Banking sector braces for its Uber moment

NEW YORK: While Jenkins is no longer at the helm, Barclays is going big on technology, sponsoring startups and working with the blockchain -the technology that underpins bitcoin -to try and improve payments.

In fact, pretty much every big bank has made technology a priority in one way or another, either by tapping startup expertise like UBS or by experimenting with systems and technologies internally.

Just under a third of Goldman Sachs' employees are now engineers -11,000 -and its big projects at the moment include messaging platform Symphony, an online peer-to-peer lending platform, and Marquee, an 'app store' that lets clients use its internal trading a modelling tools for a fee. Thousands of clients are already using it.

Around 58 per cent of senior bankers polled by Temenos said they plan to spend more on IT this year, the highest percentage since the survey began in 2008.

The big question, as Jenkins points out, is whether these huge institutions can move fast enough to get ahead of the wave of change -or at the very least ride it. Antony Jenkins, the former CEO of Barclays, has a nightmare vision for the future of big banks.

In a speech in London this week he said: "The incumbents risk becoming merely capital providing utilities that operate in a highly regulated, less profitable environment, a situation unlikely to be tolerated by shareholders."

Jenkins says a series of Uberstyle disruptions in the industry could shrink headcount at traditional big banks by as much as 50 per cent, while profitability in some areas could collapse by over 60% -huge predictions from a man who, until recently, ran one of Britain's biggest banks.