...The real Banking....Balanced Books Fair and Square

Scales of accounts

Tilted by schemes

Many many views

To write off the dues

New songs abound

The unfinished dropped 

Abandoned words

All time wrapped

Hold up the Sand Grains

but time flows free

Transfer the books 

to the master referee

The elements of time

Recorded in air

In master's books

It is all fair and square

Chavez - Is there a Capitalistic Side Lane?

I have been wanting to write this note about Chavez. He is no more but the impact he made on Venezuela and the politics of Latin America and beyond is considerable. I had a chance to be in Caracas and in Barquisimeto when he was the Presidente and the impact he had made on the society was significant. 

The banking world was distraught, it was not just that the banks had fund Chavez's plans but also had to keep the infrastructure open for the poor and the hitherto "un-banked".

One scheme that was being discussed was the La Politica Habitationes - the housing plan where all "workers" either self employed or employed by others had to contribute a part of income (through another set of regulations and agreements) to ultimately get a housing benefit. The money would go to a government fund and there would be returns. All good so far but the funds would be collected in Bank Accounts (just a store who had to transfer money to the government periodically and report) and the banks had to have a quota of such accounts to fill.

Take this further - these accounts would need to have infrastructure similar to that of a typical customer operative account (at least a savings account).

For those employed at the bank, dealing with those with limited means in itself is beneath dignity but "serving" such a large number is abhorring particularly for such low returns with no liberty to play with these funds. The real estate is expensive and technology can tend to catch up late in this segment where a pass book record is considered a guarantee or proof of funds availability. People would queue up every month may be to just check the balance. Senor Chavez would not take a no for an answer.

As in many such matters there can be a huge polarization of opinions and it is not fair to ask an external observer to make an opinion. Apart from the typical social, economic and political issue that needed resolution there was a technology issue that was there to be resolved - to keep the cost low and provide a wider access.

I remember there were talk of stored value cards (will they be Visa, Maestro, Master - imaging somebody who you thought otherwise would be carrying the Visa power) that are accessible on Multiple channels (to leverage among others shared networks) - ATMs and Mobiles were actively discussed. The talk of kiosks that are not attached to the physical branch perhaps in locations closer to the location of the customers. There was mention about selling store value cards available in street side shops (in a slightly unrelated context).

There was no middle path the banks had to fall in line. Both the source of funds and the application of funds and the ultimate use of the fund were pre-defined.

In India, there are these Aadhar cards and MNREGA scheme. This a new source of revenue for consultants to solve another problem. 

One may say, if there is an open mind socialism is the best financier for capitalism - it is just that somebody has to figure it out. Like somebody told me the other day one should not be bogged down by jargon. The result of successful socialism is individual wealth and money makes money - does that sound like capitalism. I don't know of any society that has bucked this trend. Charity is also if you have money, individual charity is capitalism not socialism. 

All old things are better of in museums and as ruins for tourist places. Let the new flow and it need not always wrapped in a gift paper with a ribbon.

A little rhetoric this one ...but none the less RIP Senor Chavez.

Bank Statements - Clean up the Mess

I am tired of Bank Statements which are not easily available in importable formats. First of all it is difficult to get an excel format, if there is then an export to excel is not clean due to the nature of data in the statements and historical data is more often than not available in a consolidated formats.

The transaction list that the bank provides is required for savings, current, loans, credit card, Demat and name it and one has to spend hours transforming it and uploading them into the database.

There are indeed good tech enabled banks - ICICI seems to stand out in technology innovation at times better than international banks - but one does not bank exclusively due to technology.

It is not that there are no standards. ISO20022 has acceptable formats and XML can be easily imported into Excel. It requires some discipline and regulation and not to penalize customers to buy applications that negotiate with banks to get the statements formatted and display.

It is time RBI considered this. A bank may go head over heal to create custom formats for corporates for retail customers it requires regulation.A simplified and standardized statements help many people in the financial supply chain, CA, Income Tax Department least of all and indeed will save the bank many expenses downstream.

People and Power - The Last Sentence so to say.

Dr Manmohan Singh is an Economist, has a greater experience as a bureaucrat than as a politician and even as a politician is elected to the upper house of Parliament. Mr. IK Gujral, the former PM of India was an acclaimed diplomat, some of the most visible ministers in the cabinet today and many of today's leading spokesmen are well acclaimed lawyers of supreme court of India and elsewhere. Mr. Shinde's qualification for the post of home minister of India is his previous job (however little)as a policeman. Some in the government are well known industrialists. A similar situation exists in opposition parties. In short, many are in politics today (small today but growing) due to their past experience and many cannot get elected on their own, infact many are in the Rajya Sabha - the indirectly elected house. If you look at the people who participants of the Indian freedom strugggle a bulk of them were students of law and political science. They were in politics because they had experience of a lifetime in some or the other form of professional occupation.

Let us come to Indian Democracy - The PM and the cabinet are part of the legislature and not the executive. All the better, because they need to represent people's views to legislate. But then, when one is in Rajya Sabha they are not directly elected - Mr. Nitish Kumar, the popular and well acclaimed mass leader and Chief Minister of Bihar is also from the upper house.

