When we created Bricknode in 2010, 14 years ago, I thought that the financial world would switch to using APIs from file communication over night 😂. OMG, was I ever naive!
Bricknode is now part of Huddlestock where the journey continues where we call the service Investment-as-a-Service (IaaS).
There are two legs to IaaS and they are as follows:
The last couple of days I have done a few postings on X and LinkedIn regarding the awesome work that we are doing within Huddlestock like these:
Huddlestock is constantly integrating with new services, like for example AvtaleGiro, Nets, Bambora etc. I am always surprised by the old tech that is used by these companies and the likes of Huddlestock is building integrations to these so that customers of for example Huddlestock don’t have to deal with those old formats. Instead customers of Huddlestock can use the Huddlestock API to do their thing and Huddlestock takes care of all the heavy lifting that needs to happen under the hood.
So, what do I mean by old tech? A typical thing is communication with Flat Files. Flat Files were popularized during the 1970s by IBM and simply means that in a text file you have one line which contains a single entity of data. Maybe you have heard about CSV-files and those are Flat Files where each value is separated by a comma or semicolon.
The worst of them all are position based files where you need to get an instruction on what positions in the file means what, look at the example below:
I have entered some red dividers in the file for illustration, between position 1 to 11 there is one number, between position 12 to 23 there is another number etc.
This is extremely limiting and is not as easy to read by a human and you have a fixed number of characters that you can deal with in the file. There is no hierarchy within the data so it is all bad!
This is however how a lot of the financial companies communicate today, even in 2024!!, and that is why a company like Huddlestock brings soo much value to the market because it integrates with all these services and wrap them in a completely new system like Bricknode which then the users can interact with through many graphical user interfaces or via API.
My goal is to get every company and entrepreneur who is looking to develop a new financial service to first reach out to Huddlestock and see how it could help cut down the road to market and make tech less costly!