The Credit Crunch and the Digital Bite

Banks and other financial institutions work by transferring and otherwise manipulating money. The modern financial systems used by the employers of quants harness modern digital technology to work with money of various kinds, and in increasingly diverse ways. The Internet makes it easy for money of different kinds to be bought and sold, to be sent and received, and to be amplified and hidden away. In the early days of automatic data processing, banks and insurance companies were important users of digital machinery. The banking industry put an enormous effort into developing the automatic machinery for processing checks that had data encoded in the familiar MICR fashion, now half a century old. This fostered the growth of commercial banking, and was followed by other financial machinery and processes now familiar in initialisms such as ATM and EFTPOS.