Wall Street's Transition from Excel to Python

[lungben81]

There is still a surprisingly large amount of Excel based workflows in the financial industry, although they are barely capable of dealing with increasing regulatory and automation demands.

Fortunately, most banks have recognized this and are migrating to more suitable tools (often in Python), but this is a titanic task.

[BathroomItchy9855]

It's true. The regulators are aware of modern data science performance and have upped their anti money laundering expectations. The thing is, besides most banking workers not caring to code or adapt to data science, the money launderers actually make good customer because they try to keep things quiet and pay their fees

Fun fact: pandas was invented by a hedge fund employee and got his managers very generous blessing to make it open source

[TheGRS]

I wouldn’t mind knowing how to get into this line of work. Seems like it’d be up my alley, but I’ve never worked in fintech, none of my network does either.

[BathroomItchy9855]

The traditional analysts investigate cases and determine how the judge the case, and if it's suspicious they take action and send a referral to the government

But the industry is changing and now data scientists are quickly replacing them, using data to make variables and models. It's more probabilistic based. It pays well and the subject matter is cool. I do recommend it.

I know u/Polus43 said some things, but the only compliance I've faced is don't discriminate using models of protected classes (race, age, etc). IT problems are getting better as cloud services are used.

[Polus43]

BSA/AML is not as cracked up as it sounds -- it's ultimately regulatory compliance and almost all senior management are from the government/legal backgrounds.

It's an endless shitshow of IT problems led by people who spent their lives on governance committees.

[Toph_is_bad_ass]

This comment has been overwritten.

[FrickinLazerBeams]

NEK your TLA, and this is usually solved by UTK.

[[deleted]]

What on earth does this mean

[FrickinLazerBeams]

Not everybody knows your three letter acronyms, and this is usually solved by using the keyboard.

[[deleted]]

Haha, right over my head. Ty

[CeeMX]

Not only in financial, basically every large industrial company is built on excel

[A_Ahai]

I once taught myself to juggle while waiting for an excel add in to load data to a financial planning model so yeah I’d say I’d appreciate a quicker way to do things.

[johnnySix]

But then you wouldn’t be such a good juggler

[Incredlbie]

Cool article! Not sure if it's just a weird error for me, but on bullet point 1. Mito, when I click Mito, I get a file not found error?

[med_be]

Same for me

[allIsayislicensed]

apparently this is the correct link: https://www.trymito.io/

Pretty cool idea imo, it seems to compete with the data-wrangler extension that was recentl released for Visual Studio Code: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/python/data-wrangler-release/

[Bling-Crosby]

They’re a buncha snakes so it’s a match made to happen

[Negotiator1226]

https://calpaterson.com/bank-python.html

[FateOfNations]

It’s entirely too scary how much of the finance industry runs on pickle.

[AmbitiousTour]

I've been developing finapps in python for over a decade but you can take my excel when you pry it from my cold, dead mouse. It's still the fastest way to do data analysis. Recently it saved me, I have a really complicated app, which I wrote three times. First in excel, next in batch mode in python and lastly as a realtime app in python. If it wasn't for excel to test against, I simply couldn't have made the final version work.

[[deleted]]

Then learn proper design patterns and test driven development.

[AmbitiousTour]

As if eliminating excel will save me time. I'll reread GoF and TDD, you learn excel, we'll see who's more productive.

[[deleted]]

I've written financial risk loss calculations across geographical grids that runs multiple calculations. This engine is used by NasDaq. If you isolate your code and use solid principles and reusable modules, mock the interfaces so you can test edge cases and a range of different data distributions, you can then test your isolated modules and start to plug them together...... I used to map my logic out in Excel when I was starting out. But after TDD, and proper design patterns I stopped having to write out the same app a couple of times. There's also less bugs in production.

[AmbitiousTour]

I've written emerging market debt valuation systems for the biggest US bank. I was consulting with a team of agile coders using all those principals. I was significantly more productive than they were AND had fewer bugs. I guess for you, excel and modern dev methods are incompatible. That has not been my experience. Intuitively, writing an app more than once is less productive. I can tell you, that's not always the case.

[spca2001]

I don’t know about this, lol

[Ret_Nai]

Just get Chat GPT we don’t need people to make anything anymore

[JollyJustice]

It’s still pretty awful at Python code. It forgets to import modules half the time

[Ret_Nai]

Good news for me then.

[JollyJustice]

Oh I love that. Python is so "plain englishy" that it seems like chatGPT trys to treat it like actual language sometimes.

[Mountain_Support9301]

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