I think there has never been a better time (well in at least 100 years or so) to build a new bank. A new sort of bank. I’ve been meaning to post (some of) my ideas on this since last spring but have never had the time. Plus given that this is something I would love to actively drive and participate in, I probably sub-consciously was a bit loathe to spell it all out. Until I get a day or so free to translate my vision and copious notes into something coherent, here are a couple articles that might give you a taste of how I am thinking:
Embrace the possibilities offered by 21st century ICT (cf “Doing IT wrong”)
It also seems I’m not alone in this thinking, at least not in the UK, with first Tesco and now Virgin Money aggressively entering the (retail) banking space.
(via The Guardian) Virgin Money has made its much-anticipated move into the retail banking sector by taking over a small private bank.
The £50m deal to buy Church House Trust was announced to the City this morning. It is a key part of Sir Richard Branson’s attempt to challenge the UK’s major high street banks, and comes two years after Virgin failed to win control of Northern Rock.
“Virgin Money aims to bring simplicity to the UK banking market, which has traditionally been a complex sector,” said Branson, who believes the move gives Virgin “a strong platform for growth”.
I’d love to meet the leaders of these two firms as I think a lot of what we are working on would resonate with them. That is, unless we decide to start a competitor!
A couple of months ago, I had the privilege to have been invited to speak at eComm 09 in Amsterdam. I have posted on this previously but recently the video of my talk was posted and perhaps will make it easier to understand my accompanying presentation. If you can spare 20 minutes (there is an additional 10 minutes of q&a at the end) and are interested in understanding how Nauiokas Park defines our opportunity space, please have a look as it is probably the most succinct expression of the worldview we bring to investing and analyzing potential investment opportunities.
And here is the presentation again, in case you would like to follow along as you listen to the video:
Well-built developer platforms are the future of every industry. (-ReadWriteWeb)
Note: Their is a small glitch around 7:40 where the video skips over a few seconds; funnily enough (for the conspiracy theorists out there) this is exactly where I say that had ZSIN’s existed, the extent of the disasters that occurred in the mortgage securitization markets would have been at least an order of magnitude smaller…)
Anyone who has ever used an Apple product understands that a key part of the value flows from the design aesthetic that covets simplicity, intuition and beauty; harnessing these attributes to provide solutions and services that users find a joy to use right out of the box. The complexity of their products is hidden from view, Steve Jobs having understood that the extra effort needed to transform complexity into simplicity was something that created tremendous value both for his customers and his shareholders.
Creating simplicity is hard. Much harder than creating complexity. Entropy and all that. But it is very often worth the effort. Helpfully, John Maeda wrote a great guidebook “The Laws of Simplicity” where he articulates 10 basic laws:
Reduce: The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
Organize: Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
Time: Savings in time feel like simplicity.
Learn: Knowledge makes everything simpler.
Differences: Simplicity and complexity need each other.
Context: What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.
Emotions: More emotions are better than less.
Trust: In simplicity we trust.
Failure: Some things can never be made simple.
The One: Simplicity is about substracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful
Finance and financial markets are often complex. This complexity can arise within products (exotic derivatives), infrastructure (clearing, settlements and payment platforms) or regulation. And most financial services firms (and professionals) revel in this complexity. Not only do they not seek to hide it away, but they often compete vigorously to show it off in all its glory (and of course by association they seek to validate their virility and cleverness by navigating all this complexity on behalf of their hapless customers.) Of course – sticking with the computing metaphor – this ‘look how clever I am’ approach is very Microsoft-ian (and no, that isn’t a compliment) and very rarely does it provide the most utility or best value for the customer. So one of our key investment themes is to find and nurture companies who are to finance as Apple is to computing (and media!) The complexity of modern finance and markets is the ideal substrate for simple products and services, to quote John:
Simplicity and complexity need each other. The more complexity there is in the market, the more that something simpler stands out. And because technology will only continue to grow in complexity, there is a clear economic benefit to adopting a strategy of simplicity that will help set your product apart. That said, establishing a feeling of simplicity in design requires making complexity consciously available in some explicit form. This relationship can be manifest in either the same object or experience, or in contrast with other offerings in the same category—like the simplicity of the iPod in comparison to its more complex competitors in the MP3 player market.
