Article title in "The Economist", 24-Jul-10. About the requirement of big banks to reform their IT. Yes is is true our tools influence our thinking more than we want. Banks were the first to use mainframes and many are still thinking in applications of that time, operating lots of different data bases producing numbers.
How can you map you business processes and important financial objects in such an environments?
You cannot. The computers say No.
In a factory you do not only model accounts, you need to model products, manufacturing environments and processes, operational plans, market information, .. and derive accounting info ..
Why do banks still organize information around accounts? Because they remember the machines saying, this-is-what-we-can-do-best. Gigantic programs, in the mean time untouchable, keep the systems running and the best IT can say about the system: tightly integrated.
Deploy high-powered financial applications as interactive web sites? Get your users automatic result for the input?
People still think dynamic websites that manage transactions, compute custom results and interact with users require difficult programming and show unreliable functionality?
The UnRisk FACTORY a server-based application that's front-end only requires a web browser is organized around financial objects and has shown unprecedented stability and robustness in around-the-clock usage at many banks with many concurrent users.
To enable quant finance developers to build and deploy their own high-powered computational websites we provide the tools: UnRisk-Q and webMathematica and webUnRisk.
