The Daily Mirror Isn’t Impressed With Pope Francis
I found this article on the Daily Mirror written by a journalist, who comes from the Falkland Islands.
I think most people in the UK, would agree with what he says, as we tend to have fairly strong feelings about those faraway islands in the South Atlantic. I don’t think I’ve ever met a UK citizen, who thinks we should give the island to Argentina.
The writer of this article finishes off like this.
So Pope Francis, I urge you to join the rest of us in the 21st century and recognise the Falkland Islanders’ democratic rights.
Oh, and while you’re at it, how about changing your mind on contraception, abortion and gay rights into the bargain?
Sadly, I think there’s more chance of me becoming the next Pope than any of that happening.
I think my advice to the Pope would be to stay out of the row and try to be a calmiong influence on all parties.
The Banking Sector Is A Turd
Not my words, but those of Simon Walker, the head of the Institute of Directors, as reported in The Times and also here in the Guardian.
He should know given his position.
The Grandmother Of All Overspends
it is being reported that the overspend on the Sochi Winter Olympics is approaching £335 million in several places. Read about it here in the Bangkok Post.
The Times is also reporting that they’ve got serious floods in Sochi.
It’s good that we had the Olympics last year, so now weather and cost overruns can’t effect them.
The Banks Dismal Record On Innovation
I’ve worked on and off with senior banking professionals and those that think about their banking since the early 1970s.
In that time, I doubt, I’ve seen much really good clever innovation, that would have been to the benefit of either the banks or their customers.
I’ll start with a classic from the Midland Bank.
I was putting together a finance company in the late 1980s and the Midland Bank were keen to be a source of bulk money. We of course, had a beautiful little spreadsheet in the format of the time, Lotus 1-2-3.
The guy we were dealing with at the Bank, then said that he had no in-house facilities to examine the data. In their wisdom, the bank had provided those with a multi-user system based on a PDP-11, so they could run their own spreadsheets. Unfortunately, there was no way of uploading your data to their system. The guy we were dealing with had actually bought himself an Amstrad PC so that he could run them at home. Needless to say, we didn’t deal with Midland Bank. But what idiot in the bank, decided that PCs were a fad, when virtually all of their customers were thinking of or actually using them to run their own businesses.
The second is from the same time and applies to all of the banks.
My accountant at the time was pretty good and for years, he’d felt that one of the banes of his life was the lack of connection between the banks and small business accounting. His ideas, were that you could put a two digit code on all of your cheques in a space by the numbers along the bottom. You might put 67 for electricity, 68 for gas etc. These would then appear on your statement, so all the accountant would have needed to do was split everything down in his accounting software, especially if it was possible to get the statement in a simple electronic format.
He felt that any bank enhancing their service in this way, would have been very profitable to themselves, as they could have offered a simple accounting service. He did of course realise it would have lost accountants like him a lot of business.
But banks have done nothing to move into this area, which would have seen them offering a simple and much-needed service.
And then there was Lloyds Bank and their Cashpoints.
I was still doing my management accounting work for Lloyds as I was writing Artemis and someone there, asked how the bank could use a system like Artemis. As they were installing Cashpoints here, there and everywhere at the time, I said Artemis would be an ideal system to plan the roll out of the terminals. I did suggest, Artemis might be used to predict the cash flow and generate the budgets for the program.
I was then told that banks didn’t have cash flow problems as they used customers money and anyway, all of the Cashpoints they needed for the several year program, had already been delivered and were sitting in a warehouse somewhere. How about that for good management thinking?
The Management Accounting software I wrote for Lloyds wasn’t revolutionary in its own right, as any decent programmer could have written it, but the methods under it were far from conservative. An outsider, who had been the Chief Accountant of a major company had been recruited to try to get a hand on the bank’s costs.
It was truly innovative, but it never got beyond a trial, which seemed to end, when most of Lloyds’ staff were moved to Bristol.
One day, I’ll write up more on that work, which probably had a major effect on the design of some of the parts of Artemis.
Why Can’t I Sort My On-Line Bank Statement?
Often at the end of the month, when my current account has too much money in it, I transfer the excess I won’t need to Zopa.
This morning, I wanted to check, that I had put all of these payments into my Excel spreadsheet, that tracks my Zopa lending and calculates the rate I get.
So I logged into my bank account and looked at the on-line statement. I could of course look at it on a page-by-page basis, but where was the feature to sort all of my bank statement entries to bring direct debits to Zopa together?
No-where that I could see! There isn’t a select either to just bring up the debits to Zopa.
It is just not good enough, in this day and age, where a good proportion of the general population is familiar with handling sets of dat in programs like Excel.
I remember in probably about 1990, I was talking to a senior programmer, at one of the big banks. They had made a proposal to senior management to enable customers to get their bank statements on floppy discs. It was technically feasible and they felt it would have been taken up by customers and professionals, who needed to get the data into their personal computers.
These days, it should be second nature for a bank to offer a simple download of your bank statement in an Excel format.
Why doesn’t my bank offer this facility to everybody?
The Anonymous Widower 