# Keynote Case Study: SAP — Financial Services Was Running a Sprint With a Boat Anchor Attached
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There was a problem with SAP’s 2018 Financial Services Industry Conference. Too many people wanted to attend. Registration ran to roughly double expectations. That was a good problem to have. And it said something important about the moment. Senior executives from major banks and insurance companies were looking for clarity about disruption, fintech, new competitors, technology acceleration and the future of their business models. I opened the conference in New York with my keynote: Think Big, Start Small, Scale Fast: Innovating in the Era of Disruption. It was somewhere around the 30th or 40th time SAP had booked me at that point — part of a relationship that has now involved more than 40 engagements around the world. The financial-services challenge I described was simple. Many companies were being asked to run a sprint while dragging a boat anchor. They were being pushed by fintech competitors, mobile expectations, AI, open banking, new platforms and software-driven innovation. Yet much of the core technology infrastructure of the industry still traced its roots to systems and architectures built decades earlier. That gap matters. The faster the market moves, the more expensive legacy becomes. Six themes framed the keynote: The Future Happens Slowly — Then All at Once. Disruption often appears gradual until a tipping point suddenly changes the market. Every Industry Becomes a Software Industry. Financial products and services were increasingly being defined by software, data and digital platforms. Innovation Velocity Accelerates. Moore’s Law and technology economics were compressing product and innovation cycles. Data and Analytics Everywhere. Real-time information was becoming central to risk, underwriting, customer insight and decision-making. Expectations Accelerate. Customers increasingly expected simplicity, speed, immediacy and frictionless digital interaction. Infrastructure and Security Risk Exponentiate. As financial services became more digital and interconnected, the complexity of infrastructure and security risk grew with it. The timing issue was especially important. Financial services had been hearing predictions of massive disintermediation for decades. As far back as the 1990s, people were predicting the end of the broker, the advisor and the traditional banking relationship. Some of that disruption happened. Some of it did not. That can create complacency. When people hear the same future prediction for twenty years, they begin to assume it will never happen. But that is precisely where timing becomes dangerous. A trend can move slowly for years. Then a combination of technology, consumer behavior, regulation and economics can push it across a threshold. Suddenly, what seemed premature becomes inevitable. The deck made this point repeatedly. Cars were becoming upgradeable, hyperconnected software platforms. Science was exponentiating. AI was moving into diagnosis and prediction. Health and technology were converging. Big data was becoming ubiquitous. Open banking and APIs were making account creation and financial interaction dramatically simpler. The common theme was acceleration. That was the strategic message for the SAP audience. Do not confuse slow adoption with permanent irrelevance. Do not assume legacy infrastructure can carry unlimited future weight. And do not wait for disruption to become obvious before beginning to build the capability to respond. The conference was also another example of why SAP had repeatedly brought me back over the years. Each engagement was different. Utilities. Financial services. Customer conferences. Leadership events. But the core challenge was consistent: Help people understand how quickly their world was changing — and what they needed to do next. Financial services was being forced to accelerate. The question was whether its infrastructure, culture and leadership could accelerate with it.

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Source: https://jimcarroll.com/2018/12/keynote-case-study-sap-financial-services-was-running-a-sprint-with-a-boat-anchor-attached/