Capital One enters enterprise B2B software, new data management SaaS | Hacker News Reader

Capital One enters enterprise B2B software, new data management SaaS

capitalone.com

86 pointsaidangrimshaw58 comments

Here’s a direct link to Capital One Software: https://www.capitalone.com/software/

And a link to the first product they launched, “Slingshot”: https://www.capitalone.com/software/solutions/

Essentially it sounds like Capital One is taking some of their internal tooling and starting to sell it, starting with their tooling for managing Snowflake instances.

Snowflake, in my circles, means something that's outside of the patterns in use and doesn't scale. It's something that's inherently bad and you want as little of it as possible, preferably make it visible and obvious, and manage it outside of your regular repositories and pipelines. Keep bringing it up at retros and planning until it's either industrialised along with the other things you support, or you drop/refactor/hand over.

Terrible name for a product!

Seems like they’ve done okay.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/snowflake-computing

Weird. In my circles, and the circles of people who are in the market for such a product, snowflake indicates a particular design pattern for designing data warehouses.

You’re both right. Snowflake as a technical slang/jargon generally refers to “flaky” or light-weight solutions that aren’t expected to withstand the test of time/scale.

Snowflake, the data warehousing platform, on the other hand is a juggernaut - in a league of it’s own (I suppose comparable to BigQuery and RedShift).

To be fair, neither of us even could be wrong, we both expressed things as they are within each of our contexts, and personal opinions. :)

I see they’ve already mastered the enterprise software technique of a “screen-by-screen video” that shows zero actual screens of the actual product, just a series of animations vaguely indicating business processes that are efficient & scale & managed etc.

Ironically these are called "explainer" videos too. :)

Can’t express how much I hate those videos.

A higher density of utter meaningless bullshit, I couldn’t find anywhere else in marketing.

it's like our version of the "Turbo Encabulator" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac7G7xOG2Ag

My number one pet peeve in the sales cycle. We just docusigned to switch to a new platform - 50% of this was because their demo and other videos ACTUALLY SHOWED THE PRODUCT and they had youtube playlists with more!!

How else do you get people to sign and/or pay for dogshit you haven't even built or battle tested yet? (if you're offended, I'm talking about your product)

I've been out of consulting for 7 years now, so I don't know how widespread or old the trend is, but I'm seeing a lot of banks moving to a product operating model for their internal/backend software. The last place I worked had been at it for a couple of years and there were a few teams that really ran with it. At some point why not turn them into a profit center?

I've seen so many companies in multiple domains including consulting firms be so proud of their software they try to sell it on the open market. I've also never seen it succeed.

Whatever you have to say about Capital One as a bank or as a software company, they are absolutely top tier when it comes to marketing. At least B2C marketing. If they succeed at this it will be on the strength of their marketing.

Yes, this a thousand times over!

Why would I spend 100x the cost to buy an internally developed solution that is barely an MVP product when I could buy a market leading, polished, SaaS product from a vendor who takes me out to dinner and ballgames? They also have implementation and professional service teams to help install said product quickly and efficiently, and many third party consulting firms if I need even more help (they take me out to dinner too!).

Oh, also the vendor doesn't yell at me like the internal IT teams do :)

Quite the conundrum for sure!

Would love to know which execs approved this at Capital One and what happens when they leave and everyone's air cover is gone?

> Why would I spend 100x the cost to buy an internally developed solution that is barely an MVP product when I could buy a market leading, polished, SaaS product from a vendor who takes me out to dinner and ballgames?

Sooo... not Google products?

Allegedly, Rocket Mortgage was built on top of an internal project + lessons learned for another large bank. One could argue that was a very specific example of the general trend you're discussing.

The trend of banks outsourcing software dates back decades. The "online banking" systems of most small banks and credit unions are outsourced, for example; if you have three branches and an IT staff of two people, you're going to struggle to maintain those sorts of systems yourself, never mind developing them in the first place.

Years ago when I was at Chase Manhattan (shudder) they were at the other end of the extreme where there were multiple teams within the bank that did the exact same thing, and they would have to undercut one another to get business from other internal teams. Somehow everyone got enough business that the teams didn’t ever merge which is good, because rivalries between the teams became so fierce that none of them could work with someone who had been on a competing team. Managers loved it because if you had dollars to spend you would have a lot of people kissing up to win your favor - you could get a lot of free lunches and end of year your office would be full of gift baskets.

Well… I read it. And I’ve gotta say, that sounds like a blatant violation of Regulation Y, the requirement that bank holding companies engage only in, “The business of banking.” There are lots and lots of activities that fall under that umbrella, but enterprise B2B software sales isn’t one of them.

CapOne may be too big to fail, but it’s not too big to receive a C

>> “ Regulation Y also describes transactions for which bank holding companies must seek and receive the Federal Reserve’s approval.”

My reading of Reg Y is if Capital One got approval from the Fed, it’s fine for them as a bank holding company to engage in a nonbanking activity. Am I missing something?

