Here's a video featuring Eoin Woods, a software architect at Barclays Global Investors (BGI), talking about Apex, the new equities portfolio management system being built for the company's well known active management group:

Cooper worked with closely with BGI users and developers for almost 2 years going from from concept to detailed design and well into construction.

Much of the talk is focused on the technical architecture of the system, but you get the first glimpse of the user interface at 23 minutes in. Around the hour mark he takes questions, the first of which is about interaction design.

We're really excited about how it turned out, and a lot of credit and congratulations are due to the incredibly smart and talented folks at BGI.

Retail banks are realizing that Internet banking is not living up to the hype that surrounded it a few years ago. At that time, analysts predicted that demand would follow the trends in general Internet usage and grow to hundreds of millions of users by the middle of this decade. Some brave entrepreneurs were even betting that the age of the branch-based deposit institution was over, and that upstart "Internet-only" banks would be able to capitalize on hot new technology to steal all the customers. Yet adoption rates are low, and customer interest is flagging. Why? Online banking is a good example of how bricks-and-mortar institutions can stumble when they try to solve new economy problems with old world approaches.