DAVV ops — how Fintech is creating new specialists
We all know about ‘dev ops’ but there is also a branch of the business which we refer to in our firm as ‘davv ops’.
This stands for ‘Detection, Authentication, Validation and Verification’ operations and covers the wide ground of dealing with data after it has been received and putting it through the rigors of various systems and examinations in order to test its veracity.
The skillset isn’t typically held by one person, we have it spread across developers, machine learning/AI teams and business development who help to create the human driven requirements which the engineers then seek to fulfill.
In time this will change, we think that there will be people who start to garner skill in this multidisciplinary area as an area of itself. This is contrary to the ever greater specialization you often encounter in industry but we have to remember that not every job goes down deeper and darker rabbit holes.
For instance, we have seen wide lateral development in education. Only a few decades ago children were taught a few core subjects and not much else. Nowadays you have education spreading into areas like anti-bullying and many other areas outside of traditional course subjects, it doesn’t make you better at mathematics, but it contributes to a more rounded individual.
What we all want and drift towards being in fintech, is to solve the problems of the financial world by specifically eliminating the pain points in what has traditionally been a bulky and slow industry.
Technology has sped many things up, you expect rapid online banking for instance, but nobody expects rapid mortgages, however, one day you will be able to get a remortgage with a fingerprint and not much else, that’s how commoditized it could become and we want to make that journey better.
That’s where we got our mission statement from, we want to make things like mortgages and insurance ‘easier, faster and better for everybody’.
‘Everybody’ is an important person because you can’t leave out important constituencies and create positive change.
Again, this may sound contrary to the idea of ‘disruption’, but the important constituencies are not necessarily the traditional constituencies and that distinction is vital.
If you take a service like Uber or AirBnB it matched people who had a need (a ride somewhere, a place to stay) and it matched them with people who could do that while leaving out a traditional constituent- the taxi driver or hotel.
Identifying your actual master in a world full of competing voices can be difficult and we can all point towards companies who in hindsight failed to do that.
You can’t do that, and this is where Davv-Ops comes into play. There has to be a person, or team or area (and remember I’m talking fintech specifically) where you focus only on better Detection, Authentication, Validation and Verification in order to succeed.
There are so many ideas that look great and which work in general, but if they fail even once in particular then the whole conveyor belt of operations can come undone.
The future and today are close relatives where their cousin ‘tomorrow’ resides, given the nature of time you can’t necessarily plot out how these developments will occur or take place, only that they are underway, evolving in their own right.
For that reason, anybody looking to get into the career of ‘tomorrow’ may be better off (from a tech perspective) getting into engineering as a hobbyist, machine learning as a subject but general business as the core skillset because that is the missing piece — the tech and engineers are abundant in a worldwide sense, as things develop there are also bigger repositories of reusable code.
This isn’t ‘anti-technical’, it’s an acknowledgement that human systems are not scientific, they are behavioral and relational and that means solutions which involve people have to work for … people.
Forgive the meandering path of this post, I hope to articulate its points more clearly in the future, but for now, understand that while the world changes and as people and their customer experience change, that the tech is the enabler but the DAVV-ops is what will allow tech to supersede everything we thought previously possible.
