Category: Banking
This Strange Machinery: How African Banking Cannot See Its Own Clients
Ride’s “Chrome Waves” is a 1992 B-side that most people will not know, and one of its lines has lodged itself in my thinking about African banking: “this strange machinery, is keeping you from seeing me.” The lyric was written about something entirely personal, a distance between two people that the ordinary machinery of life […]
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Synchronous Transactions in Banking: Why They Cause Failures at Scale and What to Do Instead
The mistake is not synchronous processing. The mistake is dragging unrelated work inside the synchronous boundary. 1. What Users Actually Experience as Real Time There is a particular type of architect that most people in banking technology will recognise immediately: deeply opinionated about correctness, committed to order, and entirely confident that every payment must complete […]
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ShedLock and Payments: Every Way It Can Fail, How to Retry Safely, and Every Lock Type Worth Knowing
1. What ShedLock Is and How It Works Spring Boot makes it trivial to schedule a task. You add @EnableScheduling to a configuration class, annotate a method with @Scheduled, and the framework fires it on your chosen cron or interval. The problem surfaces the moment you deploy more than one instance of your application. In […]
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How Capitec Secures Your Money: Real Answers to Real Questions
Andrew Baker · May 2026 I get asked a lot of questions about how Capitec secures its customers’ money. Not in the abstract, but the real ones: what happens if someone swaps my SIM, can someone drain my account while I am on hold with the fraud line, how do you stop someone inside the […]
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Hidden Bank Fees Exposed: How AI Will End Fee Smuggling
There is nowhere left to hide. For decades, banks built an elegant asymmetry into the relationship with their customers. The bank had a team of specialists, the time to design products, and the lawyers to draft disclosure documents that were technically correct and practically unreadable. The customer had a life to live and, at the […]
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Banking Malware on Android: How to Spot It and Stay Safe
Published by Andrew Baker and the Capitec App Security Team | March 2026 For media enquiries and quotable statistics from this article, see the Press Summary at the end. Every day, approximately 15 million South Africans open the Capitec app to check their balance, pay a bill, or send money to a loved one. It […]
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Capitec Pulse: The Engineering Behind Real-Time AI at Scale
By Andrew Baker, Chief Information Officer, Capitec Bank The Engineering Behind Capitec Pulse 1. Introduction I have had lots of questions about how we are “reading our clients minds”. This is a great question, but the answer is quite complex – so I decided to blog it. The article below really focuses on the heavy […]
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Why Core Banking Was a Bad Idea From the Start
A companion piece to Core Banking Is a Terrible Idea. It Always Was. It is 1972. A group of very serious men in very wide ties are gathered in a very beige conference room. They are about to make decisions that will haunt your change advisory board fifty years from now. The following is a […]
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Why Core Banking Architecture Has Always Been Flawed
The COBOL apocalypse conversation this week has been useful, because it has forced the industry to confront something it has been avoiding for decades. But most of the coverage is stopping at the wrong point. Everyone is talking about COBOL. Nobody is talking about the architectural philosophy that COBOL gave birth to, the one that […]
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How a Blog Post Wiped $30 Billion from IBM in One Day
Anthropic published a blog post on Monday. Not a product launch, not a partnership announcement, not a keynote at a major conference. Just a simple blog post explaining that Claude Code can read COBOL. IBM proceeded to drop 13%, its worst single day loss since October 2000, with twenty five years of stock resilience gone […]
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