Not all heroes wear capes

"Faster, higher, stronger" - that’s how my colleague Philippe titled one of his last blogs about developments in the financial industry. The Olympic thought of giving the most to be the best stems from that one basic rule of life: survival of the fittest.

One of the industries that has mastered the art of outdoing one another is certainly the film industry, which comes as no surprise: entertainment for the masses requires a bigger bang than our efforts to make markets more efficient.

Hollywood’s latest blockbuster certainly does not save on the superlatives. Avengers: Infinity War is one of the most expensive movies ever made, has a diminutive cast of over 30 main characters, and after its opening weekend (the highest-grossing opening weekend of all time), critics were quick to claim that the scale and grandeur of Infinity War surpasses anything else to date in the genre.

Before the release, it was also dubbed "the most ambitious cross-over", given the huge number of superheroes that come together to fight against a common enemy and, of course, to save the world.

By now you’re probably waiting for me to link all this back to the financial industry, and to elaborate on how our collaborations – be it in multinational partnerships and projects such as TARGET2-Securities, but also in the up-and-coming fintech realm – bring together our universe’s strongest forces to fight inefficiency and to save the world from evil such as collateral shortage and fragmented markets.

I am not going to do that, though. The financial services industry is not a superhero universe, and at least the people I am dealing with refrain from wearing capes in public. Like I said in the beginning, entertainment requires a bigger bang to be effective, but in finance, our ultimate goal is actually that people can go about their lives without thinking about us as either a blockbuster or a flop. It is our duty to create and maintain the infrastructure that makes markets work, worldwide, efficient, and uninterrupted. We take pride in leaving the headlines to Thor, Captain America and co. knowing that after all, it is our systems, products and services that will support mankind in going faster, higher, and stronger.