Finance transactions aren't so standard after all

In my job I'm familiar with the hellish stew of healthcare IT transactions.

Honestly, I'm a bit of an expert about that.

We always assume things are better in the simpler world of bank transactions.

That's probably true, but apparently they weren't so great 10 years ago ...

Charlie's Diary: How I got here in the end, part nine: the little start-up that could:

.... 1998 was a painful learning experience. It turns out that while the British banks all adhered to the APACS protocols for exchanging financial transactions, the protocols in question were prone to, ah, flexible interpretation — and each and every one of the banks interpreted them differently, seemingly in order to lock out their competitor's suppliers' EPOS terminals....

Standards are hard work, particularly when one's income depends on the standards not quite working.