten more and more true as time goes on.

------
mtgx
For some reason, I thought this article would go into a different direction -
like about how tech companies are borrowing money at record rates because of
dirt cheap Fed interest, which to me is a sign of a new financial bubble.

------
atomic77
Banks are better described as tech companies than the media / advertising
behemoths. Information security is their bread and butter.

As far as I can tell, the only thing that qualifies a company as "tech"
nowadays is a technical tradition of building on open source from the ground
up (eg. LAMP and its successors), while banks have traditionally been
dependent on a constellation of vendors.

The open source approach has proven a more effective model and it seems that
this realization has finally spread outside of silicon valley. It's about
time.

------
k__
I don't have that feeling when I see online banking websites...

------
eecc
Just Banks? No, “tech” - which stands for information technology- is just
about everything, every industry and job is affected and will change.
Information is like electricity...

------
internetman55
Haha, i heard lines like that at so many places i interviewed with. 'we're not
a finance company, we're a tech company that does finance' etc

------
mwexler
I work currently at one of the larger banks, and they actually like to
describe themselves as "a tech company who happens to focus on financial
things". It's as true as you are willing to believe it, but modern global
money movement is really just tech these days, and has been so well before
distributed ledger tech came along.

Now, whether any of the banks are any good as tech companies is a different
question.

(some grammar fixed)

------
Talyen42
what is a tech company, really?

it's like saying something is a "concrete company" because that's what the
corporate buildings are made of, or a "people company" because they only
employ humans

(terms that actually make sense: SaaS product (Salesforce, Dropbox),
advertising marketplace (Google, Facebook)... and so on. Not "tech")

------
patcon
Anyone else think that the finance folks are just realizing what the tech
sector gets away with by being incomprehensible and too fast for regulators?
They're just doubling down and digging into tech to get away with more, for
longer...

~~~
dredmorbius
Finance have been doing this for a _long_ time.

See J.K. Galbraith's _The Great Crash: 1929_.

------
agumonkey
isn't it everything ? everything is techno engineered these days

uber the tech taxi

amazon the tech store

... it's the engineered era

~~~
mywittyname
Amazon is the way to put your product on the internet. AWS is their biggest
profit center and a lot of Amazon's product sales are from merchants who
happen to sell their product on Amazon (and use Amazon's fulfillment centers).

------
awl130
Sanford Weill, while chairman of Citigroup, once remarked that their main
asset was information, not money (I haven't been able to find the quote but i
distinctly remember it from my b-school lectures).

------
awl130
Technology has always driven the financial markets--because better access to
data is what allows new instruments and/or the active trading of new
instruments.

------
code4tee
Very true (and actually has been that way for a while now). Big banks are
largely tech companies that happen to do banking.

------
hownottowrite
[http://archive.is/D7vIv](http://archive.is/D7vIv)

------
Tloewald
It's still easy to tell banks from tech companies. Banks probably won't offer
you 2FA or allow you to use secure passwords and will cheerfully bring down
their website for maintenance for twelve hours at a stretch. They'll also
charge you mysterious transaction fees.

------
abarringer
heh yea, but no. All our clients are banks. I spent a good part of the day
working on a project to convince them to upgrade their browsers to something
that supports TLS1.2.

------
baxtr
Isn't every company becoming a tech company?

------
freefood89
sad

------
lifeisstillgood
meh. Software is a new form of literacy. No one goes around arguing if we have
literate companies any more. It's like fish noticing water. Give it one more
generation.

------
drharby
I work in a bank and man - shits cool af

------
BigChiefSmokem
Goodbye Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citi, and the rest of the credit cartel!
You will never be missed.

Hello Wealthfront, Robinhood, Simple, and the rest of the movers and shakers!

~~~
FireBeyond
> Simple, and the rest of the movers and shakers

Yeah, a bank that announce that 1% of their customers had their account
involuntarily closed with 30 days notice is sure to build trust in the new
world order.

[https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/14/simple-account-
closures/](https://techcrunch.com/2017/04/14/simple-account-closures/)

~~~
tadfisher
Simple engineer here, not representing the company's views necessarily but
relaying my own opinions.

That situation was indeed a load of bullshit, but the other side of that coin
is that we were doing something that has never had to happen in the history of
modern banking, probably because it's insane.

You see, normally when a bank is acquired by another bank, the acquirer gets
the acquiree's FED terminals, ACH numbers, deals with Visa, etc. that make the
transition more-or-less seamless for customers. So customers keep their cards,
their direct deposit still works, their checks still work, and all they need
to do is log in to a different website to manage their accounts.

What we were forced to do was to essentially close hundreds of thousands of
bank accounts at our former banking partner, open new accounts at our new
partner, transfer funds, and issue new cards. And we had a contractual
deadline before which the transition had to be 100% complete. We explored
literally every other option available, including having BBVA acquire our ACH
and Visa prefixes, but that was a no-go for reasons I'm not aware of.

So we got the vast majority of our customers to make this painful switch,
which was a miracle in itself, but we could not make it all the way down the
list, and that sucked. New bank means new account-holder rules, customers
changed email addresses/phones, customers moved, we underestimated the
complexity/time requirements, all sorts of reasons applied; but the bottom
line is that it was an inevitable situation for this kind of transition, and
while we did what we could, we let some customers down (0.7% to be exact).

At least I can say that we won't have to go through this again, and we're
finally out of the woods with all of these platform transitions, and we're
back to building products again. Feel free to AMA.

~~~
baybal2
Are fed terminals still are actual physical vt100 like contraptions? Or it is
simply a metaphor for a kind of API access over the internet?

~~~
tadfisher
I believe the vt100 terminals have been phased out for FedACH/FedWire, which
are the "modernized" APIs (read: the same weirdo fixed-width NACHA format but
sent over HTTP/SFTP).