One of our portfolio companies does exactly this. They take a simple service, using technology and their market knowledge to engineer a solution that keeps the complexity away from the customer and behind the scenes. (Where it should be.) A solution that embraces simplicity and transparency in a market heretofor characterized by complexity and obfuscation. It’s not a new music site or social network. It’s probably not something anyone would get too excited about. It’s boring. But it’s big. Billions big. And important. And for many individuals and corporates, unavoidable.
The service is foreign exchange (aka FX) and international payments. And the company, as you might now have guessed, is FX Capital Group. (See also my FX 2.0 post from this spring.) And the reason I am writing about them today is that they have just launched their new website and online trading platform and it is by far the best FX user experience I have seen. Simple. Transparent. Complete. Easy-to-use. From the initial client take-on, all the way through to the onward payment to the account of your choosing, every last detail of the process has been engineered to make the customer’s life simple. The “iTunes of foreign exchange”. After all selling one currency to buy another should not be that hard.
And now, it isn’t.
FX Capital Group’s vision is to combine technology and traditional phone base services with competitive and transparent pricing to deliver on the promise of simple, cost effective, and customer friendly foreign exchange and international payments services for clients.
Leveraging experienced individuals, the best technology and a deep understanding of both international foreign exchange and payments markets, FX Capital Group brings transparency, simplicity and automation to meet the foreign exchange needs of clients in a robust, easy and effective manner.
Buy, Sell and Hedge Currencies: A full range of phone based and online services to buy/sell currencies and hedge currency risk. Competitive, consistent and transparent pricing for all customers.
Manage Currency Risks: Guidance on strategies to hedge currency risk within your business. A great service for firms who contract in multiple currencies or import / export goods and services.
Sell on Your Website in Multiple Currencies: Expand your online customer base by selling to customers in multiple currencies using our real-time FX API’s at rates that are better than those “bundled” with merchant service providers.
Invoice in Multiple Currencies: Invoice your international clients in local currency. Embedded hedging of any currency movements and no need to maintain bank accounts in multiple currencies.
Make International Payments: Our international payments service (online and phone) will save you money over you bank for making international payments and may be free if you transact your FX with us.
And other brokers and financial intermediaries are also welcome to partner with FX Capital Group, either via API or white label agreements. Indeed, first and foremost this is very much a platform company, FXaaS really. The customer facing website is in fact just an implementation of the underlying platform, and shortly the company will be launching the second implementation – RabbitFX – which will be tailored specifically to private and retail clients. Going forward we hope that many other partners choose to build innovative and customized services on top of the core FXCG platform. We also are excited by the ability for partners to integrate FX into their products and workflows simply and powerfully. Imagine for example an ERP provider, or online accounting services, or an ad network, etc. etc. …the list of potential partners is almost endless.
One area that is particularly close to my heart is the ability to allow even the smallest start-up to offer their customers payment in any currency – easily, cost effectively and transparently. Or helping start-ups with geographically dispersed operations pay employees, contractors and suppliers in any currency without having their eyes ripped out by their bank or payments provider. I’m sure most of the seedcamp finalists from the last few years have foreign exchange payments to make from time to time, many on a regular basis. In the spirit of helping to get the ball rolling on this front, I’ve convinced them to sweeten the bargain for all the companies that have applied to seedcamp (or mini-seedcamp) over the past three years.
If you have been a seedcamp applicant, finalist or winner, if you open a corporate account and do a trade before December 25th, FX Capital Group will send you a £25 iTunes or Amazon gift card and also contribute £25 to the charity of your choosing. Just let them know when you register for which seedcamp event you applied or attended. They’ll do the rest. And then sit back and save time, money and energy and never worry about managing FX payments again.
Like all good start-ups a big part of the excitement and frustration is knowing what is ‘in the pipeline’ and wanting it all to be released to users ‘yesterday’. However we also know that the best ideas and certainly the best prioritization algorithms emerge from getting a product into the wild and so after 9 months of development and private alpha, I can’t wait to hear ways in which customers and developers will want to use the platform. So for all you early adopters out there, know that the platform is probably not perfect (although we’ve stress-tested it up to 250,000 trades a day without any problems, which gives us a bit of headroom to grow into! lol) but (we think) it’s damn good and would rather challenge you to help us make it even better than pretend we’ve got it all figured out.
