ABSTRACT

Information processing plays a pivotal role in today’s banking and fi nance. But the way fi nancial information processing changed over the past decades is still hardly touched by banking historians. Dutch computer histories focus either on the technological development or on the interaction between technology and organizations. As far as banking is concerned most of these publications discuss the postal bank-as the Netherlands like Germany has a strong tradition of Giro payments-or the listed commercial banks. In 2004, De Boer and Frankhuizen published an inside history of forty years of automation at Rabobank, a co-operative bank. Still missing are comparative studies on mechanization and automation at Dutch commercial banks, savings banks, and co-operative banks. The same applies for the impact of automation on retail banking in the Netherlands.