How about this: “Currently, a personal package being sent to your home is more easily tracked than a retailer’s money.”
That sounds odd, because retailers' cash is transported in armored vans, and surely the carrier services know where the vans are and what's inside them? Well, apparently not. One retailer says “if he has a missing deposit, he has to get proof from the store that it was picked up, proof from the carrier that it was delivered, and proof from the bank that it was received and deposited. It can take several days to get responses from all parties involved.”
Maybe you guess the way this story unfolds. There are several major cash carriers in the US and they are starting to introduce cash tracking services, so retailers will be able to follow the movements of their money just like a package from Amazon.
And here's what one retailer has to say about these developments: “Our concern is that you’re going to have Garda’s version, Dunbar’s version, Loomis’ version—everyone’s going to have different versions. I’d like a standard. We use Garda a lot and we do use their current system. It’s not ideal. Since it’s standalone, they can’t share information with the financial institutions properly. We want something that everyone can use; something that doesn’t matter if Garda’s going to U.S. Bank or Fifth Third or Chase—I can still see the same information.”
That's a long quote – but it contains the major arguments for data standards in any sphere of activity. Vendor lock-in? Check. Inability to collaborate? Check. I think you can also hear a plea for sanity in this quote – between the lines I hear suppressed disbelief that a non-standardized, needlessly disparate data tracking situation should even be contemplated. It's the twenty-first century. We don't need to repeat the mistakes of the past.
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