Financial Service institutions are, traditionally, quite conservative in their approach to technology replacement.  I do realise that there will be myriad exceptions here, and that technology has enabled revolution in financial services, but I still stand by my assertion overall.  And a major reason for that conservative approach is that once something works, it becomes part of critical infrastructure rather quickly and then is difficult to change because of the risks involved around failure, technology or reputation.

As an example, let’s pick authorisation systems for card networks.  Quite a few organisations will still say they’re running authorisation on Tandem NonStop hardware, despite the fact that Tandem hasn’t existed for years and the solution is, to be blunt, hugely expensive. There’s better value solutions on commodity hardware out there, but who wants to be the person who killed an organisation’s presence on card networks?

But yet, against this backdrop, BBVA has signed up for Google Apps for Business. First of all, let’s be clear: this is just for communication and collaboration, not the highly specialised stuff a bank needs to do.

Still, I find this simply astounding. A globally recognised bank, with over 110,000 employees, is trusting Google with all their internal communication and collaboration.

The details of the deal must be quite something, and I’d love to see what’s in them.  There’s little hints that things might not be quite as standard as Google would like us to believe, though…  Will this be private servers, or the standard Google fayre?  BBVA are developing a “High Performance Desktop” for their Intranet and Google Apps will be a part of this: my question is how?

How have they solved the issues around EU data protection?  Or US PATRIOT ACT? Or regulatory compliance?  How will they ensure that stuff that isn’t meant to go onto Google doesn’t end up on there – such as client financial details?

Or the fact that Google is rather in the habit of mining messages for their own purposes?  We don’t have to worry, because Google “won’t be evil”, but a bank’s internal collaboration on product, clients, plans, strategy, issues, challenges, etc will be passing through a company that exists to discover those trends and make money from them.

To me, that’s the most worrying piece.  And I’m similarly amazed that the press really isn’t all over this like a rash.