“Woe is us, we’re in a lot of trouble” Earlier today, South Africa’s president Jacob Zuma announced the removal of Nhlanhla Nene as Minister of Finance. South Africa has been in a decline for some time, and this is the final straw for our economy. Reasoning and research One of the reasons I have hesitated in writing a post about South African politics and economics is due to the depth one needs to go in order to show how and why South Africa is in the state it is in. »
As part of of my project to build out banking infrastructure I needed to create something “above the line” to showcase the functionality. Since the functionality has been implemented and stabilised, I have been deciding on the best way to show what can be done with this, outside of command line client commands to a server. The options for showcasing this functionality came down to two initial choices: a web application, or a mobile application. »
After building and using the stock notifier I built in Go I am pleased that it is solid and the calculations seem to be working as expected. I recently decided to integrate a Telegram Bot into this system, as an addition to email. I then added some commands to the bot. This process was much easier than expected, taking under two hours from start to finish. Telegram I decided to use Telegram due to its ease of integration. »
Through posts on Hacker News and diving down a rabbit hole I managed to find some great companies who are in the fintech banking space. Tom Blomfield- Mondo: building a full-stack bank from HN London on Vimeo. »
This post is part of a series on a project I am doing to build banking architecture. Since the initial post on payments processing I have made progress on the “next steps” functionality, as well fully implemented one aspect of payments. This functionality is: Securing the TCP connection using TLS Authorization of requests using token-based auth Account creation Payments processing on accounts This post will detail this functionality, as well as go through a full account creation and payment between accounts. »
This post is part of a series on a project I am doing to build banking architecture. In the previous post I discussed using the blockchain as an immutable distributed database store, for handling transactions and more. As with most initial proposals there are several problems associated with using the blockchain in this way, most immediately the fact that there is no incentive for mining the blockchain as Bitcoin is removed. »
Over the past few months I’ve been looking into banking infrastructure, and what it could look like if it was re-engineered with our current knowledge of software. I’ve touched on the UX experience for OTP, as well as started writing the payments portion. As I continue development on this project (feel free to follow along at Github), I continually question assumptions and look for the best alternatives available. My understanding of the banking industry at a software and hardware implementation level (server organisation, regulation application, failovers, etc) is fairly limited, but strong enough to make a decent attempt on how it could be done. »
As part of a larger project of building banking infrastructure, I have begun work on the payments processing aspect of it. This post will detail progress thus far, as well as considerations for future development with a focus on scalability, security and regulations. Adhering to a standard There is currently a standard for a variety of financial instruments in the form of ISO20022. There is a wealth of documentation on this standard, as well as hundreds of XSD files describing each XML structure per type. »
There is a lot to be fixed in the banking industry. In dealing with retail banks, consumers continue to have a multitude of bad experiences for a vast array of tasks. These tasks can be anything from the mundane to the complex, but they all stem from a similar issue. Banking is a massive industry, and most modern banks are several decades old at least. With the pace of current technological growth, consumers’ expectations are not being met. »
Living in South Africa, I am surrounded by the vast divide in economic equality. Due to our history, the economics of South Africa has led to a particularly stark contrast between the haves and the have nots. The government in power, the African National Congress, has tried to address this inequality through two predominant policies: Black Economic Empowerment, and Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment. BEE and BBEEE have almost completely failed, leading instead to a rise of an extraordinaly rich black class of black elite. »