(Con):...I am much
more concerned about the impact of this stuff on what —I agree with the noble
Lord, , about this—calls
“good work” than about some new banking crisis. At the moment, our
traditional joint stock investment banks are more regulated than
they have ever been before and I do not think the risk of any
systemic breakdown is high at the moment. There is a much greater
likelihood that traditional joint stock banks, with their ageing,
constantly patched, endlessly rebooted IT systems, with bits being
bolted on in replatforming, are going to suffer terribly from the
new cloud-based technologies and agile, starting-from-scratch new
banks, like the globally dominating tech giants, the inherently
scalable new worlds of Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and the rest. They
are bringing new work to the UK in new settings, and that should be
greatly welcomed...
(Lab):...In fact, from the 1950s onwards, there were
some applications of computers in business. One of the
interesting ones even beat Amazon to it. Freeman’s mail order
company—my godfather was a director—was well known in all the
valleys, and it introduced the KDF9 computer to distribute its
goods. It is a pity that that, like other technologies, it did
not make the global level. Sometimes the commercial application
of computation moved much faster than the scientific calculation.
Noble Lords may not know that in the early 1950s, Joe Lyons,
which used to distribute Swiss rolls and stuff for the tea shops
around London, was so advanced that the Met Office used to send
people from Dunstable down to Hammersmith to learn how to do
it...
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