So, I just installed MyBanco

Right, so you have a new installation of MyBanco, what should you do now? Well, here are a few ideas just to get the ball rolling:

• Create a new skin of MyBanco. Skins are very easy to make, you do it by just copying an existing skin to a new directory (skins are in C:\xampp\htdocs\Skins). For example, to make a skin called ‘wicked’, here are the steps.
  1. Copy the folder ‘Simple’ and paste it in the same directory.
  2. Rename ‘Copy of Simple’ to ‘wicked’
  3. Enter the folder ‘wicked’ and rename ‘Simple.php’ to ‘wicked.php’
  4. Goto ‘C:\xampp\htdocs’ and edit ‘config.php’.
  5. Change the line starting with “$CONFIG[‘skin’]” changing it to this:
     $CONFIG['skin'] = 'wicked';
  6. Start editing the new skin, making it look how you want 🙂
• Install xbank. Do this by going to the admin, and specifying ‘Enable xbank’ in the config. If you have made the config file read only (not a bad idea!) you will have to edit config.php manually.
  When XBank is enabled, a new config item will appear, where you can add banks that allow communication with. To do this, you will have to know what the partner bank’s XBank I.D. is, and create a new Communication Key with them. You must share then with the manager of the partner bank’s system your communication key, and they will give you their communication key. If both keys are not traded, communication between the banks will be impossible, as the communication key builds up the security between the two banks.
• Enable Currency XChange. (CXC).
  CXC is a system that allows different currencies to be traded in a fair way. The way that CXC works is that a new currency is created by a ‘Host Bank’. This host bank then specifies the four character CXID, or ‘Currency Xchange ID’, which other banks will use to specify the currency.

   

  For example, the “Test Bank of Testland” floats their new curreny, who’s CXID is “TEST”. “Test Bank of Testland” tells the CXC server that they are willing to put t10,000 into a CXC account. This new currency can now be floated at a rate specified by the “Test Bank of Testland” against *ONE* other currency already in the CXC.

  When another bank, for example the “First bank of Demonasia” has a customer that wants to put t2,000 into the account, the money will then be traded with the specified amount.

  This requires both banks to have communication set up not only between the CXC, but also with each other.

  The First Bank of Demonasia can then tell the Test bank of Testland that it has 2,000 to put into the foreign bank, and the money will appear in the account.

  Unlike other systems availible at the moment, this system does not magically ‘create’ currency, rather, it is only traded, so always the exact amount that was put in the system is actually there.

  Really cool things can then be done, for example, the Test bank of Testland can remove all the money that it has from circulation (which are not held in other banks)

• Offer Phone Banking
  If you have an install of Asterisk laying around, you can actually create online banking for customers of your bank. For example, with voip.ms, a new number in America only costs around $3 a month, and you can accept two incoming calls at a time (and pay nothing to accept those calls). All you need to do to make this work well is have a good TTS (text To Speech engine installed, like Cepstral) and a Linux install of Asterisk, which is allowed to access the MyInfo location (the backend of MyBanco).
• Allow SMS Banking
  If you have credits with Clickatell, you can actually do SMS banking. This costs a bit of money to actually set up, but getting it working once you pay the $30 a month is very simple. Customers can then see from anywhere how much money is available in their account.

Well, that should at least get the ball rolling.

Note, MyBanco was a project from a number of years ago. It is no longer developed, and the code is not really that great. If you would still like to download, install and generally have a play with it, check out the project on GitHub (github.com/mybanco/mybanco).