The difficult birth of e-banking
Banking is one of those industries that might have been invented for the purpose of demonstrating what electronics can do for bookkeeping, but it has taken banks an unforgivably long time to realise it. It was only last year that a group of the big banks persuaded their more conservative colleagues to set up a committee to investigate how electronics could cut down the vast amount of clerical labour in the banking system.
The committee has now reported that it is technically possible to introduce electronics from top to bottom of the banking system, but the reception has been mixed. Two of the biggest banks seem keen to try out such a system, but at least one regards it as so much science fiction.
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This is a serious split, for the banks depend on cooperation between each other. If one bank refused to join a system of electronic bookkeeping, its value to the others would be seriously reduced. However, no decisions will be taken until electronics manufacturers respond to the committee鈥檚 proposals for the necessary equipment.
The cheque is the cornerstone of the committee鈥檚 plans. Across it would be printed a variety of codes and figures. Two types of machinery would then be needed. One is the sorting equipment, fitted with code readers, to divide the cheques up into the bank branches to which they have to be sent. The other type consists of a computer and ancillary input and output devices that can take a cheque, decide which account it belongs to and produce a permanent record of the transaction.
Perhaps, now that the committee has reported, the banks will be needled into realising they could respond with similar vigour and imagination. Otherwise it seems they are blandly asking electronics manufacturers to spend considerable sums designing a banking system that they then may not choose to use.
From The New 杏吧原创, 28 February 1957