In case you were wondering, the team is indeed working on putting a screencast/video demo of the trading platform online and but in the mean time they are more to happy to walk you through a short online demo if you are interested. Alternatively you can go yourself to https://demo.fxcapitalgroup.co.uk/ and use the following credentials:
username: demo@splashypants
password: demosplash
pet’s name: splashy
favorite animal: whale
favorite city: atlantis
Have a go and be sure to let the team know what you think. Best channel is probably twitter where you can find them at @FXCapitalGroup or on Facebook.
Finally it’s important to make clear that I’m not just writing this post as an investor, commentator or director but first and foremost as a customer. My entire adult life I have had to deal with managing FX risk and struggle with the pain and cost of doing international transfers. When the founder Nigel Verdon came to me with his vision, I thought ‘Hallelujah!’ – at last. It may not be the sexiest business in the world but there is real pain and real profits to be made in using technology to disrupt the old way of doing business and give customers a better deal. And so I did a ‘Victor Kiam’. So next time you have to make a foreign payment, whether its for yourself or your company, give FXCG/RabbitFX a chance, I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.
I first wrote here about Ken Banks and FrontlineSMS a little over a year ago, after having seen him speak at Supernova in San Francisco where he made a tremendous impression. I remember immediately being excited by the obvious possibility of leveraging the Frontline:SMS platform to provide financial services, not only in developing countries but also in more mature markets. I put ‘try to set up meeting with Ken to discuss’ on my to do list, but it never quite made it to the top as the myriad challenges of setting up our business (and moving house) in the midst of generalized global financial calamity conspired to keep it from becoming an urgent priority. Of course (and thank goodness) the world does not wait for me and an enterprising young man, Ben Lyons, spotted the same opportunity and (much) more importantly has moved to action, teaming up with Ken and FrontlineSMS to create FrontlineSMS:credit:
FrontlineSMS:Credit aims to make every formal financial service available to the entrepreneurial poor in 160 characters or less. By meshing the functionality of FrontlineSMS with local mobile payment systems, implementing institutions will be able to provide a full range of customizable services, from savings and credit to insurance and payroll.
Launching FrontlineSMS:credit a few weeks ago, Ben wrote:
Our mission is simple: leverage the mobile space to extend access to affordable financial services to rural, disconnected and impoverished communities. To achieve this end, we are constructing a series of free and open source financial modules that will allow FrontlineSMS to communicate with mobile payment systems in real time, turning FrontlineSMS in to a microfinance management information system, a payroll center for small & medium enterprises (SMEs), a collection and distribution center for micro-insurance premiums and payouts, and a detailed center for individual credit histories and scores.
Now if this isn’t a massive opportunity, well I don’t know what is. At the risk of sounding churlish, it’s an order of magnitude more substantial and important (socially, financially, economically…) than half the me-too start-ups chasing funding and customers amongst the western digerati. Take another look at Ben’s mission statement:
… leverage the mobile space to extend access to affordable financial services to rural, disconnected and impoverished communities.
I suspect the first time you read that you thought “in Africa”, or perhaps India, or developing countries more generally. But these same under-served communities (alas) exist in every country in the world, and one could even make a case for saying that for those living in a developed economy, the relative disadvantage of not having access to basic financial services is even more damaging. It seems inevitable that the approach taken by FrontlineSMS:credit will become the primary channel through which universal access to basic financial services is delivered in any country or economy. Which leaves the politicians of many European states very little time to figure out what the hell to do with all the postal employees currently cashing cheques and taking payments for utility bills, who will soon need to find more productive work. And I’m not sure how complacent I would be as a shareholder in an incumbent retail banking operation (the top executives I doubt will lose much sleep as the timeline for this kind of transition is probably 10-15 years or so, much longer than their expected tenure…) as this bottom up, platform approach to delivering financial services has the very real potential of blowing a giant hole right in the middle of their business and revenue model.
To further whet your appetite here is an excellent 10 minute introduction to FrontlineSMS:credit by Ben at Africa Gathering in London a couple weeks ago:
A couple years ago, I had just decided to try to build what would become Nauiokas Park. I wasn’t entirely sure exactly how I was going to go about it but I had a vision of what it might look like and I knew the market opportunity – to develop technology-enabled disruptive business models in financial services and markets – was vast. Also, Saul and Reshma’s inaugural seedcamp had given me an excuse (or a push) to stop ‘mulling it over’ and ‘get started’ even if I didn’t exactly know what ‘it’ was yet.
