Douglas Barnes says:
Oh really? :-) I worked for First City National Bank in MIS for three years... I'm sure Chase has the drop in terms of experience, but you need to realize that these institutions are the IBMs of the financial world. How much truly innovative tech do you see out of IBM, despite all the centuries of experience locked up in meetings?
Plenty. Find me a workstation with the sort of uptime a 3090 running MVS will give you. I think this is a matter of neglect and a lack of market pressure, but let it never be said that IBM's problem was a lack of technological expertise. They have possibly the finest manufacturing technology engineers in the world, and world class computer jocks, even in the mainframe world. They have expertise in scads. Their problem has always been an inability to understand that they are in a competitive marketplace. Thats why they are always suprised when their machines don't sell even though they are priced too high. They are also too big to manage.
Also, the Credit Union movement was started by amateurs in the 19th century, and the bulk of CUs are still started by rank amateurs today, albeit the regulators like to see some folks who have at least a basic grasp of accounting (of which do indeed have.)
Hey, thats fine, but if you aspire to revolutionize a business you should first understand it. To my knowledge, most credit unions do not produce financial innovations.
I think that you are overestimating the sexiness of this project, as did an earlier poster. It's really quite ordinary,
Thats my point. The ordinary day to day problems of producing good banking software are not trivial. Designing a dam for a large river presents no technological challenges whatsoever. Try doing it without a lot of specialized knowledge. So you are starting a bank. Tell me -- can you tell me what a bankers acceptance is? What the clearing time is for checks? What sort of securities instruments a bank is allowed to invest in? If you find yourself with fractional pennies in a transaction, what do you do with them? Can you tell me what organization sets accounting practices in the U.S., and what the name of their major publication is? Whats a CUSIP number? If one of your credit union's members cashes a savings bond, what sort of tax information must your accounting system keep, and what forms are you obligated to file, and when? How do you clear a check from an out of country bank? Indeed, how do you clear a a check from an american bank? What, legally, is a check? What language is needed on a loan document to make the loan transferable? This stuff isn't difficult. There is just scads of it. Getting the software to handle all of it properly isn't a part time job. Stating that you are setting out to produce "the" banking protocols of the future when you don't grok banking yet is a bit on the hubristic side. Perry