

Is there any open source Bank? - JoelJacobson

Most banks sucks. Legacy systems, lots of security holes, zero innovation and lousy support.<p>It would be awesome if someone would start a bank running 100% open source software. Think about the ease of merging banks running exactly the same systems, so such a bank would only win in the long-run from competition copying and using their system.<p>And then there is the lack of APIs. They don't have any. SWIFT MT-messages don't count, they are as user-friendly as punch cards.<p>SWIFT ought to be replaced too by the way. If the open source bank system spread among many banks, they could begin to do their communication between each other via the new system, and only rely on SWIFT for communication with older banks who haven't migrated yet.<p>So if someone has €5,000,000.00 with no idea on what to do with it, please consider starting this kind of bank, it would rock! And please start in the Europe, preferably in Sweden, and I guarantee you will have at least one customer from start.
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uown
Totally agree with you. I have a project that I have been putting together for
a while now goes down this road. It doesn't start this way of course but it's
taking this course!

I believe with passion that banking should take an approach where people
who're using the bank own it. The only problem is what do you back the money
by? Gold? What happens if we had a major food crisis, would someone want to
trade their food for your gold? So do you store it in food, same problem. It's
such a complex problem and it needs to be reinvented at the roots.

If you have ideas on this, lets talk.

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JoelJacobson
I'm not suggesting using alternative currencies or changing anything for that
part of how banks are governed or how to handle backing of money. That's out
of the scope of what I had in mind.

And the goal is of course not one single bank. By making it open source, you
encourage others to copy you, to set up another bank, hopefully better than
yours. In the end, you hopefully end up with hundreds of banks using the same
open source system.

The diversity means the society will spread the risk, so if one bank screws
up, the damage won't be as big.

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uown
That's brilliant! I would says the banks of power would fight hard against
something like this, but I cant help but see this coming about, it makes
sense! The effect technology has on consumer behavior, the way we shop, the
way we buy in general makes this something I think is probably already
happening. _has a look_ okay... well they exist and there is quite a
few(haven't done any digging).

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lostnet
Why go bank down when you can go currency up? bitcoin is opensource, I think
it just needs a derivatives market.

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please_no
I am so up for this. Including that the financial reports and decisions are
public.

There are some good credit unions out there, but no open source technologies,
expect maybe the web page.

Should we make a github account?

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JoelJacobson
The best would be if an existing or startup bank openly declared they will be
switching to the best open source banking system the community comes up with.
But before there is such a bank, all efforts put into creating a top-notch
bank system is more or less wasted, as all good projects needs real-life
applications from start to be built around, otherwise you are just writing
code for imaginary problems without any proof any of the code is useful in
real-life.

So if any bank is willing to step up and embrace the idea, I'm sure there are
a lot of excellent coders with relevant skills out joining forces, just for
the fun of it, and will of course gladly move their business to a bank where
they can participate as a developer.

A first step for such a bank could be to open source all their existing code
of their legacy systems, or at least documentation, internal APIs and stuff.
This would help the rest of the world of non-COBOL coders to get a picture of
what's in a bank system. I for one don't know, but have an idea of it.

I'm the founder of a payment solution provider myself, and we work with a lot
of banks, aronud 30 I think. Non of them offer any APIs. If anyone would have
one, we would probably move a lot of our business to such a bank, I can only
dream of the tens of thousands lines of code I code probably reduce to a few
hundred lines of integration code.