___________

Source:

https://www.frbsf.org/banking/regulation/regulations-policie...

Which Capital One is breaking Regulation Y?

Capital One Bank (USA) N.A. — Currently offers a wide variety of credit card products, other lending products, and deposit products.

Capital One, N.A. — Offers a broad spectrum of banking products and financial services to consumers, small businesses, and commercial clients, including traditional banking products through an extensive branch network in Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Louisiana, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Texas, and Virginia.

Capital One Auto Finance, Inc. — Offers automobile financing products.

Capital One, N.A., Member FDIC

Capital One, National Association

Capital One Bank

Capital One Bank, N.A.

Capital One Bank, National Association

Capital One Bank (USA)

Capital One Financial Corporation

Capital One Home Loans LLC

Capital One Services, LLC

Capital One Settlement Services, LLC

Must be fun to be an accountant at these places

Agreed, I don't understand how this doesn't immediately violate Reg Y.

This is a bold play, given their security track record.

Open S3 Buckets as a service

The hacker, Paige A. Thompson a/k/a/ erratic, was a former AWS engineer who abused her access to download the CapitalOne data along with 30 other companies data. Insider attacks are so deadly.

On top of her having insider access, she is mentally ill (hence her fitting online moniker) so that doesn't help any. She was long known about in the hacking scene before the hack. Very aggressive and rude online behavior.

She got convicted recently and her sentencing is in September, looking at 20 years. I think she'll get that. Hopefully she doesn't follow through on her previous statements of wanting to attempt suicide or fleeing the country.

You have no idea what you're talking about, there was no "insider attack" she had scripts the equivalent of a web scraper/sniffer.

I know what I'm talking about as I used to unfortunately hang out in the same IRC servers that she did (l0de radio).

Her working at AWS (where she was fired from) let her know exactly how and what to target in order to steal the data she was able to find and obtain. She had prior knowledge on what companies to snoop. I'd say thats using insider info to your benefit. Yes there are also common scripts that bug bounty H1 and Bugcrowd users use to pwn S3 buckets.

she also did was into cryptomining on hacked servers

>Ms. Thompson also used her access to Capital One’s servers to mine cryptocurrency

> a former AWS engineer who abused her access

Nowhere in the criminal complaint[1] does it say this happened. Instead it says that Paige wrote a script that scanned web application firewalls (WAFs) for a specific vulnerability. Anyone could have done this. The problem was only possible because after abusing the vulnerability Paige discovered that the IAM Role used by the WAF was granted permissions it shouldn't have.

1. https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/press-release/file/1188626...

What do a lot of giant corporations like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Cisco and now Capial One have in common? They write their own software.

What's in your wallet? All the money you saved.

At a certain scale you simply can not afford software licenses.

If they could they almost certainly would have tether bought an off the shelf software.

Speaking as someone who has worked at multiple such companies, they don't buy off the shelf because you can't get a big budget and build a big team and get a big win and a big promotion that way. They also have so many teams they literally invent the same thing 3 times over. Sometimes building and firing the same team 6 times over as they try and fail to build one thing.

When a company has more money than sense, it enjoys spending it more on building rather than buying. It's also much easier to justify dedicating FTEs to yet another internal project rather than vetting a vendor and churning out a PO for a product you don't know how long you'll use.

Surprising that a bank is going in this direction but not surprising that it was Capital One. They have historically been pretty technology forward in comparison to other US banks. They are one of the only US banks that provide pretty pain-free APIs to the public.

Don’t let the marketing budget fool you. They’re a subprime lender wrapped in the veneer of a fintech while being a closeted sweatshop. A large proportion of their engineering team used to be H1Bs about 5-7 years ago, unsure if that’s still the case with quotas shrinking recently.

https://newrepublic.com/article/155212/worked-capital-one-fi...

I know a friend who got a job there. Many teams do not do any coding at all. Like most banks they have automated away all the programming and have little need for new tech.

Depending on when your pal worked there, they were in the middle of a huge standardization process. I'm not sure what's going on there anymore, but they made a company wide effort to only use a single infra framework that handles deployments, testing, infra, and all kinds of other stuff. All the fun stuff has been farmed out to a few enterprise teams and everyone else was forced to shut down anything custom.

Friend currently works there and has worked their for a year. A year of no coding sounds rough, but I guess he isn't jumping cause he is worried about the pending recession.

I didn't work at Capital One, but this sounds familiar to what I saw working at another big bank that I will not name. An entire division basically got laid off with a select few people being "promoted" to "Principal Engineer" (more work without pay raise) and they replaced everyone else with contractors. It did not go well. Last I remember, the exec they pulled in that spearheaded this reorg left after only being in that position for a year or so.

I do not miss working there.

Sweatshop is right. I remember a dude joking that after project end, one of the new dads would finally be able to meet his kid. Maybe it's the stacked ranking.

All of the FTEs were super bright but realized that if they were going to be worked like dogs, they'd rather be at FAANG making twice as much. Even then, some expats told me their letters were more laid back.

