Community

This is an initiative that has the potential to truly change the financial services landscape. There is no reason really, that financial services API cannot become as standard as the USB connector or even a power plug/socket.

Banks are conspicuous by their absence in this initiative. The UK government has shown tremendous leadership and forsight in mandating that the banking industry come together and evolve as set of standard API that will allow access to customer data, to significantly increase competition among financial services providers, and more importantly, enhancing convenience for bank customers.

I wonder if banks really design user interfaces keeping the user in mind, whether it is for their mobile apps or browser based front ends. Some banks seem to think that users want to see more pictures of the "bold and beautiful" and more graphics on their websites. They often ignore the user's "end use case" while designing reporting formats. For example, when a user downloads a bank statement in an Excel format, she is not interested in the visual appeal of the downloaded statement, as much as the data itself, and the ease with which it can be uploaded into some other application like a Personal Financial Management system.

A case in point is ICICI Bank in India, which took an excellent internet banking front-end, and one fine morning turned internet banking into one of the most tedious chores you can dream of. It now takes 3-4 clicks to log in where it took one, and the simple Excel statement now takes a great deal of effort to massage before it can be used for any practical purposes. Granted, the pictures and graphics are more pleasing to the eye, but then most users would switch on their TVs when they want to see nice pictures, not visit their bank's website!

It is truly surprising that changing the name of a single bank in the CHAPS system brought it crashing down. What is even more surprising is that it took them as long as it did to diagnose and fix the problem. As someone has rightly observed, what role did Mirs play (or not play) in the imbroglio?

Software Engineering, a 40 year old discipline, evidently has a long way to go before we are able to build systems that are less complex, more reliable, stable and easier to maintain!

This is very similar to the Immediate Payment Service (IMPS) launched by the National Payments Council of India a couple of years ago. IMPS, however cannot be used to transfer funds to non-participating banks at this time.