This is a great post from Cam and FORUM, describing the conundrum they encountered when designing a customer centric system, and coming to the realisation that it doesn’t fit with product centric systems that were each designed to be customer centric in and of themselves. Consider, a customer address in the DDA system, and a customer address in the loan system; which one wins? Which address goes into the CRM system?

The core processing system was account based and the CRM was person based. Oh boy! We were trying fit a square peg in a round hole.

Source: FORUM

I have lived through this myself and the decisions are hard, using traditional methods. You become forced into deciding which system is prime, and reconciling each piece of customer data back to the prime. Its horribly expensive, and hard to code correctly.

I remain convinced (unproven at this point) that there is a better way and a simpler way. One that would allow the FI to take the data points it needs from each product system, and ignore the others. Cam calls it his roundabout moment. For me it was this datamatrix post, that came from a post Marcus did at M7.

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