One of the first things I did was to start building a database of startups and private growth companies that I thought fell into my embryonic firm’s new investment universe, and one of the first companies I added (on August 29th, 2007 to be exact) was Mint.com. I had first heard of them early that year when they were raising a Series A round and the concept had always appealed to me (and I had always wondered why banks had been so oblivious to it.) I had definitely hoped to be able to take a closer look once I had raised outside investment capital (they were already past the seed stage where I could have contemplated trying to play as an angel) and so it was one of the first companies on our internal ‘radar screen’. Well as they say in the start-up game, it always takes longer than you expect and here we are – one giant financial crisis later – in the fall of 2009 and Mint will now be coming off our radar screen (into our archives) having gone and gotten itself acquired by Intuit for $170mn.
On the one hand, it is exciting to see innovation in the space we are calling our own, succeed and be rewarded. And although I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting Aaron, I would like to congratulate him and wish him continued success with Mint and Intuit. Who knows, perhaps I’ll get to meet him in the future. Maybe when he’s contemplating his next venture? On the other hand, I can’t help but wonder if they sold too soon. I have to insert a disclaimer here – I have absolutely no idea what Mint’s financials looked like – so my view is entirely speculative, but I can’t shake the suspicion that if they had enough traction to get $170mn from Intuit, they had already hit and passed the inflection point and could have aimed at becoming (at least) a billion dollar company and owned the space.
Bittersweet? Well partly for not having invested as an angel but that’s just back-trading, so not really. Mainly it’s because – if the company was for sale – I would have really liked to have been in a position to run our slide-rule over it and, if it made sense, put in a bid, either alone or as part of a club deal with one or two private equity peers. If they have attained critical mass – which it looks like they may well have – it doesn’t take too much imagination (if you live in the sixth paradigm) to see them developing into a multi-billion dollar business over the next 5 years or so. Don’t get me wrong, I understand why management, the angels and the VCs, might find this exit attractive, especially given events of the past 24 months, but I can’t help thinking they’d done the hardest part and instead of letting a winner run, took their profits too soon.
PS If anyone knows where I can find Mint’s financials and projections, I’d love to have a look.
I’m going to keep this short, mainly because I’m not an expert by any stretch of the imagination. So discount this as a layman’s viewpoint as needed.
The most common, almost Pavlovian, stock response I hear from (both IT and senior management) financial services firms with respect to why they don’t see cloud computing as relevant to their high-level business strategy (ie ok around the edges but really just an IT cost/benefit thing..) is:
Of course you know, our business is different, it needs to be secure. The hardware needs to be sitting under my desk.
Ok, fine I made the last bit up, but you know they’re thinking as much. So without digressing into a debate as to just how secure most financial services IT is, the question I always respond with is this: does your organization know how to run a more secure data centre than Amazon or Google (or any other present or future specialist cloud infrastructure supplier)??? Really think about it. Do you make your own hardware? Perhaps you can make banking microchips better than Intel… (From Appirio’s CIO Guide to On-demand: )
On-premise does not equal secure: the biggest driver towards private clouds has been fear, uncertainty, and doubt about security. For many, it just feels more secure to have your data in a data center that you control. But is it? Unless your company spends more money and energy thinking about security than Amazon, Google, and Salesforce, the answer is probably “no.”
VPN-Cubed® is the first commercial solution that enables customer control in a cloud, across multiple clouds, and between private infrastructure and the clouds.
VPN-Cubed provides an overlay network that allows YOU control of addressing, topology, protocols, and encrypted communications for YOUR devices deployed to virtual infrastructure or cloud computing centers. When using public clouds your corporate assets are going into 3rd party controlled infrastructure. Enterprise checks and balances require you to exhibit control over your computing infrastructure. VPN-Cubed gives you flexibility with control in 3rd party environments.
The other myth to dispell is that no one is suggesting migrating any or all infrastructure to a cloud environment overnight, or even as soon as possible. The decision whether or not to move existing infrastructure to a cloud (private or public) and when is indeed probably more of a ‘routine’ (but big) question for IT (although management should be interested in the answer.) The point I’m trying to make, the point that is relevant for the executive committee is:
How does the nature of my business – what products and services I provide to my customers and how – potentially change because of this new technological substrate?
