Hedge funds cajoling peer-to-peer lenders into challengers made a long list of threats to traditional banks enumerated by Commonwealth Bank chief executive Ian Narev in a speech last week.Speaking to a gathering of business leaders hosted by think tank The Centre for Independent Studies (and reported by news.com.au), Narev shared diverse thoughts on an Australian banking sector he conceded to be under "existential" threat.The CBA CEO sprayed widely, finding time for a nod at the rise of nerds in banking."We have a cadre of people in the organisation who are introverted coders and actually can't stand dealing with anyone else," Narev said.Artificial bonhomie is no ally of progress, it seems."If we force them to collaborate with their colleagues — as we have tried to do in the past — they will leave, as they have in the past," the Commonwealth Bank chief explained."The kind of people who are going to contribute to [our] success may have a lot less in common, other than their core values and motivation, than the people who may have been working in and running the Commonwealth Bank 20 or 30 years ago."Narev picked at weakness at the 2016 realm of CBA. "If we don't innovate successfully we're toast," he told the business leaders.Narev said: "Not 'we'll lose a bit of profit, we'll lose a few customers' — we're toast. And I'm talking over a decade, not over six months, but it is an existential imperative for us to innovate."And you can just look around and all sorts of parts of the industries that we're in — whether it is lending or payment systems — you can just see that the legacy business model is not going to work. It's actually got to evolve."Narev described a Commonwealth Bank stirred to action, pitched his mongrel as the "big dog sleeping on the porch.""The kids all sort of run past and taunt knowing it won't move, and generally it won't," he said. "But if you can actually mobilise the big dog off the porch, then the big dog is actually capable of doing some pretty interesting innovation."The biggest challenges to any technology start-up were capital and customers, both of which Commonwealth Bank had in ample supply, he said. The challenge was working out how to apply the new technologies to existing business lines, and evolving the management model to keep pace."There is not a single piece of good innovation that has come out of the Commonwealth Bank in the five odd years since I've been running it, that I've had anything to do with," he said."Not a single thing. Not a single idea I thought up, not a single idea I don't think I've even made better. And I don't think there will be for as long as I'm here."All business leaders can do is "try and create the conditions where the people who do have those smart ideas can think about them" and bring them to market, Narev said.To that end, Commonwealth Bank now has product development