Today we were invited to a larger Swiss bank here in New York. We had a hosted tour through very interesting parts of the bank, such as the trading floor and their internal support. The tour began at 12:00 pm, where we were welcomed into one of their meeting rooms. They had one of the most magnificent coffee machines I have ever seen, with a price tag of 35’000 dollars. Anyway, we met a few very interesting people that told us about their daily tasks and challenges in their job. The first person was Scott, he works in the technology and innovation department and had a talk about their use cases of blockchain, augmented and virtual reality. Second was Julie. She tought us about risk and finance inside of a large bank. Even though she was only employed for about a year, she had a lot to tell us about their profession at the bank. Next, we left the room for a bit and took a tour through the inners of the bank. As I said, we saw the trading floor and internal support. They have several devices at the support for the employees to test, so they can decide what device to buy for their work. From Apple iPads, to Microsoft Surface. They even gave us little goodies on our way. Then we went to the trading floor and it was crazy. There were several hundred people, every of whom had multiple screens that displayed blinking red and green numbers, diagrams and more. Those people handle several billions worth of securities everyday.
Throughout the day we learnt, that the bank is in posession of over 1000 smart robots, that handle 80% of the support tickets that come in daily. They power their 30 data centers with 23 megawatt power and have around 4000 employees in the office we were, of whom are 40% woman and much, much more.