This is the question that should animate the weekend executive strategy retreat. In order to answer that question, you need to have some understanding of the technology but not how it works so much as what it can do. I don’t need to know how the microchip works in a digital camera to think about how I can use that camera. The question management should be brainstorming is:
If we were to start with a blank page, with the technology that exists today (and will likely exist in the next 5-10 years) how would you best build a company to serve our customers, present and future? What does FaaS (Finance as a Service) look like?
This isn’t going to happen overnight so the suggestion is not to ‘throw the cards up in the air’ and panic. And incumbents have many advantages on their side (customer inertia being the most valuable). But it will happen. And quickly in the geological timescale of large organizations so they need to start moving, start mapping out this future. And – here is a shameless plug for Nauiokas Park – one facet of that should be placing a lot of small bets on emerging, disruptive start-ups that have the luxury of moving more quickly, experimenting more radically, with faster evolutionary cycles. (Like a genomics company experimenting using fruit-flies and mice first to isolate winning adaptations.) While at the same time preparing their supertankers for a significant change in direction.
Maybe we should offer to moderate these strategic retreats. Do you think we would get any takers? If you work in a financial services company, ask your CEO and let us know.
Update:
If you are looking for a good (albeit long) explanation of what VPN-Cubed does and why it really is a “game-changer” read this post from Mark Masterson who sums it up as follows:
So, let’s sum up. Enterprise cloud computing is a type of cloud computing that is suited to the specific requirements of existing companies, and allows them to leverage resources in the Cloud to provide economical ways of adding capacity to their existing environments. First, their existing data centre (or some portion of it) is virtualised. Once this is accomplished, capacity from external cloud providers can be added (and dropped) dynamically, using technologies like VPN-Cubed, allowing enterprises to use the cloud to elastically (and transparently) scale out to the cloud. And because all network traffic is securely encrypted, enterprises can effectively make use of public, cloud infrastructure as if it was part of their internal datacentre — entirely behind the (virtual) firewall. Moreover, the same technology can be leveraged to allow the use of multiple, disparate cloud providers, effectively solving the ‘eggs in one basket’ problem. Different cloud providers can be leveraged to allow for failover redundancy, load balancing, even the leveraging of different providers on a dynamic basis, using metrics such as SLA compliance, or changes in cost. And an enterprise might want to do this not because it will reduce costs, or allow a switch from capital to operating expenditures (although both of those things might be true or not, depending on the context), but because it will increase their overall agility.
Just as Intel’s 4004 microprocessor was the catalyst for a wave of creative destruction in the 70s and 80s, will AWS prove the same for the 00s and 10s? Probably. We’re seeing it already. And it’s going to disrupt the hell out of the mastodons of industry across most sectors of the economy. Why? Because their cultures and leaders are entirely ill-equipped to face such a fundamental paradigm shift. They know how to play by the old rules. The strategic competitive advantages they built up over decades risk suddenly – poof! – to become obsolete.
And yet all too often, I’m met not with disbelief but with apathy, indifference. You can see the thoughts forming in their heads: “I’m a CEO, a business man, a producer! Why is Sean boring me with this technology stuff? Why doesn’t he just talk to the CIO?” Worse, too often when I talk to senior technology managers in big corporations, they also are disdainful, thinking: “Yeah, yeah, that’s all fine for your start-ups and Web2.whatever companies, but this is a real business. Serious. Not some website for teenagers to swap gossip.” Ok I’m exaggerating but a lot less than you think. Sometimes I figure I must not be saying it right. So I’m always on the lookout for good articulations of the potential and importance of cloud computing and its incredible relevance to anyone who is pretending to run a business. Especially a big one.
In short, Enterprise IT must extend out to Consumer IT, otherwise those companies simply won’t be able to compete. As we’ll explore, Web 2.0 has changed the landscape with social networks, and companies can ill afford to ignore the shift…
…Cloud computing isn’t just about on-demand IT; it’s about on-demand business innovation…
…Cloud computing isn’t just for small- and medium-sized companies and garage startups. Cloud computing makes it possible to create new business platforms that will allow companies to change their business models and collaborate in powerful new ways that weren’t practical before. What’s important for companies to consider is that cloud computing isn’t about technology, it’s about technology-enabled business models.
