It's nice to see that a large financial firm - one that I'm very familiar with - is up with the times - at least internally. Unfortunately for their customers their web site and back office procedures are still stuck in the last century, depending on overnight batch processing plus poor site design and coordination which often results in what should be 'real time' balances, dividend payments, transactions, etc to be available on-line anywhere from 8 hours to 4 days (over a holiday weekend) later than this century's customers expect and need it. After more than a year of error reports, screen shots, dialog and excuses, I'm still being told that they'd like to fix the problems but just don't have the budget. Guess I know now where their IT budget - and focus - really is.

Click to read the article this is in response to.