Week 290

These notes are going to be somewhat abbreviated, because I’m catching the sleeper to Inverness tonight to go walking in the wilds of Wester Ross for the rest of the week and I’m still not packed. Hopefully ex-hurricane Bertha is feeling benevolent.

Getting Things Done

We did another planning session on Monday and agreed to do a bit more work on Project Credit Union, do some thinking about the future direction of the company, make some improvements to our company website, and do a bit more work on automating email handling. We managed to make a start on the first three of these, but we ran out of time to do anything on the last one.

We’ve developed a new tactic when trying to tackle gnarly subjects like the future direction of the company - we gather around a whiteboard or the projector and write notes as we go along. It feels as if this allows us to to have more structured conversations and making notes means it’s easy to stop and come back to it if we run out of steam.

Project Credit Union

We did some more work on the project. In particular, Chris did some investigation into pre-paid cards and discovered that some of these accounts offer direct debits and other current account-like functionality. He’s applied for one of the cards to understand more about how they work.

We noticed that some of the companies which offer pre-paid cards are regulated as e-Money Institutions and others as Payment Services Institutions (as opposed to banks, building societies or credit unions), so I decided to start reading up about them. In the process I did a bit of reorganising of the wiki home page to better reflect our latest thinking i.e. maybe we don’t need to accept deposits nor start a credit union to achieve our aims.

Chris also did a bit of research into white-label banking services based on a GitHub issue raised by Chris Blanchard, but although such a thing exists in the US, it doesn’t seem to happen over here.

We finally heard back from ABCUL on Friday about our Credit Union Study Group Application and we should have access to their Members’ Area shortly. Our contact at ABCUL has read our blog and has kindly offered to have a chat on the phone to help us clarify some points.

Chris has already written up the Show and Tell session we ran on Wednesday, so I think that’s it for now.

– James