What's the big deal?

Now, what can be so complicated about techonology that a bank would use? Just another software package ,which the software corporates, would vie to accomodate in their ever popular model of outsourcing. What is the big deal in it?

These were the initial thoughts that ran thru my head, when I was selected to join Iflex Solutions Ltd on Jun 31 2003. But believe me, two years of development and a 6 month onsite experience with the company which makes the world's "Best Selling(This is the crucial word in the title) Core Banking Solution" product has changed my concept about 'Banking Technology' . Its a whole new concept, with a plethora of things to consider.

From a different point of view, it is really astounding to see the increase in the IT budget a bank puts in every year. And it makes complete sense why to do so too?
Automation, obviously was the very need of the birth of software. I guess some of the other important parameters for which the bank is ready to spend so much are Functionality, Flexibility,Performance and Security.

Functionality and Flexibility go hand in hand in a banking scenario. Having a myriad of functionalities is just not enough to lure the client into making a deal nowadays. What's more valued is how easily/effectively can you customize your product to that of the bank's requirements. I think that's the most important factor one needs to consider. The flaws in the design only come out at the customisation stage.
Performance definitely can be a nigthmare for the vendor most of the times. Ofcourse everything would look fine for the first one year after the implementation. Its only after those huge volumes of unpurged data and archive logs fill up all the disk space and kill the performance of the bank's day to day transaction, the 'cribbing'(from he bank)begins. End of day time increases, Interface handoffs take longer time and the bank's DBAS go crazy having to answer to the increasing complaints of a slower database. The bank's finance department, already having allocated enought funds towards IT will be all reluctant to spend that extra penny towards infrastructure. So who's to blame finally? Obviosly the application makers! The software vendors!
Security,With the ever popular events of call center fraud scam filling the front page of newspapers, there's no need for me to stress on this explicitly. With ever increasing number of channels through which a bank can transact today, Security has been one of the most challenging areas.

So its no joke to create banking software and there are a number of other technical,functonal and physical aspects to it.

I plan to explore and understand more about this intersting and intriguing class of software development and share them...