Great move. I really believe in the "free software, free society" idea of the FSF. After this batch, I'm sure there will still be a lot left to open source, but it's definitely a big step! If we're fortunate, others will follow suit. Germany is a great country for stuff like this. They have a relatively high share of Linux users, OpenStreetMap usage, etc. I feel like they're very critical towards their own country an…
Germans also are very conscious of online privacy, which is very important in this post-Snowden world we live in.
This is mostly a PR move. I currently work at DB, I can say that they make it look nice from the outside, but when you get here what you find is a large mess. It's a big difference between a bank and a company that actually ships software. Most of the work here is done in interfacing systems together, and moving data from one place to another. There is no focus on quality, just patching things together and making the…
Day to day traditional banking operations will be slow to innovate. Partially due to the regulatory burden as you describe. But also the perception there is little financial upside for the investment.
Outside of that however change is happening. And you will see new products coming out of "Innovations" groups operating entrepreneurially. My colleagues at WF and JPMC are busy experimenting with distributed ledger tech, mobile payments, global micro credit, and other "fintech." And the rollout of Zelle, instant peer-to-peer cash transfers, happened in weeks not months. Literally I was invited to participate in a beta program around the beginning of summer and a few days later billboards advertising the service started popping up around town ;)
I went to a Deutsche Bank Hackathon last year in Berlin where they announced opening up their apis. https://developer.db.com/ They touted it as being innovative and open but in the end all Banks are required to open up when PSD2 comes into effect next year. Seeing this release, maybe they have honest intentions for being more open, but it being Deutsche i still have my doubts.
I used to walk around other countries bragging about German online banking, given that we have a standard that has been iterated upon (HBCI/FinTS) over decades and you can pretty use any online banking software with any bank. A few years have passed since then and most germans banks are still the same. Meanwhile you get instant wire transfers in a few countries. When I think Deutsche Bank and innovation, I think of m…
When I moved here I was quite surprised with the stone age ATMs compared with what we had in Portugal almost two decades ago, where all kinds of services were available (train tickets, concert tickets, charging mobile phones, internet payments, ...) and best of all, at no additional charge regardless of the bankcard origin.
Germany requires a lot of high-touch interaction to get anything official done, but in Hungary I have to sign seven (seven!) pages in order to send a DHL letter. So it can be much worse. :-)
When receiving packages from outside of the EU, you'll have the pleasure of going to the Zollamt in Germany. At the Zollamt you'll get to enjoy standing in at least 3 separate and consecutive lines. Only to pay import taxes. Something that could have been done faster, cheaper and more conveniently by sending an invoice.
Spreadsheets are heavily used in all financial sectors. Personally I've connected many trader developed pricing spreadsheets to etrading systems at investments banks. Last year I was contracting for a large UK mortgage lender who used spreadsheets for all their product dev & spec. Spreadsheets enable bankers to move quicker than bespoke or vendor supplied solutions, hence their enduring popularity.
Any complicated spreadsheet might be a bug ridden mess, but at least it's one the finance guys understand and can augment themselves. Alternatively they could wait for in-house IT to take a few years and millions of pounds (add going running over schedule and budget, too) to produce a bug ridden mess that misses.
>but at least it's one the finance guys understand and can augment themselves.
And more importantly it enables the "money people" and the "1s and 0s people" to work together throughout the software life-cycle. When the people who input the data understand what's going in and the people who read the output know what should come out the black box in the middle is a lot easier to create and maintain.
I used to walk around other countries bragging about German online banking, given that we have a standard that has been iterated upon (HBCI/FinTS) over decades and you can pretty use any online banking software with any bank. A few years have passed since then and most germans banks are still the same. Meanwhile you get instant wire transfers in a few countries. When I think Deutsche Bank and innovation, I think of m…
This is mostly a PR move. I currently work at DB, I can say that they make it look nice from the outside, but when you get here what you find is a large mess. It's a big difference between a bank and a company that actually ships software. Most of the work here is done in interfacing systems together, and moving data from one place to another. There is no focus on quality, just patching things together and making the…
>but when you get here what you find is a large mess.
Had a friend that worked at BBVA Compass. Same deal: huge mess, overworked employees, and awful experience setting up and getting into a workflow.
This is mostly a PR move. I currently work at DB, I can say that they make it look nice from the outside, but when you get here what you find is a large mess. It's a big difference between a bank and a company that actually ships software. Most of the work here is done in interfacing systems together, and moving data from one place to another. There is no focus on quality, just patching things together and making the…
Sounds just like the investment banks I worked for. The software is just accretion of patches and fixes.
Betas and hacks that make it into production because no-one is allowed to re-engineer things correctly.
Imagine in 2017 still having to run IE6 because there's a web-ui written in a COBOL system back in early 2000 that everyone is afraid to touch. And supporting Solaris 2.6 for similar reasons. You don't have to imagine.
This is mostly a PR move. I currently work at DB, I can say that they make it look nice from the outside, but when you get here what you find is a large mess. It's a big difference between a bank and a company that actually ships software. Most of the work here is done in interfacing systems together, and moving data from one place to another. There is no focus on quality, just patching things together and making the…
OT: Imagine you hire somebody and this person publicly posts that some of your company's work "is a large mess" after you worked months to improve the situation. Even if DB hasn't deserved any credits for this "PR move", is this fair?
Why is a PR move worse than an employee who publicly badmouths his employer while being on the payroll? And why is this tolerated (upvoted) when it's a large corporation?