Now, look at the real popular people - The Gandhi's don't want power, they believe in sacrificing, the late Mr. Balasaheb Thakerey preferred a remote control to an office and like him the RSS leadership does not even want to contest elections. There are king makers in the states that control the central government without sitting in either houses of parliament. Mr. Ahmed Patel is not a member of either house, Mr. Deve Gowda will never want to become the Chief Minister while he awaits ashes to rise. All these people want to rule through their people. Power can have many titles and powerful titles many not satisfy all egos.  Some may call this power without responsibility and others statesmanship, altruism or sacrifice.

What ever it is - I think we have to grant every body their wish. The cabinet can be assigned to the upper house and strict qualifications can be defined for entering that house in terms of qualification and experience in public service or profession. The necessary requirement is that they have to be elected by directly elected bodies. Well, call them indirectly elected representatives.

This way the intellectuals can have the satisfaction of governing and the mass leaders the satisfaction of power. The common person will have qualified people governing (not ruling) and mass leaders and their ego tempering the government with public opinion.

The Americans do this in a good way with college professors and fat moneyed capitalists in the cabinet.

If only the Chinese get a Lower House.

Last but not the least compare this to an organization. Where do you fit people managers and project managers :). This was the last sentence that I wanted to make.

....Caravan ka khel

Ek Aur Saal beet gaya

Caravan chal ta hi gaya

Jo Uthara woh choota

Bache sab nikal gaye

Rasta sirf Caravan ki

kab bani thi pata nahin

Chahe jis taraf bhi raah mude

talash hai sirf puranee wahee

Maango jitna bhi tum

na rukegi yeh karvan

chahe jitna bhi  mutthi pakdo

Samay ki reth phisal gayi

khud apna raah banao

banao duniya mein naam

kuch bhi karo baath wahin

jo Is karvan samajh ta ho

Aasman phaad ke nikal pado

ya samay ki dhara badalhi do

Chahe durbin se duniya jhanko

aadmi rahega sirf wahin

Samay ka niyam yehin hai jisko

divya jyothi dikhati hai

Andhera deepak mein yeh aank micholi

Itna hi Karvan ka khel hai

Be Ready and Be Suitable

What is Suitable? There is one proverb that says all that is white is not milk. The iceberg is deeper below the sea than what meets the eye.

There is another that says that suitable is how you define it. One has to adjust to become suitable. We can make a perfectly logical argument hazy by bringing is perfectly reasonable sayings....but would we need a mirror to see the wound on the palms.

...again examples for life apply to it's constituents, what is relevant for the esoteric is relevant for the real too...like say IT projects.

At a philosophic level every body can do everything, after all the boundaries are defined by us but that is for the future, the current should be well defined particularly when the problem is known. What we have on hand is what we have what we do not is what will cause us pain. We need to define boundaries for the needs and assess how to bridge it?

The most important thing that one needs to do is constantly learn so that when an opportunity comes one is there to help and make oneself useful. It is what we offer to make life simpler and not what we get out of an opportunity. If there are things that needs to be learned so be it, we can cross a stream but we cannot build a boat to cross the seas a day before the travel. We cannot start arms practicing during the War - we cannot do 'Yuddha Kale Shastrabhyasa!'

An IT infrastructure is simple but critical - particularly when applied to mission critical applications like Banking - but one has to have a deep understanding of the fundamentals. A person playing with toy gun cannot lead a war let along participate in it. There could be hierarchies and escalation paths for resolving the unknown but the person who does not know the concept or feels it  is not in his or her scope of learning is irrelevant and if involved in the project a pure nuisance. All lies will eventually get caught.

The next important thing is professionalism, not in the conventional sense that is taught in management classes but just to the extent of being reliable. This is independant of the sourroundings and is a reflection of integrity. Integrity comes out in program code and can be caught in code reviews, in the quality of comments, quality of defining the scenario and if probed a litte more than normal in the articulation of a solution.

In my opinion suitability cannot be faked for long. In the short haul however all involved will struggle.

I am writing this as an observation of a situation. There are solutions and most problems can be solved but better solve it before than later.

..The Real Retail Banking..

This has been there from the time we remember in a formal organized way but it is only now that the retail customers are getting empowered. There are two reasons for this I think a) Technology - Among others giving them some power can push them out of the branch and save real estate and manpower costs b) There is competition - particularly banks breaking country barriers to acquire reliable customers.

However for some reason retail banking customers are treated as simplistic non sophisticated users who are not trusted with features. The UI in retail Internet banking is restrictive if not condescending. Even if there are some tools it is in the mode of creating additional revenue stream or to get insight into their data and not to provide independant insight into finances. While a bank would be careful enough to prevent corruption of their data there is an opportunity for the banks to provide user fields that can be in control of the retail customers only the data store can be on the servers. This data should be maintainable and downloadable in some standard formats.

The benefits can be quite startling. A bank statement can be reviewed online and the download criteria can be defined. This is better then downloading the data and uploading this to another application to segregate.

Similar infrastructure can be provided by the banks to associate classifications (not just the comments ) at the source of a transaction that can provide classification on the nature of transactions. This can be directly fed to the tax calculation data among others.

By just providing flexibility in the way a statement can be downloaded and providing options for transaction classification a considerable customer delight can be achieved for a tech savvy customer. Options to integrate the different accounts, providing cash forecast methods are additional bonus.

Think about the amount of small scale applications that can be built by third parties by empowering these transactions.