Starter Kit. Idea 315 of 500. Cluster 15
Software maintenance for the legacy systems that every bank in the region still runs
The mechanism, from the book
The proof exists in Malabe. What is missing is a thousand small versions of it.
The first step
Find engineers who worked on the old banking systems and are now retired or underused, and ask whether they would take contract maintenance work. Then approach the head of IT at a small bank or finance company in the region with a named team and a fixed monthly fee for keeping one legacy system running. A trial contract is the proof.
- Who pays first
- A bank's head of IT with an old system nobody wants to touch, who will pay a fixed monthly fee for people who understand it.
- What leaves today
- Engineers who know the old systems retire or emigrate, while the banks that still run them pay high rates abroad to keep them alive.
Ask first
- Department of the Registrar of Companies. Ask which company form suits a contract team serving banks in other countries.
- Data Protection Authority. Ask what rules apply to engineers who can see bank customers' data.
Check before you spend
What the bank's regulator requires of outside suppliers, security vetting for each engineer, and the liability you carry if the system fails in your care.
Find out these three numbers
- What does a bank pay now to keep its legacy system running?
- How many retired engineers know the system and want work?
- How often does the system fail, and how fast must fixes come?
A comparison from the book
WSO2, Colombo. Chapter Three
"software now runs inside banks, insurers and telecoms across the world"
Banks abroad already run on code written here; trust earned on one system opens the door to the next.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.