Technology meets Financial Services

JRuby how to: Converting from a ruby array to a typed java array

dougereed — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 07:21:37 +0000

I’ve been spending a lot of time with JRuby and thought I’d share a great tip. When using a java library that requires a typed java array, you can automatically convert from a ruby array using the to_java method.

Here’s an example.
in ruby:
ruby_array=Array.new( [a,b,c] )

// turn the ruby array into a typed one in java
java_array=ruby_array.to_java com.java.my.class

It took some digging, but this link from Project Kenai helped. http://kenai.com/projects/jruby/pages/CallingJavaFromJRuby

Snow Leopard killed my Rails apps

dougereed — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 02:53:01 +0000

Wow, what a mess! Like many, it’s taken more time than I wanted to get my Rails apps up and running under Snow Leopard. I finally had to uninstall everything relating to my old 32 bit ruby install and start from scratch recompiling mysql, ruby, installing gems, etc.

Finally everything is back up. Many thanks to the blog links below. None of them exactly solved the problem, but they were helpful in figuring it out.

http://blog.bogojoker.com/2008/06/installing-ruby-187-on-mac-os-x-1053/
http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2009/8/30/upgrading-to-snow-leopard
http://cho.hapgoods.com/wordpress/?p=158
http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=41940
http://hivelogic.com/articles/compiling-mysql-on-snow-leopard/

Why financial aggregation needs a Mint

dougereed — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 23:01:13 +0000

This has been an exciting week as Mint was acquired for $170 million by Intuit. TechCrunch recently had a great post asking if Mint was Yodlee’s YouTube, and I thought I’d chime into the discussion.

As someone who has built two financial account aggregation systems from scratch (1999 – 1ViewNetwork / 2006 – Cake Financial ), wrote part of the OFX specification in 1997, and served as Intuit’s OFX architect, I have a ton of experience in this area.

First, financial aggregation is a lot harder than most people realize. There are reasons why there aren’t a lot of Yodlee competitors out there. For starters, an aggregation system has to deal with the various bank security mechanisms (both single and multi factor), protect the user names and passwords users entrust to the system, detect changes to bank sites, and handle data normalization/quality issues. Add in that the only structured channel built by the banks, OFX, is all late 1990s SGML not XML, and you have a technical challenge.

History has shown that users expect more than just a tally of balances and airline miles. Financial aggregation 1.0, as implemented by a lot of banks and brokerages, has not seen a lot of uptick because most people just aren’t that concerned about minor fluctuations in balances.

Where Mint succeeded was in doing something of value with the aggregated data. Users recognized this and rewarded Mint with registrations, traffic, and most importantly their data.

Like many others have said, congratulations are in order to Aaron, David, and everyone else at Mint for building a product that people love.

Intuit buys Digital Insight

dougereed — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 09:59:00 +0000

http://web.intuit.com/about_intuit/investors/corporate_releases/2006/11-30.html

This press release is big news. Intuit has been trying to figure out how to get into web based financial services for awhile, and this should do it. Digital Insight is the leader in outsourced online banking and have a ton of tier 2 and 3 FI customers.

Corillian, S1, and Yodlee are probably worried since they have been moving towards online versions of Quicken.

Check21 and ARC

dougereed — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 06:10:00 +0000

As part of some research I have been doing on check images, I came across this great article describing the difference between Check21 and ARC. The largest is that Check21 allows the truncation of all checks while ARC allows only consumer checks to be converted to ACH.

Some basics:

ARC – The process of converting a check into an ACH payment. According to NACHA, ARC is one of the fastest growing areas in the ACH network.

Check21 – Federal law that allows a financial institution (ODFI in ACH speak) to truncate a check and turn it into a legal image.