While researching The Numerati, I traveled down to Miami
for the annual awards ceremony of INFORMS, the institute for operations
research and management science. This is the kind of organization I
never dreamed I’d be covering. But what they do is fascinating.
Operations Research is the applied math used for modeling and
optimizing just about every industrial and logistical process on earth.
Sometimes it’s things you’d never think of. In last night’s award ceremony, for example, the winner was the Mexican securities clearing house, Indeval.
Using operations research, they optimized the settlements of securities
transactions. Yes, it sounds boring. But it makes a difference, because
while transactions are closing, the banks have to hold onto money. This
new process reduced liquidity requirements by 52% in cash and 26% in
securities.
Just one sign of how much things have changed in Mexico: When I was the
BusinessWeek bureau chief in Mexico City, from 1987-92, we had
ridiculously high phone bills, both for the office and my home office
in the city of Cuernavaca. My secretary had to go to the bank with a
bodyguard. She would return with stacks of cash. I would drive them to
Cuernavaca, and my wife or I would take them to the telephone company
to pay the bill. Talk about high liquidity requirements to close slow
transactions.
Then there was the time we had our first of two babies in Mexico, in
1988. (He’s graduating from college next month.) The birth cost less
than $1,000. We expected they would bill us. But they demanded cash. We
couldn’t leave with the baby until we came up with it. It was Saturday
and our bank was closed. We did not have bank cards with access to
ATMs. So we had to call friends of ours, baptist missionaries, to scare
up enough money to bail out our baby.