So if you know a CEO, or any senior managers (in any business) pass them this article. It will only take 10 minutes to read. And maybe it just might make them reconsider. And maybe they’ll invite me to lunch!
A second issue was that the processor, although a key component of personal computers, was only a component. To effectively market this component to the PC buyer it was important to work with the manufacturer of computers. After all, the processor was buried deep inside the computer and despite its significance it was hard to tell which processor the PC contained before it was purchased.
Carter and his team studied successful consumer marketing techniques and examined tactics used by well-known companies supplying a component or ingredient of a finished product, like NutraSweet™, Teflon™ and Dolby™. They also began a variety of marketing experiments and soon began envisioning how a branded ingredient program would play out in the computer industry.
Key to this strategy was gaining consumer’s confidence in Intel as a brand and demonstrating the value of buying a microprocessor from the industry’s leading company, the pioneer of the microprocessor. At the suggestion of its advertising agency, Dahlin Smith and White, Intel adopted a new tag line for their advertising: “Intel. The computer inside.” Using this to position the important role of the processor and at the same time associating Intel with “safety,” “leading technology” and “reliability,” the company’s following-and consumer confidence-would hopefully soar. That would create a new “pull” for Intel-based PCs. Later, this tagline was shortened to “Intel Inside.”
The important role of the microprocessor was being communicated, but to be truly effective the ingredient status of the microprocessor needed to be dealt with. In 1991 Carter launched the Intel Inside® coop marketing program. The heart of the program was an incentive-based cooperative advertising program. Intel would create a co-op fund where it would take a percentage of the purchase price of processors and put it in a pool for advertising funds. Available to all computer makers, it offered to cooperatively share advertising costs for PC print ads that included the Intel logo. The benefits were clear. Adding the Intel logo not only made the OEM’s advertising dollar stretch farther, but it also conveyed an assurance that their systems were powered by the latest technology. The program launched in July 1991. By the end of that year, 300 PC OEMs had signed on to support the program.
The PC business ultimately was redefined by this – moving to a barbell of high volume commoditized assemblers/distributors (Dell) and high value specialist niche players (Alienware) and of course the fully integrated hardware/software approach of Apple. The same thing will happen in financial services over the next 10-20 years. Only the ‘Intel inside’ isn’t hardware (except maybe for some high end high frequency trading applications where I think you’ll see people starting to design and sell custom chipsets…) but financial widget providers. FaaS or Haas or RMaaS. (For the few remaining bankers that read my blog and are scratching their heads, these are not tickers or Bloomberg functions – or if they are that’s not what I’m referring to – but acronyms for Finance or Hedging or Risk Management ‘as a Service’…) These will in turn get mashed up by enterprising distributors and channel managers to offer all sort of customer (from the head to the tail) the package of financial services and products that is right for them. This is what the mega-fauna of global finance (retail, commercial and investment banks in particular but also life and property insurance companies, brokers, asset managers, etc.) do now, in house, although the concept of “open architecture” on a fund management platform for example is a sort of distant evolutionary predecessor.
A more apt existing business model along these lines – that practitioners in the retail trading and FX markets will be particularly familiar with – is white labeling. Indeed companies like Saxo Bank have done extremely well with very sophisticated and industrialized white label partnership programs. You want to offer your customers trading on FX, FX Options, Forwards, Spot Gold & Silver, CFDs, Stocks, Futures, etc? Just plug into their machine and you’ve got yourself a trading engine and infrastructure. You want to offer your customers weather insurance? No problem – just grab Weatherbill’s new white label solution:
The WeatherBill White Label platform enables any third party to offer weather coverage to their clients, written on their paper, and using their distribution channels. It is an innovative end-to-end technology platform for pricing, transacting, settling, and managing weather risk. WeatherBill White Label creates new revenue streams and growth opportunities for insurance companies and weather derivative dealers, allowing them to leverage WeatherBill’s technology to offer fully automated, customizable weather coverage to their clients.
For any company who has customers that could use weather insurance in the context of their relationship with this company, this would seem to be a no-brainer; you don’t need to re-invent the wheel, weather algorithms and derivatives processing are probably not your core business and/or is not where you want to deploy resources. Outsource it. Add a plug-in. Did you write your own mapping software to show where your offices are on your ‘Contact Us’ page? No, you used Google or Multimap etc. and integrated it into your site and/or your service. It’s as simple as that, and makes just as much sense.
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