Their letters?

letters of FAANG, meaning their jobs that paid more were more laid-back

The Citigroup hiring discussion 2 months ago confirmed that working for a bank is terri-bad:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31648636

Having used to work at Capital One within Shared Tech, I worked with a lot of really brilliant engineers who could easily have been working at FAANG. That being said, they didn't pay as well as FAANG so a lot of us moved on.

I'm not surprised at all by this move, there's a lot of solutions at Capital One that can be monetized. The company is so large that there's redundant solutions concurrently developed by different teams, inevitably someone was going to work the bureaucracy to start selling SaaS

> Having used to work at Capital One within Shared Tech, I worked with a lot of really brilliant engineers who could easily have been working at FAANG.

I don't doubt this - but my guess is that a lot of these top engineers are working at CapitalOne for relatively low salaries compared to FAANG explicitly because they're tethered to the company by an H1B or L1 or similar visa and can't easily jump ship.

The headquarters of Capital One is smack-dab in the middle of the US defense and IC contracting hub in Tysons Corner in Northern Virginia. They're competing for talent now with hundreds (thousands?) of small software contractors and also the big defense players like Northrop, Lockheed, etc. And on top of that, the big tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft have expanded heavily in the area and are now gobbling up all the talent as they pay way more than DOD and gov't contract work.

Yet Capital One still doesn't offer competitive salaries that even match the defense contractors, never-mind AWS and Microsoft. I know half a dozen talented engineers who got tired of the $175K defense industry salary "ceiling" and jump ship to Amazon. I know of zero who've moved to Capital One, though they probably employ more engineers in the area than any other company.

And from what I've seen, it's because their engineering departments are 90% Indians on H1B (again - some very talented). Most US citizens won't want to work there.

Bringing new meaning to software debt

This makes me want to get rid of my Capital One card. I knew they'd wasted millions on a giant engineering department that does jack for their business (worked with many of their ex-engs), and this is proof that they never had anything useful to do. CTO must be trying to save his bonus by making up a new irrelevant business to justify their unnecessarily large engineering org and lack of purpose.

It's either that or more TV commercials

This is sometimes hot and cold sometimes depending on C.I/T/D.O decisions. I used to work for enterprises that said software is eating the world and revenue , insourcing and IP differentiation. Come next CXO cycle , we are a manufacturing company / Fintech / Insurer and IT is left to the specialists (and sell off entire arms or rebadge).

Aside , no two warehouses may be alike (fragmentation) + the fact that specialized products that keep adding new features find it hard in the data lineage space / governance space. I doubt if this steam will keep up unless there is a significant revenue (and that will be a challenge for anyone who would make a decision on a SaaS product)

I work in the enterprise/b2b bank software and consulting market. Nothing seen here appears to have any impact on our business or customers. Not quite sure who this is oriented at.

If you are so big you can spend time arguing with capital one about your IT workloads, you may consider doing it in house or working with a smaller partner like ourselves who exclusively focuses on the software part. When you don’t have to worry about running a bank, you can get a lot of other work done. It’s also a shitload easier to operate outside of the regulatory domain you would otherwise be trapped in.

No other company wastes nearly as much money on AWS routinely than Capital One. Entire Kubernetes clusters for microservices that do essentially nothing.

Here is their jobs portal: https://www.capitalonecareers.com/search-jobs?orgIds=1732&ac...

And here is one of their job postings: https://www.capitalonecareers.com/job/vienna/back-end-softwa...

Back End Software Engineer - Capital One Software (Remote Eligible)

What You’ll Do:

- Collaborate with and across Agile teams to design, develop, test, implement, and support technical solutions in full-stack development tools and technologies

- Share your passion for staying on top of tech trends, experimenting with and learning new technologies, participating in internal & external technology communities, mentoring other members of the engineering community

- Collaborate with digital product managers, and deliver robust cloud-based solutions that drive powerful experiences to help millions of Americans achieve financial empowerment

- Utilize programming languages like Java, Python, SQL, Node, Go, and Scala, Open Source RDBMS and NoSQL databases, Container Orchestration services including Docker and Kubernetes, and a variety of AWS tools and services

Basic Qualifications:

- Bachelor’s Degree

- At least 3 years of professional software engineering experience (Internship experience does not apply)

Preferred Qualifications:

- 4+ years of experience in at least one of the following: Lua, C++, Angular, Java, Python, GoLang, Nginx, Scala, Go, Rust or Node.js

- 1+ years of experience with AWS, GCP, Azure, or another cloud service

- 2+ years of experience in open source frameworks

- 3+ years of experience in Agile practices

Can't wait for Goldman Sachs Software

They have some pretty good software:

https://github.com/goldmansachs

I would love to see the statistics on # of SE hires by the FANGS then Capital One. Has to be comparable.

I'm sure the sweat shops like Accenture, TCS, Infosys have them both beat on that measure.

Whatever that measure indicates of product quality ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

CapOne trying to launch their own Aladdin....

what ever happened with their enterprise k8s? critical stack or whatever.

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