In-house software development is tempting. On paper, it may look cheap. But maintenance, the hidden cost of software development, is also the greatest cost. However, in the long run it is invariably more expensive than solutions offered by software vendors, and the results are less satisfactory, unless the system being developed is specific to your business.

Banks are in the banking business. Their software personnel may have enormous expertise in supporting the financial aspects of banking. But banks are not in the online security business, or the IT communications or wireless communications business. They should not need to develop the expertise required to provide complete, robust, scalable and maintainable solutions in these fields. Software developers utilize the expertise gathered from all of their customer experience, and spread development costs over all customers. A software vendor's product reflects the cumulative experience of many customers and of experts in the specialty field serviced by that product. IDentiWall is no exception to this rule. Moreover, IDentiWall is the result of a cooperative, consortium effort to provide secure e-banking, so IDentiWall customers benefit from the experience of many banks and financial institutions. IDentiWall also incorporates syndication functions that are hard to implement in standalone systems you might build at home.

It's no secret that maintenance is most of the price of any software project. That includes correcting any defects, meeting future needs, and coping with expanded capacity and business operations. A large pool of users ensures that any defects are detected rapidly, and the cost of correcting them does not fall on a single customer. A security system like IDentiWall will be constantly updated to reflect emerging threats detected by experts, and will not become obsolete when banking software is altered. If you develop your own system, it also reflects the present expand as your business expands. Your solution may not be able to handle expanded capacity, multinational operations or new functions that you will undertake in the future. IDentiWall is designed to handle the largest e-banking and e-commerce operations and it is meant to grow with them. Our business is maintaining our software, so the system will not become obsolete and unusable because a key programmer left the organization.

A customer could also be their own banker. Do you think that is wise?

The table below compares the advantages of IDentiWall versus in-house development of banking security solutions.