Can anyone suggest suitable material available on the Internet or in print, free or for sale, that would allow someone completely ignorant on the subject to learn how electronic banking works for the purpose of finding and using the necessary software?
The specific need is about centralised cashflow/expenses management of many foreign (branches) financial institution accounts yet to be set up.
Thank you for your help.

What have you found thus far?

This is a very broad topic, cash management software can be very customized based on your requirements. I submit that the best of the best have very complex modeling software of several types which they have paid a large amount of money for, not just blindly either, they incorporated developers into their establishment with the purpose in mind to develop something usable, sustainable, which suits their specific needs, and which they control the nature of that software.

Otherwise you're just talking about free versions of QuickBooks or something, however this isn't along the lines you're saying.

I suspect that you'll need to specify what you want and then work towards developing a great deal of that internally. Parts you can buy or find, however not all inclusive to meet your requirements.

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Yes, there are a handful of standardized systems that run the ACH = Automated Clearing-House systems throughout the world. Not surprisingly, information about how they work is "not freely distributed."

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Honestly, no. I've worked for/with several banks (both large and small), and such software falls into two general categories:

• Off-the-shelf software that obeys a well known standard. These are things like ACH, credit-card processing, and the like. While the STANDARDS are easily found (you can look up how ACH works: https://www.nacha.org/rules and credit cards: https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/document_library), the software is just monolithic. You can get a manual for the particular program you buy, but it won't cover the underlying standards.
• The banks own software, written by the bank, for the bank, by people who work FOR the bank. It's usually 127 million lines of spaghetti code, developed over the course of however long the bank has had a computer of some sort, probably going back to the 1970's.

If you really want the nuts-and-bolts...you need to go to work for a bank. Personally, I'd rather have an unpleasant medical procedure than do that again.

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I've worked for a bank's software development team before too. For me, it wasn't a bad experience at all.

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The arcane policies, byzantine rules/regulations, and other bureaucratic nonsense made it intolerable for me. I remember many times when something that should have taken 30 minutes to resolve would go for weeks, by the time you got through change-request forms, sign offs, meetings, approvals, user acceptance and testing, etc.

Could have applied the fix to the test system, and had someone run it the same day. Fill out one form, and apply it that night after hours, and you're done. I understand the need for a paper trail and testing/stability, but these places take it to the next level. The last bank I worked for actually got to the point where you had to fill out a form to request PERMISSION to then fill out a change request form. Yes...a form to approve another form. So that you didn't 'bother' your manager with unnecessary paperwork....really....

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fwiw, i created this credit card parser:
http://schneidz.noip.me/credit-card-...swipe-reader.c

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Nothing.
Thank you for the answers, it's not what I thought it was. I understand it's better write one's own.

I'm late to this discussion, but I'll pitch in anyway.

You will not find a lot of Linux software on this topic, for reasons that TBone laid out above. The market is limited, the legal requirements are onerous and changeable, frequent updates on tight deadlines are often necessary, and the potential customers tend to be Windows shops. These are the same reasons you don't find a lot of CAD or tax software in the FOSS world.

I'm late to the discussion, but I recommend you take a look at Turbocash. It's a highly regarded application intended for business use. You may learn much by reviewing it and its documentation.

Full Disclosure: Unfortunately, my finances have never been complex enough to require such an application.

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No. Please no. Don't go down that path. There are enough packages to do whatever you think needs to be done.

Start with learning about your key areas. Probably

• protocols and procedures to automate remittances (or reverse it by getting your banker to send you details - in India it would be called scroll or passbook).
• Collate according to currency, party ..,
• verify proper application of exchange rates and charges (SWIFT for example has got 3 modes of deduction: sender, recipient and both).
• MIS
• ..
• and so on

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I'll add that, for large banks anyway, a ton of what you're looking for is still done on mainframes with in-house JCL programming.

If you're looking for specific topics: ACH/IAT, EDI, SWIFT, Wire Transfer/Fed, just to name a few cash management items.

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It really depends what engagement you wish for all this. Personal financial management, small business, large corporation, financial infrastructure, or other. Honestly the original question asks about electronic banking, centralized management of multi-national accounts. Heck, and sorry for the observation, but that could be anything from money laundering to government banking. If you want to find out how to skirt the tax system, and not necessarily illegally but by way of finding and understanding loopholes, then a good thing to do is work within that system. If you want to find out how to manage accounts for numerous clientele, then a good thing to do is consider working for one of the online banking companies which have been and are constantly springing up. If this is all just personal financial management, my take is to hire someone to advise you about the rules and do as much or as little of the transaction portions on your own. I.e. when I went into business as a sole proprietor, but still as a corporation, I had an accountant who told me my legal responsibilities, however I paid myself quarterly and dealt with the accountant once a year for all the forms and such, meanwhile in one introductory meeting the accountant told me how to calculate payroll. Therefore the accountant really worked for me once a year, got paid fairly, and I was happy with that level of service.

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+1's, i work for a large health insurance company working in automated claims processing. many of our claim service reps have to navigate mainframe screens (the title of many of the mainframe menues still have the name of a corporation we merged with in the 1980's).

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Very true, however the bank that I worked for ran Linux on z Systems, which was Linux running on a big mainframe computer.

So there probably Linux running the back end on the majority of banks if they are using mainframe.

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The one I worked for was using a mainframe stack (either S/390 or z/OS, IBM Endevor for version control, JCL to launch applications, COBOL applications, IBM DB2 database) for part of it, Java elsewhere. With SOAP services and IBM WebSphere to tie everything together. When you wanted to do something with the database, you would write the query into a COBOL application, write JCL to run that COBOL application, and then send the JCL to a task scheduler. I can't remember the name of that task scheduler right now. If you needed a UI for your COBOL application, you would use CICS to implement that UI.

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