Simple questions - simple answers

Home- and SME-business e-banking was introduced in Finland in the early 80s. It became a success first because of bill payments and as employees were allowed to use workplace computers for personal banking (modems for home PCs were not that common first). Share trading and other bank services were added soon after. Interconnecting customers with e-identication and e-signatures were added in the early 90s. 

Then simple question about foreign payments.

One service I kept nagging about was foreign payments. The answer I kept getting was low volumes and expensive integration to SWIFT. Until one day somebody asked: Do we really have to automate this from day one? Why not  connect e-banking payment orders to printers - reuse these old IBM printers in the foreign payments back office and let the staff key it the rather modest numbers. So it was quickly done and became very popular as it was so much cheaper for customers compared to doing it via branches.

Now simple question about low volume credentials

Now I keep asking this very question to deployers of organisation EUDI and other wallets. Do you really have to squeeze in immidiate back-end system integration upfront for sending and receiving simple low volume credentials?  Will there ever be an integration need for the millions of SMEs? Especially if the accounting firms understand that they should be early wallet deployers.

Now - like then in the 80s - the IT-departments have their own plans disturbed by the new and do not always try hard enough to change course. So we need to keep nagging that that the trust infrastructure is the most important step for the economy at large and destressing both at home and at work.

All eyes on the public sector.

Public sector organisations are of course expected to be the earliest wallet/issuing and verifying movers - as Brussels has spent quite a lot of legislation money and making it mandatory in many sectors (like banking).