Maybe Wells Fargo's unions need a blockchain

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If you are reading this, you probably work for a bank. Which means you probably are not in a union. Financial services is one of the least unionized industries in the U.S., with fewer than 2% of employees carrying union cards. There have been efforts in recent years to change that. The Communication Workers of America has specifically in fact targeted the banking sector as one it wanted to unionize.

There have been some victories. Employees at 28 Wells Fargo locations have unionized.  Beneficial Bank in California was another notable win for unions, where the management actually supported the effort. But recent developments show that not only is it hard to make a union in banking, it's hard to keep one, too. 

After a good two-year run, some of those Wells Fargo unions are reversing course, our banking editor Kevin Wack reports. In Apex, N.C., Spring Hill, Fla., and Casper, Wyo., employees have either already voted to decertify their unions or are poised to do so. It seems the new union members have a case of buyers' remorse, at least in the cases where decertification's on the table.

Unless Sally Field comes walking through that door with her Oscar-winning charisma, it seems like banks are going to remain a tough nut to crack for the CWA or any other organizers. 

Defi fo fum
Bankers have been trying for some time now to figure out exactly how they are going to respond to the technology that goes by several names. Distributed ledger technology. Blockchain. Defi. The buzzwords start to all melt together, but you know what I'm talking about: the software conventions that make bitcoin and other digital assets run. 

At this point, every banker needs to figure out how they are going to approach this technology and deploy it within their operations and offerings, our new Market Intelligence analyst Megan Ryan wrote in her debut column on Monday.

How you plan on using it probably depends upon how big your bank is. The big national banks are doing what they usually do, which is to just jump on and play around with every new thing that comes down the pike. They can afford to throw money at all different kinds of use cases and see which if any are worth keeping. Smaller banks have real budget constraints and thus hard choices to make. And this wildcat era of crypto means there's a dizzying array of options. Which one is still going to be around in a decade? 

One way to make that decision is to be clear-eyed about what we're discussing. We all call all this stuff technology, but that may not be the best word to use. Nobody calls Excel a technology. Nobody calls the iPhone a technology. They are products of technology, of course, but they are products first, technologies second.

Banks offer products. You could call them services if you like. A savings account is a product. A certificate of deposit is a product. A home-equity line is a product. And what customers want are, indeed, products. They don't want defi, or distributed ledgers, or blockchain whatever. The vast, vast majority of your customers do not care about any of those buzzwords. They want a product that allows them to use their money in the best way possible.

The problem with most of the crypto world is that the people in it do not understand the difference between products and technologies. They are hyper focused – obsessed in many cases – on the latter at the expense of the former, which is why most crypto products are actually awful, which is why bitcoin after nearly 20 years of being a live network is largely unusable to anybody who isn't a coder. Which is why a company like Coinbase is so successful, because from the start they understood exactly what their competitive advantage was going to be: creating a product that was so simple anybody could use it.

The future doesn't belong to any technology. It belongs, as it always does, to products. This is a point that FIS CEO Stephanie Ferris makes today in a BankThink essay, albeit she was writing about AI and not defi. But the principle applies to both: "Financial services is, at its core, a relationship business. When it comes to their money, people want to bank with people, buy financial products from people and know the faces behind the transaction. Trust is hard-won and easily destroyed. Technology's role is to augment those relationships, not replace them."

Your customers, most of them at least, do not care about how the thing you're offering them gets made; they just care that it improves their lives in some meaningful way. Find the products that accomplish that goal, and you'll find your way through all the defi fo fum blockchaindom.