Where the hell is my jetpack?

Innovation in financial services continues to underwhelm

So Hendo finally released a real life hoverboard. Yes you can now buy a genuine, Marty McFly style hoverboard and watch your kids claim unlimited cool points with their friends. Last month, Lockheed-Martin announced it had made a breakthrough discovery which will allow it to produce a nuclear fusion reactor small enough to fit on the back of a truck within 10 years. The world of energy will never be the same again. The University of Rochester has got the basics together for a properly functioning cloaking device and this year a computer program simulating a 13 year old boy named Eugene Goostman became the first to get close to passing the Turing test.

We’re about to enter the age of mainstream virtual reality and most experts predict technological singularity inside the next 25 years or so.

Meanwhile, financial services innovation languishes in a bizarre space-time continuum where the industry is happy to merely observe minor disruptions of the financial services software vendor industry. Startups all too often seem set on developing marginally better software solutions to compete with incumbent large-vendor platforms.

One thing that is rarely happening in financial services today, is true innovation. We’re mostly recreating existing solutions, albeit, making them a little cleaner, faster and more accessible. Esentially we’re solving the same problems with variations on the theme.

“one thing a person cannot do, no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination, is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him”. Thomas Schelling.

The Rocket Belt was first developed by Wendall Moore in the early 1960s when he was chief engineer at Bell Aerosystems. Since then, only a few have ever been made mainly due to the complexity of the engineering design and constraints with working with hydrogen peroxide. Many would-be pilots have abandoned projects as they face constant setbacks in designing a belt that would work. In fact, more men have stood on the moon than have been strapped into and flown one of these things.

“It’s the twenty-first century and let’s be honest — things are a little disappointing. Despite every World’s Fair prediction, every futuristic ride at Disneyland, and the advertisements on the last page of every comic book, we are not living the future we were promised. By now, life was supposed to be a fully automated, atomic-powered, germ-free Utopia, a place where a grown man could wear a velvet spandex unitard and not be laughed at. Where are the ray guns, the flying cars, and the hoverboards that we expected? What happened to our promised moon colonies? Our servant robots?” ‘Where’s My Jetpack?: A Guide to the Amazing Science Fiction Future that Never Arrived’, Daniel H Wilson

Where’s the true disruption?

So where’s the true disruption? Where is the Tesla Motors of financial services? Is Apple Pay the closest thing? When do we see the stuff of sci-fi movies entering financial services?

How about an intelligent robo-adviser processing trending data in real-time from Twitter to recommend trading strategies? When can we see a real-time financial crime solution that knows it’s near-impossible for a customer to be using an ATM in NY whilst his mobile phone is still in London? What about 3D virtual reality pricing platforms coupled with wearables to help the trader manipulate their data? When do we see T+0 real time settlement or zero transaction fees?

And when exactly do I get my jetpack?