Rob Harding says IoT trails behind the likes of big data, machine learning and AI in importance to CapitalOne.
The Internet of Things (IoT) isn’t a game-changer the financial services sector, according to the CIO of financial services firm CapitalOne Europe plc, Rob Harding.
Harding said that while IoT could play a prominent role in many industries, financial services wouldn’t be one of them. In fact, in Harding’s own graph of technology trends, IoT lags behind other areas such as big data and machine learning.
“I keep a graph that I update periodically of all the things that are out there from a technology point of view. The x-axis is my opinion on the importance to CapitalOne UK’s business strategy and the y-axis is our current fluency with the technology,” he said.
“I’ve actually got IoT at the furthest edge of that, in that I think it’s the least important technology at this point in time to our business strategy and an area where we have low fluency,” he added.
Game Changer
Harding emphasised that IoT meant a great deal for the industries where a huge amount of sensor technology is deployed, for example in logistics or mining, but he can’t see it being a game-changer for CapitalOne, particularly as the firm just signed a deal with Amazon Web Services last year to move much of its production load to the public cloud.
“If I was keeping more of my data centres in-house then I think the IoT has some interesting applications for monitoring hardware and networks to avoid service outage. However, I’m looking to move more of my production load to public cloud so it’s not an area of monitoring that I’m choosing to invest in,” he said
“It’s a fascinating topic and for some industries, it’s going to turn them on their head, but I don’t think financial services will be as impacted by IoT as some of the other technologies like cloud, big data, AI and machine learning which will have much more prominence. On my graph those are all a lot more towards my right-hand side,” he added.