I must be feeling really cynical today – perhaps its just those two books I just read … but this press release is a classic spider response to a starfish problem. 

Absolutely Banks have a problem of legacy systems and inadequate response from web services and CRM to solve that.  But encapsulating the problem in a press release and linking yourself with a few partners is not an adequate answer. 

Haislip: The Factory will provide architecture guidance, best practices and other information to help banks create a uniform environment for cross-channel integration. The goal is to provide better experiences for employees and customers across five key channels:

• ” Branch tellers, who will service customers quickly, efficiently and accurately by being able to accept deposits and cash checks, issue non-traditional financial instruments and service customer account inquiries.
• ” Branch sellers, who will sell and service customers with multiple products through immediate access to customer information, such as new account opening and forms management, loan applications, account and product servicing and product information.
• ” Call centers, which will effectively interact with customers through an indirect or self-service capability by being able to process new account openings, provide assisted and self-service transactions, customer service and resolution, and build customer relationships
• ” Online banking, which will enable remote self-service via the Internet by processing transactions, electronic bill presentment and payments, E-statements, money movement and account inquiries.
• ” ATMs, which will enable customer self-service by giving access to account information, processing self-service transactions statement printing and extended product sales.

Source: Q&A: How Banks Can Achieve Application Interoperability: Microsoft’s new Banking Integration Factory initiative aims to help banks integrate multiple applications across telephone, the Web, retail branches, ATMs and other banking channels.

To announce a “factory” which is probably a loose partnership agreement between the parties mentioned to suggest that they have the magic solution …. this reads like “lets announce the problem, announce that we are the answer, and that will ensure no-one else has the answer”.

Yesterday I sat and listened to some guys in a loft, speaking about new technologies that allow them to build applications from scratch, in weeks, with bi-weekly cycles, for 5 figures … applications that would at a minimum take a traditional Bank millions.  Ability to build at an abstraction level, that is somewhat immaterial from the business requirement. 

This is not a snide comment .. merely fact.  If we use old thinking for new problems that’s what happens.  Technology has evolved at an incredible pace, and the solutions are there – we just have to take advantage of them.

I was trying to think of a metric, an evaluation, and here where I got to …

Open question to Bank CTO’s – how many (specific number please) people at your bank know:

• RSS
• Ruby on Rails
• Linux
• Anything open Source .. anything at all!
• Agile development, rapid development (you name it, but you know what I mean)
• development cycles counted in hours or days
• development based on infinite users – limited only by hardware, software limitations

Relevance to Bankwatch:

The truth is out there:  the answers are there for us … we just have to take advantage of them.