How come nothing ever goes through on like a balance sheet when online banking over the weekend? It always updates on Monday it seems like. What’s that all about?
In: Economics
I work with it systems in a bank in Denmark. I have not worked directly with the issue but coworkers have. I cant speak for other countries as this area is highly regulated and i think there is many differences between countries.
One answer is that in “old” days there were not much computing power and you were reliant on the weekend to “batch run” alot of numbers and reports. When all systems are not doing anything it is easier to sum up accounts and stuff when there is not constantly being changes to the data. That also removed complexity in the code. Also in the weekend everything was closed so why would you make transactions ?
Fast forewared to 6-7 years ago. The Bank suddenly got the project of removing this constraint. It is not needed anymore and the customers dont want the batch days where they cant get a correct amount on their account.
The job here was to clean up in old legacy systems and remove the batch jobs that run in the weekend, to run continuesly. This was easier today with improved technology, better programmers with increased architecture understanding and ofcourse the improved processing power of todays computers.
The main issue was that this is the code incore of the bank you need to change. So every system built on top of it has to be retested and often changed. I think this last step was what took the most time, not the actual change in the “core” code.
Why have we not removed this constraint before ?.
Its a massive project and the implications are hard to foresee. Sometimes we get caught in the “this is how we always do”
Tl:DR
Because of missing computing power and for the simplicity we have used batch jobs in weekends.
With improved technology and knowledge we can remove this constraint.
Latest Answers