How do you make something as boring as "banking" sound sexy? Easy, just add in a dash of "offshore"....
Viola! Now you are dealing with arms merchants, spies, monopolistic cartels, money launderers, dirty CEOs, and drug lords.
The movies do a good job of glorifying the profession (while villifying it) and making it look a whole lot more sophisticated than my brief experience has shown it to be.
I crack up everytime someone sends an Offshore Bank Wire in a movie like Mission Impossible or "Firewall". The thief (or other unsavory type) types in his account, encryption key...pushes a couple of more buttons, and then sees a graphic onscreen filling up like an mp3 download tracking the progress.
Question: why would it take longer to wire transfer 200 million dollars than it does 2 dollars? :) technically i guess you have to send an extra 6 zeros over the wire (in binary...gasp!) but....long enough to have a progress indicator? :)
While my company recently implemented online banking, and we have fancy encryption keys, etc. However, a lot of processes -- especially sending wires to international accounts have a good deal of "hands on" processes that are still handled by people....and there is a reason....as some say, "three feet of air is still the hardest firewall to crack".
