Stifling Innovation
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
The problem with innovating is that it's a very Darwinian process, more attempts to innovate fail than succeed -- the risk level is thus very high. An animal is more likely to ensure survival doing what it knows than trying something new. Similarly, an organization will generally tend to continue plodding along as-is instead of innovating -- unless there are sufficient external pressures to force it to want to try.
Apple is an interesting case study in this. They compete as a single company against an enormous competitor, Wintel PCs. In order to survive they've had to keep innovating...the status quo would not ensure survival any more than a gazelle continuing to stand around (status quo) while being attacked by a lion would survive. Instead it runs off and tries to make a go of it doing something different.
In banking, it's all different. The risk to innovate is much higher, and the attacker is much slower. It's more like the gazelle is being attacked by a giant sloth. It can stand around longer, doing gazelle stuff, and when the sloth gets close enough to take a swipe, it simply walks a few steps away and goes back to doing gazelle stuff. If the gazelle were to just run off as soon as it spied the sloth, it would uselessly consume calories and eventually just die of a heart attack...thus, it mostly just stands around.
So innovation in banking is not the same as innovation in computing. It has to be more conservative because it'll die of a heart attack. More importantly, the analogy is only complete when we consider that the gazelle is also driving my brand new car. And if it peeled out every time it saw sloth it might end up wrapped around a telephone pole. Sure it might die if it screws up my car, it might survive, but most important to me is that the gazelle, in a fit of innovational panic, broke my new car.
In other words, I really really don't want a bank screwing around and innovating with my money.