Background of financial technologies. First Part
José Antonio Schmucke Moreno, CTO of e4Cash in Venezuela, traces the evolution of the technologies applied to the financial universe and then reaches the current fintech
We have heard the term FinTech a lot, a trend that everyone talks about. But , what are FinTech companies? What does the term stands for? How it was born? José Antonio Schmucke Moreno, CTO of e4Cash in Venezuela, analyzes these aspects through an analysis of the background to reach current scenario in a second part.
According to Wikipedia: “Financial technology, often referred to as fintech, is technology and innovation that aims to compete with traditional financial methods in the provision of financial services.” But “tech” companies, Moreno clarifies, have been around for many years. An example is Google, Facebook or Netflix, which made a difference each in your area, thanks to the application of technology.
The same happened in the traditional financial industry with the arrival of fintech companies. Moreno brings to the present a little history to understand the importance of technology in the provision of services today.
On the way to innovation
A story that begins in the 40s and 50s with the arrival of modern computers. This new invention came with programming languages that interpreted the orders that humans wanted to give computers to perform calculations for us. Programming languages are the pillars of our fintech.
By the end of the 60s the battle of programming languages began, with different scopes. Moreno mentions FORTRAN, COBOL, RPG, BASIC, SmallTalk and the famous ANSI C (“thanks to Kernighan and Ritechie, we will be eternally grateful for their contribution to this new era”).
The latter is the father of many operating systems that we currently use, as the specialist emphasizes. “It was the time where these languages were developed in the Universities of Technology with very short reach to the public, because they were few and something new for society.”
On some occasions, these languages were developed in laboratories of the United States government or in very large corporations such as BELL (Bell Laboratories). The story becomes interesting when, in the 80s, with the arrival of new types of more advanced languages, such as ADA, C ++ and Objective-C, paradigms are broken with object-oriented programming, allowing components and functions of our codes to be reused.
With this, everything starts to change because we were getting ready to interconnect, says the co-founder and promoter of the Venezuelan Society of Fintech and New Technologies. But, he says, “there was a big problem in each of them, because each developer programmed their communication protocol and that made them incompatible with each other. There was no communication standard that they respected among them.”
Thus, the Internet era arrives and changes everything with the HTTP Protocol that runs over TCP / IP allowing the creation of the first web pages. The father of this famous protocol is Tim Berners-Lee, who worked at the CERN European Center for Nuclear Research. Then World Wide Web was born (Fabric or World Cobweb); the network that allowed us to share documents all over the planet.
It was also the new object-oriented languages and, no less important, the first language that began to standardize the developments to create our own integration libraries which allowed us to communicate with other systems.
Among these components were the JNDI (Java Naming and Directory Interface), RMI (Remote Method Invocation) and CORBA interfaces for the development of distributed applications and the API for accessing JDBC databases (Java DataBase Connectivity), paying attention to the last component which allowed us to standardize our communications.
Thus the APIs (Application Program Interface) were born allowing us to communicate and develop new applications available to any developer. We no longer needed to be in a laboratory since this was public, available to anyone. This are the basis of our current fintech.
In a second part of this interview with José Antonio Schmucke Moreno, CTO of e4Cash in Venezuela, we will discuss technological aspects and the application of fintech that we know today.
M.Pino
