Bankloch

At the turn of the millennium, the European banking industry underwent   significant consolidation   - a process where financial institutions merge or are acquired, resulting in fewer but larger banks with greater market share. Notable examples from that period include: Belgium : CERA, Kredietbank, and ABB Insurances merged into KBC in 1998. In 1999, ASLK and Generale Bank combined to form Fortis Bank, which was later acquired by BNP Paribas during the financial crisis. Netherlands : ABN and AMRO merged in 1991, forming ABN AMRO, while ING was created in the same year through the merger of Nationale-Nederlanden and the NMB Postbank Groep. France : BNP and Paribas merged in 1999 to form the BNP Paribas Group, while Crédit Agricole acquired Banque Indosuez in 1996. Germany : Deutsche Bank acquired Bankers Trust in 1998, creating one of the world’s largest banks. That same year, Bayerische Vereinsbank and Bayerische Hypotheken-und Wechsel-Bank merged to form HVB Bank. Switzerland : Union

In July of this year, the world was shocked by a major IT incident caused by an update from the cybersecurity firm   CrowdStrike . A wrong patch led to a global IT outage, affecting 8.5 million Windows devices and causing the cancellation of more than 5,000 commercial airline flights. This incident also impacted hospitals, media, and banks, resulting in an estimated $1.5 billion in losses. Dubbed the "Largest IT outage in history," this event highlighted the vulnerabilities in our interconnected digital world. While this particular incident grabbed global headlines due to its scale,   massive IT outages are becoming increasingly common . As companies rely more on cloud services and many depend on the same IT software, the risk of widespread disruptions grows. Here are some notable examples of major incidents in recent years: Atlassian JIRA Outage   (April 2022): Atlassian is used by many major corporations for managing their IT departments (via software like JIRA, Confluence

In 2019, I posted a blog about the use of abstractions in IT within the financial services sector (" Abstraction in Financial IT - How far can and should we go? " -   https://bankloch.blogspot.com/2020/02/abstraction-in-financial-it-how-far-can.html ). This continues to be a topic that fascinates me. In IT, we tend to build   layer upon layer of abstraction , which allows us to become continuously more productive as complexity is hidden away for the user. This means users can focus more on the functionality they want to deliver. The evolution of Low-code and No-code platforms, alongside AI advancements, will likely push this to an extreme, where people with no IT skills could simply converse with a chatbot to describe the application they need, which is then automatically created under the hood. However, as I mentioned in my previous article, this   continuous abstraction also comes with issues , as software is rarely optimized for usage. While a simple tool programmed 20 yea