Social Media Round-Up [Aug 2020]

Rise in LinkedIn group membership, continued –

In the last issue I opened with observations about LinkedIn groups that had amassed more than 3,000 members. For members of the NonStop community this represents a sizable accomplishment even as it is also a reinforcement of the level of interest the NonStop community maintains when it comes to networking. After publishing this update, I received the following from Greg Horne, the owner of the LinkedIn group, BASE24 & BASE24-eps Forum which at the time had just passed the 3,000 membership level (now at 3028):

“It’s gratifying that the BASE24 & BASE24-eps Forum has reached over 3,000 members. It’s been a long journey. The group was started in 2008 when Classic skills were still in relatively high demand despite (or maybe be because of) ACI’s intention to ‘Sunset’ Classic on Tandem/HP in favor of EPS on IBM Z/Os which never took off as ACI hoped it would.

“These days it’s more about scarcity of people with either Classic or EPS skills, especially in North America which has the dual challenges of Covid-19 and the very thin Geographic spread of people with those skills to try and overcome. Those old legacy systems are still going but the people with the skills are either re-training, retiring or pushing up daisies.

 “The USA’s dependency on off-shore/on-shored resource with H1B visa status is frowned upon by President Trump’s administration so that’s thinning out the crowd as well. It’s time to start training home grown talent or getting smart about how and who you hire.”

Now Greg is a recruitment specialist so he’s always on the lookout for new talent, although I have to admit, I think that it’s not so much a case of legacy systems as it is legacy applications. When it’s all said and done, the NonStop of today, running on Intel x86 architecture, is far from a legacy implementation. But I will leave it at that and watch for further comments posted to Greg’s most recent update on LinkedIn –

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6702120292451397632/

Posts that say it all!

Thanks to the alertness of ACI Senior Principal Product Manager (Partner Solutions) Robin Setty I was able to read a good explanation on the differences between “banking as a service” versus businesses just providing / promoting APIs along with open banking. In the post Challenging: Why BaaS, Open Banking, APIs is all a confusion, to his blog, TheFinanser.com Chris M Skinner makes the differences between the two very clear:

“Banking as a Service (BaaS) is the provision of complete banking processes, such as loans, payments or deposit accounts, as a service using an existing licensed bank’s secure and regulated infrastructure with modern API-driven platforms.

“An Open Banking or API player provides just the processing for a very specific part of financial markets processing – such as the loans process, the stock trading process, the foreign exchange process and so on – but do not need a full banking license to just do that piece. Because they have no full license, you cannot call it banking.

“This nuance may not be obvious to the average person, but a company cannot use bank in their title unless they are a fully licensed bank. It’s a regulatory thing and it’s complex, but key. 

“Almost any company can offer a cool API, but they can’t offer banking or, therefore, BaaS.

Stripe is not a bank, but offers APIs.

TrueLayer is not a bank, but offers a payments and data API.

Codat is not a bank, but offers an SME API.

Form3 is not a bank, but offers a payments API.

And so on and so forth.

To conclude, Skinner adds a final observation concerning abuse of acronyms:

“BaaS – is now widely used and abused. It’s not Open Banking. It’s not APIs. It includes both of these things, as the platform behind all financial processes, but the core of Banking-as-a-Service is that it allows anyone to build a fully licensed financial firm by integrating the Open Banking and API services of firms that enable full-service banking.”

One last thing …

If as yet you have not joined the LinkedIn group, Fools for NonStop, then perhaps you should. You may want to know more about how this group came about but it’s probably common knowledge by now that one NonStop antagonist called me a fool for NonStop a while back and the label kind of stuck. No apologies for that, my site, mind you. Those who have joined this group will have come across the post:

OK, you fools for NonStop. You have been very quiet of late … the big question is whether or not we need to wait any longer or whether, realistically, we are living with the “new normal” right now?

In other words, our current work environment is how it’s going to be for a very long time. Past 2022 in all likelihood?  So, how are we faring? Love your new home office set up? Filling in 8 or more hours a day with productive work? Happy to be given time away from the water-cooler chats of former times?

Or are we sort of languishing in a no-man’s land? Wondering what might happen next? Observing what’s been happening and having the opportunity to listen in on virtual events, it’s kind of a wake-up call to a new world.

The only real question I have, is in a world of eCommerce where any purchase it’s just a click away, will this have any impact on NonStop sales / growth as fund are being moved rapidly around the world as we fill in the blank hours with purchases?

Let me know what you think – good or bad or something in between for NonStop?

As the one last thing of this column the question stands, are you loving your new work environment alone as most of us our as we work from hastily put together home offices? If you have something to add to this conversation, please go to this LinkedIn group and let the NonStop community know more about how you really feel!