Bankloch

The tech-companies of Silicon Valley (with Facebook one of its most notable proponents) embrace the attitude of " Move Fast and Break Things ", "Sell/Ship First, Fix Later" and "Growth at any cost". This philosophy promotes a   fast time-to-market   (and being first on the market) over quality. The idea is that if you aren’t breaking things you’re delivering value too slowly. In a world with continuous evolution (especially in the tech sector), this seemed the right way forward. This is in strong contrast with the   large established financial service companies , which have often   only a few releases a year , with multiple test-phases and test-cycles, which often take months to complete. As always in these types of evolutions, the 2 extremes (productivity/time-to-market versus predictability/quality) tend to converge to a middle ground. On the one hand the incumbent banks are adopting   Agile and DevOps methodologies and practices , allowing...

Hypes and marketing buzz words are strongly present in the IT landscape. Often these are existing concepts, which have evolved technologically and are then renamed to a new term, as if it were a brand new technology or concept. If you want to understand and assess these new trends, it is important to   reduce the concepts to their essence and compare them with existing technologies , e.g. Integration (middleware) software   ensures that 2 separate applications or components can be integrated in an easy way. Of course, there is a huge evolution in the protocols, volumes of exchanged data, scalability, performance…​, but in essence the problem remains the same. Nonetheless, there have been multiple terms for integration software such as ETL, ESB, EAI, SOA, Service Mesh…​ Data storage software   ensures that data is stored in such a way that data is not lost and that there is some kind guaranteed consistency, maximum availability and scalability, easy retrieval...

I am always surprised how many - at first sight -   easy, resource optimisation problems , are still unsolved or can only get solved by specialist users. Almost in every industry, you have optimisation problems, i.e. problems in which resources are constrained (limited capacity) and need to be most effectively planned to come to a solution. Typically, each resource also comes with a number of constraints, which makes the planning exercise even more complex. Some every-day examples are: School exam schedules : create a schedule for all exams for the different school years and directions, taking into account the availability of teachers (sometimes working at multiple schools), availability of classrooms, but also preferences of students (e.g. complex and large classes like mathematics placed after a weekend). School schedules for supervision during breaks : create a schedule for the supervision of teachers on the playground during breaks, taking into account the num...

For companies a   financial balance sheet   (i.e. the statement of the financial position at a certain date) is common practice and for the majority of companies even mandatory to create one as part of their annual reporting. In such a balance the assets are put against the liabilities, with the sum of the assets always equal to the sum of the liabilities and equity. While this is such a common tool for companies, for individuals it’s almost funny to speak about a personal financial balance. Nonetheless such a balance can give you (just as for a company’s balance sheet) very interesting insights in your personal life and more specifically in your personal finances. For individuals instead of a real balance sheet, we usually work with a holistic wealth overview, which calculates your total wealth, by subtracting the liabilities from your assets. This means it doesn’t use the same categorizations and visualizations as in a corporate balance sheet, which is a pity a...