Patrick McKenzie Profile picture
Aug 14, 2019 6 tweets 1 min read Read on X
A Japanese innovation which I expect to see in the US before long: video conferencing kiosks at bank branches for relatively low-volume transactions which, for regulatory or customer-comfort reasons, require a bank officer to meet with the client.
This lets you centrally provision the bank officer at a call center in a market where bank officers are abundant and inexpensive and increase their utilization, rather than having to have relatively expensive bank officers constantly underutilized at your most expensive branches.
A sample transaction, which takes about an hour of an officer's time at my local bank, is onboarding a new deposit account customer. This combines a bit of data gathering, a bit of salesmanship, and a bit of regulatory compliance / KYC.
(The question is almost literally:

Select which of the following you will use your new bank account for:

a) Daily life
b) Operating your business
c) Nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons development
d) Terrorism
e) Operating an anti-social group
f) International wires
)
A shadow implication of this is further deskilling of the retail bank branch employee base, since traditionally the people doing this sort of work have to be able to handle the (fairly expansive) set of things that anyone in the neighborhood could want a banker to do.
The telephone booth services are going to be provided by a computer and call center rep symbiosis, though, and while the system has to know how to handle anything, the call center rep only needs to know how to handle whatever queue they're assigned to.

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Patrick McKenzie

Patrick McKenzie Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @patio11

Mar 10
This is a useful enough specific observation that I'm promoting the general observation to text:

Organizations don't make decisions. People at organizations make decisions. Very often, there is one lynchpin person who must hypercommit to an org doing something for that to be.
From this follows any number of corollaries, including:

1) If you desire change in an org, it is really useful to understand who, specifically, is the lynchpin for the change you want to see.
2) You might be offered the choice to be that person at some point in your career.

This will rarely follow someone whose job title is Quest Giver coming to you with a choice of two pills, one of which is failure and one of which is success, with clearly listed of side effects.
Read 5 tweets
Mar 8
One of the cultural quirks of capitalists is that there are many lies that one is allowed or even encouraged to tell in society, and capitalists are members of society, but are in principle not allowed to lie about revenue.

This strikes many non-capitalists as odd.
I have jokingly phrased this as “Certain forms of writing are sacred. For example, if you write the word Balance Sheet on top of a list of numbers, those numbers become sacred to capitalists, and a lie amongst them is a sin that the gods of capitalism will punish most severely.”
But this causes a cultural disconnect because society broadly allows many fudgings of numbers. And e.g. conversations between management and investors allow for certain forms of salesmanship.

But about revenue: not allowed. We are pretty serious on that.
Read 6 tweets
Feb 23
There is one contractor during this home remodel who I greatly enjoy because of his continued imprecations about the general state of contracting, other subs on project, etc.

“Got something to show you Mr. McKenzie. *gestures at floor* Do you understand how a laser level works?”
Me: “I think I get the theory.”
Contractor: “I think I do, too. Of course back in my day we did this with a bubble level of maybe a piece of string and a weight. But I was concerned that perhaps the people who put this floor in might not understand how to use traditional wisdom.”
Contractor: “So I brought a laser over here. Now, by my mark, and I brought here another piece of high tech gadgetry called a measuring tape, this floor is 3 and an eighth inches off.”
Me: “Ah I see.”
Contractor: “Three and an eighth! Who does that?!”
Read 7 tweets
Feb 21
SBF has a new interview out, conducted from prison. It is... unbelievable, at points.

Highlights include:

* Strong direct statement of his innocence.
* Accusing prosecution and judge of policitized process, analogising to experience of President Trump, apparent maneuvering to secure clemancy.
* Implied rationale for prosecution: his donations to Republicans.
* Expressions of frustration that S&C/John Ray III didn't collaboratively receive balance sheets and other business records from him and rather set about reconstructing them, which he claims delayed recovery and cost creditors substantial amounts of money in e.g. legal fees.
Read 7 tweets
Feb 17
Me: Ah a nice relaxing Monday where I can finally get some work done.
DOGE: Have you ever heard of checks?!
Me: %{*]% it.
Me: I don’t do partisan politics.
Twitter the Sumerian bird demon: Got it.
Me: Which is why I work in a painfully boring infrastructural field.
Twitter: Oh sure.
Me: That no one hates each other over.
Twitter: Yeah.
Me: So just writing the truth won’t summon a mob.
*curse starts*
Why does the government send a lot of checks? Principally because it is the easiest payment method in the U.S. to coordinate over multi-year timescales without needing to constantly re-coordinate updates with the payee on how they get their money these days.
Read 22 tweets
Feb 14
Friendly neighborhood Dangerous Professional advice:

If you are ever at a meeting taking notes, and someone at the meeting expresses umbrage that notes are being taken of the meeting, and this is routine notetaking for this genre of meeting, …
… you should absolutely want to keep physical control of those notes, and you should prioritize that over social pressure you may perceive, and you should update very aggressively against the umbrage-taker as being likely up to no good.
You should also, immediately after the meeting, document the fact that you were taking notes at a meeting and asked to stop, and that you felt in that moment this ask was extraordinary.
Read 17 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(