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                     New technologies and financial services

 The Financial Economics Review devotes this issue to the theme “currency, financial institutions and technologies”. I was first asked to carry out a review of academic works devoted to the subject in the past and present times.

Perhaps for lack of documentary sources 1, also by not including the United States in the scope, my observation is that there is very little academic work which has analyzed the consequences of new technologies on the exercise of financial professions. The insufficiently conceptual subject? The weak attraction for microeconomics in its most practical aspects? I do not know. I regret it and hope that things will evolve because the research material is considerable, especially in the period of change that we are going through. I note, however, the beginning of evolution with contributions from academics in international conferences and I am delighted.

I turned to other documentary sources. There, the finding is the opposite. The reflections, the questions, the forecasts for the future are numerous, I was going to say bloated. They began in the 1960s, with the appearance and development of computers. Let us remember Le Paris Informatique published in 1968 and written by Pierre Lhermitte, an adviser to the president of Société Générale from 1970, which deals with "the foreseeable consequences of the development of automation in the management of companies", including banking.

My objective will therefore be, in light of the articles in this issue, each one devoted to a specific field of application of new technologies for today and tomorrow, to describe what the major stages have been since the appearance of the banking IT, the financial sector's immersion in information technologies, in other words in digital. I will try to show what changes these major stages have resulted in.

In this journey, the question will be asked whether, at each stage, we were aware of what the following would be. Above all, the question will arise as to whether the past years bring the world to come.

My conclusion will be that great caution must be exercised in any forward-looking vision.

At the same time, it will be clear that digital technology, which has been at the heart of banking development for decades, has continued to see its importance grow and its pace accelerate. We are undoubtedly experiencing a paradigm shift.

 The main stages in the immersion of the financial sector in technology

The 1960s and 1970s: support for the banking of society

The transformation that the bank will have undergone in these decades is of very great magnitude. Between 1965 and 1980, the banking rate rose from 35% to 89%, the number of counters exploded, the unit of account for the number of means of payment became one billion, against the hundred million. Also, new means of payment have appeared, with cards or debit advice. Finally, the range of products offered has grown considerably, in both corporate and retail banking.

Without the massive recourse to increasingly powerful means of treatment, the passage from a bank of the well-to-do classes of the population to a bank for all would have simply been impossible.

Of course, not the slightest question about possible competition from non-banks. We have to manage growth, in all areas.

IT is the sole responsibility of IT departments. It is focused on back-office operations, that is to say, that the strategic dimension, the commitment of general management remain limited to the commitment of significant IT investment budgets, on the one hand, real estate, on the other hand.

The years 1980-1995: the professionalization of banking marketing

Keeping it simple, we can say that from the beginning of the 1980s, new technologies came out of the large processing centres and became the daily working tools of almost all the staff. Mini-computing, with servers managing clusters of workstations, themselves still not very intelligent, is developing. Gradually, almost all banking staff are equipped with connected “terminals”. It is the period of the constitution of large electronic banking networks, made possible by the modernization of the national telephone network.

This period is also that of the appearance and massive development of the Minitel, a brilliant French invention, which puts an IT tool in the hands of millions of French people. Home banking is making its first appearance. The PC will make the Minitel disappear, but it will have had the advantage of allowing French banks to acquire, before many others, an experience of "home banking". Six million households will have had the possibility of remote contact with their banks even before the arrival of the PC.

This period is also that of a considerable evolution in the capacities of storage and processing of information. Large "databases" are formed.

First, IT becomes a strategic issue, discussed in boards of directors, and general management teams include IT specialists. It becomes much more than a means of treatment, it conditions the development, in particular commercial, in all the trades. But IT departments remain in control. They both assume the project management on behalf of the trades and its project management

Conclusion

This flashback on what has been said and done on the subject of “financial services and new technologies”, let's say digital, leads me to a conclusion of great banality: risks and opportunities. In the past, some renowned authors will have overestimated the risks and underestimated the ability of French financial institutions to seize opportunities. Can we project this diagnosis for the future? Perhaps the answer will be different depending on one of the three main areas of banking, management of flows, distribution of credit and management of savings. In any case, it would be unwise to be affirmative as some have been in the past. Yes, the digital revolution is here, there, causing major changes, especially cultural ones. But the game is more open than ever.

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