“ The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving. ” -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Writing this post has taken a long time (and it’s a long post). It’s one of those opinion pieces that moves dangerously between industry comment and personal insight. Add to that a healthy dose of consumer sceptism for banks in general, and you have the ingredients for a tricky piece of writing. The stuff I’d like to share with you today is around the new online sales platform project at FNB – of which I had some intimate involvement. The project was internally labelled SSA (Single Sales Application), with the word “single” being the operative part. To you, it would just be: getting a bank product online. But getting behind the scenes of what actually changed in this version unravels the bank’s fascinating attempt to push the online sales experience into the new web world. Current situation for financial applications in the online space? Long, boring, uncr