When software fails, blood boils. The irony dawns that a timesaving device has the opposite effect, and it's costing you money. As such, it may seem sensible to rely on tech giants to provide software services. Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, these are all names whose software we trust not to fail (most of the time). What of the several DCM startups then, that offer their tech products? Many of them are only a few years old, products rolled out with a handful of banks. Are large institutions right to partner up with them rather than wait for an offering from a tech giant? This was something I didn't fully understand when I was working in DCM. I worked at a large American bank and if anyone was going to help us advance tech-wise it felt like it would be a similar size tech firm, say Microsoft. But this was based on a misconception about what a tech startup is. Tech startups should more accurately be seen as extensions of tech giants. Take our company, Bots, for example. We use a tech giant designed programming language, coded on a tech giant's developer platform. We use a tech giant's framework for application building. Then the application is physically run on a tech giant's cloud infrastructure.
This is the foundation upon which our company builds ground-breaking DCM technology. We are effectively the DCM arm for a tech giant, extending and painstakingly customising their latest work to take DCM technology to the next level.
Another way of explaining this is to distinguish “high-tech” companies from “tech-enabled” companies. Tech giants are mostly the former. The aim is to make discoveries and improvements in the field of technology. Their R&D costs are usually in the billons, their product cycles are very long and 95% of their work finds no commercial use. The latter applies the latest technological advances to new purposes. The R&D is more focused and products are working within a year.
You can think of tech-enabled firms (most of which are startups) as the conduit through which technological breakthroughs and improvements, by high-tech firms, can spread out wide and be made applicable to every corner of the business world.
So if you want a tech solution provided by an established tech provider, you need look no further than tech startups.