Well this time it maybe.. The Times Online reports that Britain’s biggest mortgage lender has accidentally made triple withdrawls on their customer’s bank accounts due to a technical error:

Thousands of homeowners have empty bank accounts after HBOS, Britain’s biggest mortgage lender, repeatedly withdrew home loan repayments from their current accounts. About 7,000 Bank of Scotland mortgage customers have had up to three mortgage payments taken from their current accounts on consecutive days this week.

Well.. uhm, isn’t this embarrassing. We have no way of knowing what kind of technology is driving this system, but wouldn’t it be quite interesting to find out? Well if you work in IT for finance and ever feel like your efforts are somehow disconnected from daily life, let this be a reminder to you that real people out there, real unsuspecting average people, are counting on you to do the best you can. No really, I’m being serious:

Judith Lomax, 48, an opera singer who has a mortgage with Bank of Scotland, said: “I have so far paid my mortgage three times this week. I was told that the payment may be withdrawn again today and tomorrow.

See what I mean?

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In a move that you could see coming a mile away (and which I’m almost certain I recently predicted but am too lazy too look up a link for), several of the largest sell-side investment banks have announced plans to launch their own alternative trading network targeted at institutional investors and their block trade orders. Think Liquidnet but with all of the IT buearocracy and political infighting of Morgan Stanley, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Merryl Lynch and Lehman Brothers thrown into the mix.

“They’re the 33rd entry into this market,” said Robert Hegarty, an analyst with the Tower Group, said of the brokers’ system. “They’ve got a long way to go to get the pole position.”

Exactly… But then again, can anyone really blame them?

Analysts said the system was in some ways a defensive move by top Wall Street firms to keep business from institutional clients who might be tempted to trade with competing systems offering pools of anonymous buyers and sellers.

Well that ship set sail quite a while ago, but then again how soon did you expect a giant effort like this to come to fruition. In all seriousness I think the large banks are right to move in this direction, even if block trading is a small piece of their increasingly complicated profit puzzle. The problem is that it reminds me of the large media outlets that suddenly announced that they are going to have their own blogs. There’s something sadly ironic about it all and you know when you compare the blogs of an enterprising individual (or group of individuals) that it always outshines what passes for a “blog” over at the newsroom in Times Square.

Anyone who’s been on the inside of technical efforts at large sell-side firms knows first hand how complicated it can be to build enterprise-wide systems that involve the cooperation of everyone within the group. Intercine warfare abounds within one bank, let alone half a dozen of them. There’s something a little too johnny-come-lately about this announcement, but it’s worth watching over the next year nonetheless. The banks do afterall have the advantage in infrastructure, both technically and service-wise:

Still, he said the brokerages will have some big advantages, including the fact that their fixed costs are already in place.

“They’ve already got trading research, investment banking services to connect to the customer,” he said. “They’re in the perfect position to get the block order already.”

We shall see…

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Some smart business developers and politicians in Pennsylvania have approached the top suits of several of the biggest buy-side firms in an effort to appeal to their prudent side and their desire to prevent downtime in the event of any catastrophic events that may cripple NYC’s financial infrastructure:

Declaring “we’ve got your back,” Pennsylvania officials and a developer Tuesday sought to coax executives from major Wall Street companies to establish backup operations in the northeastern part of the state as a way to safeguard their operations against terrorists.

Three helicopters whisked executives from Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Merrill Lynch & Co., Morgan Stanley and others companies from Manhattan to a resort in the Poconos. There they dined on filet and lobster and listened to a pitch for “Wall Street West,” an ambitious effort to build millions of square feet of office space and install hundreds of miles of fiber-optic cable in as many as nine Pennsylvania counties.

Managing risk is the essence of the financial industry. And what seemingly bigger risk is there than another terrorist strike? My only concern regarding this strategy is that any solution such as this can’t simply fall back on yet another easily targeted epicenter of technical infrastructure. It’s not immediately clear how this would be addressed and how the backup systems would be protected, but it’s worth noting that the efforts do have the backing of Washington:

The state also is expected to award a contract in November for the installation of hundreds of miles of fiber-optic cable from New York to Pennsylvania, a process that could take a year to 18 months. Meanwhile, the U.S. Labor Department has awarded a $15 million grant to the Wall Street West initiative for work force training.

There are lots of funny cracks I could make about politics and business, but this is a serious issue that effects the nation’s economic strength as well as the world at large. This is a good issue to watch and I hope that the solution for the long term is more robust than having one monolithic backup center in the Keystone state, and that is no knock on Pennsylvania, but a nod to the notion that a decentralized backup infrastructure is a better defense than one that is centralized. After all, if terrorists can penetrate the well funded defenses of 21st century NYC, how hard is it going to be to distrupt a single secondary location?

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Today brings news that the global private equity firm Warburg Pincus has aquired two of the biggest players in the treasury, FX and global back-office systems space and plans to combine them under one roof to create a powerhouse technology offering.

Wall Street Systems and Trema will be combined and operate under the name Wall Street Systems. The company will be run by executives from both companies in addition to executives formerly of Thompson Market Information and Moneyline Telerate.

What this says to me is that there is no end in sight for the continual consolidation of finacial technology services and everyone is a candidate to be a player. We’ve seen exchanges, sell side firms and now private equity funds.

In the end the technology landscape for Wall St. is undergoing similar changes to the Telecom industry in the late 90’s. It will be interesting to see how long this lasts and how quickly small innovaters will be to come up with more niche technology to feed the Street.

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Parker Brothers have thrust a sword into our inner Luddite by introducing a Visa-branded credit card machine with the popular real estate game, Monopoly. Players tap in their earnings and purchases and the “credit cards” keep track of their standing in the game.

Game makers Parker have phased out the standard multi-coloured cash in a new version.

Players will instead use a Visa mock debit card to keep track of how much they win or lose.

It is inserted into an electronic machine where the banker taps in cardholders’ earnings and payments.

What will we use to make late-night, drunken purchases at the bodega which result in cops called and solid drubbings?

Mayfair? Put It On The Card [SKY News]

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