[JoelJacobson]

The best would be if an existing or startup bank openly declared they will be switching to the best open source banking system the community comes up with. But before there is such a bank, all efforts put into creating a top-notch bank system is more or less wasted, as all good projects needs real-life applications from start to be built around, otherwise you are just writing code for imaginary problems without any proof any of the code is useful in real-life.

So if any bank is willing to step up and embrace the idea, I'm sure there are a lot of excellent coders with relevant skills out joining forces, just for the fun of it, and will of course gladly move their business to a bank where they can participate as a developer.

A first step for such a bank could be to open source all their existing code of their legacy systems, or at least documentation, internal APIs and stuff. This would help the rest of the world of non-COBOL coders to get a picture of what's in a bank system. I for one don't know, but have an idea of it.

I'm the founder of a payment solution provider myself, and we work with a lot of banks, aronud 30 I think. Non of them offer any APIs. If anyone would have one, we would probably move a lot of our business to such a bank, I can only dream of the tens of thousands lines of code I code probably reduce to a few hundred lines of integration code.