There's plenty to be done in the bank risk management space. I was part of a group a few years ago that tried to approach this space; however, family issues forced me to leave software and go back to banking.
There's a piece of software, produced by a company called QRM, used within the treasury group of a lot of large banks. This piece of software is both slow (one run at a decent-sized bank can take several hours even spread over hundreds of CPUs) and incredibly user unfriendly (you cannot do any analysis within the software itself; everything must be dumped to Excel first).
Everyone I have talked with in the industry says this software must be replaced; however, it will take quite a long runway to get things up and going.
While I doubt that this piece of software could be implemented as SaaS for bigger banks, I definitely think if you pitched a solution to smaller banks and built up a group able to conduct the type of analysis you would do with this software, you would have a winner. Also, if your CMU guy is looking to come back to Pittsburgh, I might be able to get one or two other people together for an in-person conversation.
If you are interested in learning more, please provide an email address, and I will reach out to you.
I moved from Cleveland to the Bay Area two and a half years ago. It was probably the best decision I have ever made. While working down in Mountain View, I learned there is absolutely nothing special about Silicon Valley. What is being done here in the Bay Area can be replicated anywhere. Had I not moved here, I would still have this vision of Silicon Valley being a special place.
I would even go so far as to say you're better off starting a company in the Midwest. It's a hell of a lot cheaper, and you can still find good talent. Sure, it will be harder to raise money; however, money will find the truly good ideas.
Another set is Yandex, a Chinese [Edit: Nope, Russian, see below] web crawler. I've done a basic "what CIDRs and ASNs were involved" in a top-level post.
These idiots can't tell Web crawler traffic from DDoS (though often there's little practical difference).
Not to discredit your question which is important in context... I feel like Both of them overlap and there are some really, really interesting problems in finance which most people don't have the balls to solve. There's a reason fintech startups are few and far between in comparison to the rest.
I was asking because I used to work in a bank, participated in two fintech startups, and have returned to banking due to circumstances with my family. I was going to target my advice based on the answer; however, after thinking this over some more, my advice would be the same for either answer. Stay in banking. There are a lot of problems in banking that need to be solved, and I think being on the inside of the bank gives one the best chance at solving those problems.
There's a piece of software, produced by a company called QRM, used within the treasury group of a lot of large banks. This piece of software is both slow (one run at a decent-sized bank can take several hours even spread over hundreds of CPUs) and incredibly user unfriendly (you cannot do any analysis within the software itself; everything must be dumped to Excel first).
Everyone I have talked with in the industry says this software must be replaced; however, it will take quite a long runway to get things up and going.
While I doubt that this piece of software could be implemented as SaaS for bigger banks, I definitely think if you pitched a solution to smaller banks and built up a group able to conduct the type of analysis you would do with this software, you would have a winner. Also, if your CMU guy is looking to come back to Pittsburgh, I might be able to get one or two other people together for an in-person conversation.
If you are interested in learning more, please provide an email address, and I will reach out to you.