When I first started work, cheques were written by hand for all sterling payments. Foreign currency was paid via ‘tested’ telex and confirmations were completed using a word processor. Luckily, by that stage the quill pen had been superceded by the Biro for completing the Nostro ledger. However quaint these business practices may seem nowadays, what is significant is that the back office had a process, which apart from the technology deployed, has remained largely unchanged.
Then, as now, a process was defined for standard situations, and additional processes were employed for non-standard or exceptional situations. In some respects, this could be described as straight-through processing (STP) in the sense that a payment went from one manual process straight through to another.
