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Typically, the thought of writing a blog post about a spreading database would give me shudders. As someone with far too much experience with Moody's Risk Analyst, I wouldn't think of a spreading database as having much value beyond holding some form of customer financials. 

Not all financial statements are made the same. In fact, almost none of them are made the same! Financial statements are like snowflakes. They come in just as many shapes, sizes, and formats as there are businesses to create them. At first glance this might sound strange. One would think that accepted accounting principles, such as GAAP and IFRS, would help standardize this. However, there is also flexibility left to business in how they share this data.

In today’s world, a superficial reading of tech newsletters and startup press releases leads one to believe we are on the cusp of a machine-driven society. Indeed, “Artificial Intelligence” and “Machine Learning” have become table-stakes marketing terms, with companies like Tesla (autopilot) and Google (duplex) leading the charge toward fully automated solutions to everyday problems. However, if you take a closer look at the technologies you see they are targeted to a specific type of problem (e.g. self-driving and speech emulation) and as such the underlying algorithms are tuned to be successful within those problem spaces. That by no means reduces the impressive results achieved, but the hype around these technologies has created a false belief that anything and everything can be automated. There's a big gap of understanding. 

Right now a lot of people are facing the challenges of working from home. For lenders this goes beyond the normal challenges of a full house of children, pets, and distractions. Monitoring a portfolio and performing credit analysis for new deals can be exceptionally painful without the usual workstation setup consisting of multiple monitors and ample screen space to access critical applications.

Somewhere above the Atlantic Ocean, I took a break from writing this blog to watch The Black Panther (for a third time). There is a scene where T’Challa objects to his sister Shuri’s newly-developed technology because the technology that he was already using worked well enough for him. Shuri’s response was, “just because something works does not mean it cannot be improved.”

A company is simply a group of people working toward a common goal. Companies are most successful when the best and brightest people are aligned, happy, and learning.