Santander hands over $700m to IBM in hopes of becoming incredible banking machine

Chaos....

Yep, sounds about right....

David Chaos

"The global CIO of the group, David Chaos"

Let's see if this ends well... Either way the Reg headlines will be "Chaos rules supreme!"

Must have been an interesting call with the headhunters when he was found.

In a branch? Out on a limb!

> IBM Watson, which will be, er, put to work "enhancing branch advisors' expertise" and increasing productivity.

> That is one of the aims at least, assuming UK customers can actually find a branch,

Surely the point will be that an AI doesn't need a branch. It just inhabits the web. So potential customers will just see an avatar that doles out vague advice and then tells people to buy Santander products. Your financial adviser will just be an app on your phone.

The old quote

"A fool and his money"

Haven't companies figured this out by now???

I'm well aware that IT outsourcing deals are settled over lavish dinners, golf trips and strip club visits, but you would think that companies would be wise to the outsourcers' playbooks by now. We'll see what happens in 8 or 10 years when Santander's back on the "bring it all in house" cycle again.

It's not hard to understand...massively underbid the contract, include loopholes and omissions you could drive a train through, make up the difference by enforcing change order payments for anything not written in the contract, offshore all the workers to increase margin and do the absolute minimum work necessary to avoid losing the contract. I've seen it more than once and experienced a full outsource/insource cycle. It's not pretty.

What are they teaching CIOs in their MBA programs that blinds them to the fact that the outsourcer isn't there to help them, but instead to maximize profit?

AI vs Real Intelligence

I spent the first half of my career in Financial Services IT, writing and implementing systems that put everything under head office control and so they could de-skill or remove branch managers.

The second half of that career was building humongous data warehouses, analytics systems, data lakes etc.. The goal of which was to glean information and insights that a traditional branch manager would have known instantly.

Funny old world.

Good luck to them

Best of luck to them.

I know for a fact that the engineers that IBM let loose on other vendors equipment in Santander DC's had so little a clue that multiple visits by other engineers were required to fix the mess.

I also know that other major outsourcing deals with Big Blue lead to major cost increases for the unlucky parties.

Anon for obvious reasons.

On the Brightside

they could have gone to Crapita

Hollow..

IBM has lollowed itself out to the extent that all it can offer customers is hordes of offshore bodies and some H1-B visa holders in the US. Their sales force is competent but there's no there there anymore for implementation.

Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM

Who better to test that old adage than Mr Chaos!

From ripped off Somerset

IBM had a contract with Somerset County Council using a joint venture 85% owned by IBM called South West One.

They promised savings of £180m but instead syphoned off £69m from key services like schools and social care.

Read about it here:

https://dwfoh96rza0z7.cloudfront.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/12104214/Dave-Orr-Paper2.pdf

I bank at Santander and the interest rates on my savings are rubbish. This tie-up with avaricious and unprincipled IBM will end in tears.

Watson

Interesting that IBM have “sold” Santander Watson as Lloyds cannot use it as it breaches LLoyds and FCA security compliance regulation.