Why Goldman Sachs' chief technology officer says the coronavirus pandemic will accelerate the Wall Street giant's investment in digital tools like a VR-based trading desk

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Goldman Sachs Chief Technology Officer Atte Lahtiranta cited a virtual reality-based trading desk as a possible future innovation.

• Despite IT budgets taking a hit from the coronavirus pandemic, there's a growing belief that the outbreak will actually accelerate digital transformations.
• At Goldman Sachs, Chief Technology Officer Atte Lahtiranta says the crisis is highlighting why the financial industry will challenge big tech's dominance on innovation.
• "We are going to be adopting new technology, not as a fast follower but in many cases as a leader," he said in a video posted to the Wall Street giant's website.
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While the coronavirus pandemic is taking a wallop to IT budgets, there is growing evidence that the outbreak could actually accelerate investments in new digital tools.

That's the case at Goldman Sachs, where the outbreak is proving, according to Chief Technology Officer Atte Lahtiranta, why the financial industry writ large will challenge the dominance of technology giants in leading the way on innovation.

One example he cited as a potential future disruption: a virtual reality-based trading desk.

"This is only going to go faster," Lahtiranta said in a video posted on Goldman Sachs' website. "We are going to be adopting new technology, not as a fast follower but in many cases as a leader."

Goldman Sachs has been quick to embrace new technology, but still lags behind consumer banking rivals like JPMorgan Chase. It recently announced a new partnership with SAP, for example, to facilitate cross-border payments on the German software giant's online marketplace.

Lahtiranta joined the Wall Street behemoth from Verizon's media group just five months ago. Among his major goals for the company is closer coordination with the developer community.

"I don't think the financial industry has yet focused as much on the developer's world as where I'm coming from," he previously told Business Insider. "You need to have great documentation for onboarding, keep the developers happy, and make them use your services, and hopefully create some value exchange."

But as a relatively new executive, Lahtiranta said in the video that he has had the challenge of quickly pivoting Goldman's workforce of roughly 38,000 employees to remote work - a task that undermined many of Lahtiranta's assumptions about what working in the financial industry was like.

"Every moment, every evening I am like, 'What did I sign up for?' I thought that it was a more constant-paced, more regulated environment," he said. "I did not understand how fast we can go as an industry, how fast we can adopt."

Lahtiranta said the company was well positioned to navigate the challenge because of its "very good technology base."

Goldman Sachs, for example, already had its own remote desktop system and had been using Symphony, an instant messaging system designed for the financial industry.

Alongside those existing resources, the company has introduced Zoom to all its employees and coached workers to stay as productive in their homes as they had been on the bustling trading floors.

"It's been a massive undertaking," he said.

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