Andy Gluck has an interesting post on his blog about integrating web services. In it, he promotes the concept of Web Services being the new silver bullet for financial advisor applications.

From the post:

Web Services provide significant improvement in efficiency and savings. They free advisory firms from re-keying client data into multiple applications, which saves labor and reduces errors. Service to clients is also improved because you no longer have to input all of the holdings every time you do analytics on a portfolio. If your analytics program, say Morningstar Principia, can take a Web Service from your portfolio accounting application or get it directly from your custodian, you are likely to run your analytics program more often.

I’m seeing the "Web Services is the solution" theme more and more in technology articles about our industry. I’m going to disagree with the prevailing sentiment. Not only are Web Services not the solution, they actually make the fundamental problem *worse* from a vendor perspective.

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After our sixth straight week of down markets, our worst run since 2001, we’ve had the craziest weekend I can remember. It’s getting hard to keep track of the disasters.

Regional bank IndyMac fails and the FDIC takes over. This is the second-largest bank failure in our generation and larger than the combined assets all the small banks the FDIC has taken over in the past 15 years. IndyMac may be the first of many. The Feds have a list of 93 banks they’re watching and the really scary thing? IndyMac wasn’t even on the list. In fact, analysts say that up to 125 banks could fail over the next 12 to 18 months.

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