This week we continue our exploration of the historical IBM films about early financial systems, beginning to focus on the technical components from last week’s released video.

(1) The first processes shown is encoding; today this is often replaced with ETL or translation processes to get data into consistent code sets. (2) The second processes is the sorter/reader. Although few people focus on this process today, sorting is still a significant process in almost all financial reporting systems.

(3) Third the listing and balance processor. This counts input transactions, and merges amounts with prior day balances, creating new balances. (4) Fourth is the balance storage processes setting up the required data for the next day process. All posting systems, even today, include both these steps.

Why review these steps? Because they are, and will continue to be, at the heart of all financial systems. If a solution, like blockchain, does not include these steps, it will be limited in the problems it will solve. Other solutions, new or legacy, will have to be applied to the rest of the problem.

Watch the short introductory video here. And here is the edited portion of the historical film. These are  Episode 87 of Conversations with Kip, the best financial system vlog there is.