News from Jan 22, 2008

I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that all the dire issues with banks, accountants and indeed anything in the financial sector is by design, not incompetence.

Let's take OFX files for example. These could have quite simply been standard XML files, XML arguably being the worlds most widely adopted text-based data transfer format.

But oh no, not in the financial sector, where doing things correctly is against the law (literally I believe).

An OFX file starts with something like this:

OFXHEADER:100
DATA:OFXSGML
VERSION:102
SECURITY:NONE
ENCODING:USASCII
CHARSET:1252
COMPRESSION:NONE
OLDFILEUID:NONE
NEWFILEUID:NONE

WTF is that? Why not just have that data expressed as XML?

Then you get to the actual transaction data itself, let's take a look at an example:

<STMTTRN>
<TRNTYPE>DEBIT
<DTPOSTED>2006102*******
<DTUSER>2006102*******
<TRNAMT>-1424.95
<FITID>20062991859260*****
<NAME>ATLASSIAN SOFTWARE
</STMTTRN>

(asterisk's added by me to mask data)

Again, WTF is that? Why not just use normal XML? XML that could have a strict DTD and be easily translated with XSLT? Oh wait, that would require common sense and the ability to do things in a simple, logical and correct manner. Can't be doing that in the financial sector now, can we?

This level of insanity cannot come from incompetence alone, it has to have been designed in to the OFX format. There's no way any techie born since 1970 would have implemented something as insane as the OFX file format.

I know money is just an instrument of population control for the central bank, but making people wade through crap like this just to tie up brain cycles is pushing it too far.