The Tricky Business of Merging Financial Technology Systems
Merging two complex financial technology systems can be a tricky business. Consider BMO Harris Bank, a Chicago-based bank that acquired Milwaukee-based Marshall & Ilsley (M&I) Corporation on December 17, 2010. BMO experienced application deployment problems while trying to covert the acquired M&I technology into BMO’s internal system.
Consequently, employees of the bank are blaming this application deployment error for a series of online banking systems problems that prevented the bank from making deposits into employee accounts.
The problems with BMO Harris Bank were reported by a number of customers while the company claimed that it was working to fix the technical glitches.
The bank admitted that a processing problem left some businesses unable to make direct deposits into employee accounts. Some customers reported that they couldn’t log into their own personal accounts. So what was BMO's response? BMO provided their customers instructions on how the customers could help fix their problems by adding an additional account or what the bank described as a “bank presence.”
Here is what the bank posted:
Your M&I personal online banking account may currently be in an error state because your account has been migrated to BMO Harris Bank. Intuit has done what we can to make M&I’s integration into Harris Bank as seamless as possible on the Mint side, and while we continue aggregating your checking and savings transactions, you’ll need to add an additional bank presence so we can continue to aggregate your credit card transactions.
If banks want to be successful, they must implement robust software development, integration, and engineering practices, including DevOps. Integrating software systems is a common technology task that is essential for achieving software quality.
Software configuration management best practices, especially continuous integration, can be used to merge software code base and thus prevent these types of errors.
