I know it isnt a "technology" in the traditional sense of the word, but i had a front-row view of Interest Rate Curves over the past 15 years. They went from arcane numbers some PhDs calculated at the back of the trading floor, to things Business Analysts started calculating, to things you could calculate with a standard website to things that were completely transparent and commoditized.
In 2007 when I started building an interest rate curve system for a large asset manager, it cost us about $1.5m to get it up and running and another $200k/yr to maintain/operate. A lot of it was about getting clean data, but there was a lot of model tweaking/testing/maintenance as well.
In 2014 when I left the same Asset Manager, we were able to re-do the same project from scratch with a $100k vendor product. Many quants got rich carefully guarding the creation of "The Curve" and were upset when it became easy to calculate w/o expensive workers. What lead to the commoditization? Several things:
1 - Academic review - lots of papers came out about how to do this. it wasnt patented, it was just a trade secret, but no longer...
2 - Open source, especially QuantLib, which implemented what the papers described
3 - Reference implementations - people outside the industry trying to break in released many reference implementations
4 - Overseas workers - people outside Wall St wanting to break in started doing it for free in hopes of proving their skills
5 - Democratic forums - people on the outside shared knowledge freely, helping unravel the internal trade secrets.
In 2007 when I started building an interest rate curve system for a large asset manager, it cost us about $1.5m to get it up and running and another $200k/yr to maintain/operate. A lot of it was about getting clean data, but there was a lot of model tweaking/testing/maintenance as well.
In 2014 when I left the same Asset Manager, we were able to re-do the same project from scratch with a $100k vendor product. Many quants got rich carefully guarding the creation of "The Curve" and were upset when it became easy to calculate w/o expensive workers. What lead to the commoditization? Several things: 1 - Academic review - lots of papers came out about how to do this. it wasnt patented, it was just a trade secret, but no longer... 2 - Open source, especially QuantLib, which implemented what the papers described 3 - Reference implementations - people outside the industry trying to break in released many reference implementations 4 - Overseas workers - people outside Wall St wanting to break in started doing it for free in hopes of proving their skills 5 - Democratic forums - people on the outside shared knowledge freely, helping unravel the internal trade secrets.