Some things in life I simply cannot ignore. The one that comes most readily to mind is a relative of mine who cannot help but eat things they shouldn’t. Though they know better, this particular relation errs on the side of recklessness far too often for a senior citizen. Over the past two weeks, while visiting, I have had to take harmful stuff — my opinion, not theirs — straight out of their hand. This week alone, I witnessed, for the first time, the “advanced diarrhoeic” effects of drinking split pea soup. Suffice it to say that I haven’t yet commented on it. But knowing my stance on these things, they should expect a word from me in future if I even see a split pea anywhere in their house. But they needn’t fear me.
This relative’s behaviour is not so different from the Central Bank of Barbados’ (CBB) conduct during the later development stages of BimPay and in the immediate aftermath of its launch. Continual mistakes have been made by the institution since the Pyjama Party. To be fair, BimPay as an ecosystem is welcome in concept, but the CBB continues to drink its own split pea soup. And unlike the case with my relative, I plan on being more direct with my post-launch take than I had been previously.
By all accounts, you may chide me for not seeming to have taken a more publicly aggressive position on BimPay. But I have commented, and even written about it before in this series, hence today’s title. I sincerely apologise, and hope that is enough for a clean slate between you and me. I did write, but sought the balance that the technology deserved in my review. The Governor’s apology for his comments pales beside what I believe the institution needs to issue for what I see as a disregard for certain key technology concepts. These have economic repercussions that are now being displayed as payday approaches.
Part of the CBB’s diarrhoeic approach seemingly involved shifting responsibility for customer education onto the private sector. I have never seen that before anywhere else, especially where all of the promotion — seemingly aimed at the app and not the system — was driven by the CBB. They made a huge error in pushing the narrative that the app was meant to promote financial inclusion, yet at launch the unbanked could not use it without the services of just one institution.
Moreover, I wrote previously about the Bank’s glaring lack of industry-standard attention to Business Continuity Planning (BCP). I didn’t have the space then to go deep. I won’t today either, except to say that this concept concerns more than planning for weather-related and cybersecurity-related disasters. A key part of it relates to educating key stakeholders.
To be logical, I do believe that it was, and is, the private sector’s responsibility to educate clients on BimPay more than the CBB. But the caveat is that this should apply only where it concerns payments and “transfers” outside the BimPay app. The app is where the CBB touches the wider population directly, so it made sense for them to promote that to the general public more than the other core functions of the platform. Therein lies the error. I wrote previously that they leaned too heavily on promoting the app. Because they did not convince the private sector to become key educators, the average person still does not see BimPay as a system.
Ultimately, this failure has now led to the CBB becoming a spokesperson for the system, and they are failing at this role in my opinion. But damned if you do or don’t, I say. I sincerely hope that they measure their responses more carefully. Zoom meeting help desks are not enough. The wider financial industry must step up, and that probably calls for far more interaction between the key technical stakeholders at the CBB and in the industry. This is certainly not the time for the Governor to be leading anything. The vision has been executed and, honestly, there is no need for him to be that present at what is clearly a technical time. Well, unless the Governor apologises on behalf of the CBB for technical issues that could undermine the financial system down the line.
The Governor set a strong precedent with his personal apology recently. I expect that more will need to come our way. You see, the CBB made a huge mistake by not launching the system as a minimal release. The app probably should have been the last thing on their Phase 1 schedule, while they considered running the old and new systems in parallel. This costs more to maintain. Still, given the much-debated budget that the Bank has at its disposal, adding a few million dollars more to underwrite or cover some of the additional exposure faced by financial institutions would have made total sense.
Parallel systems are a tried and true architecture for software releases, especially in the financial sector and with operating systems. Apple, for example, just released its most advanced suite of operating systems, with deeply embedded AI functionality. These systems store AI locally on the hard drive, while allowing access to frontier models off site if needed. It is well known that local AI functionality is full of bugs, no matter how much work is done during the development phase. This is also typical of any operating system once released into the wild.
So what happens? After Apple allows close strategic external stakeholders to test the technology through real use cases, the company lets developers use the operating system months before the wider public. Developers can then build and test their apps. However, the most important feedback comes during this period, as millions of technically educated users give Apple feedback on bugs resulting from use cases never previously considered.
My thinking is that if the world’s premier consumer technology company uses this approach — on top of how financial technology is normally released into the wild — then why should we do any differently for just 280,000 potential retail users? This never made sense but, to my mind, was simply unfounded yet educated conjecture. That is, until this new bubbling mess emerged as I write.
To their credit, the CBB put out a notice indicating that it has been aware of payments not being fully settled on account of missing information. This seems to be “totally” the fault of the private sector: they haven’t been entering information according to the new system rules. I don’t care at this point whose fault it is. What I do care about is the fact that a parallel system of sorts has been pushed onto people after the fact. There is a gap between what the CBB taught and how the private sector received it. Some institutions, like Sagicor Bank, understood the assignment, so kudos to George and his team. But essentially, cheques are being drawn until the system — or, maybe, just the private sector — catches up. This is a failure in BCP. I would be surprised if the Governor does not apologise for late or missing salary payments come next week. He did set a precedent, didn’t he?