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May 19, 2026
Sometimes It's Better to Ask for Forgiveness
Quick question - how many of you have the Oracle Power Browser app on your phone?
Nobody?
Well, frankly I'm not surprised.
Let me tell you a story about that.
Back in 1994 many people were still referring to the Internet as the World Wide Web. They could just as easily have been referring to it as the Wild Wild West.
That was the world I walked into when I joined a company called Online Resources. Our CEO, Matt Lawlor, was a genuinely brilliant guy who had received a patent for conducting financial transactions over the ATM network.
The product they had built was a screen phone. A special, expensive, proprietary phone with a little display screen that let you check your bank balance and pay your bills.
There was just one problem.
Nobody had one.
Not me. Not my mother. Not anyone I knew.
They hired me in part to figure out ways to get more users.
The first thing we tried was an IVR version. Interactive Voice Response - the technology behind every automated phone system that has ever made you want to throw your handset across the room. Press 1 to check your balance. Press 2 to pay a bill. Press 3 to quietly reconsider your life choices.
The logic was sound. Everyone had a phone.
The experience, however, was something less than magical.
We needed a better answer.
At the time, Windows was everywhere. So we built a Windows app.
You still dialed in through our network of local Points of Presence - expensive little relay stations we maintained all over the country - but now anyone with a PC was a potential customer.
Progress.
Then in April 1995 I attended a conference in Chicago called Online Marketplace '95, sponsored by Jupiter Communications.
About 250 people attended from the key online players of the time: Citibank, Chase, AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe, Visa, Mastercard, Microsoft.
It was held at the Sheraton Chicago, though I use the word "held" loosely - we were crammed into a corner of their main ballroom while Bill Gates accepted the International Executive of the Year Award in the other ninety percent of the room.
We could practically hear the applause through the dividers.
One detail worth noting: of the thousand largest companies in the US, only 71 had a web presence when the conference opened Monday.
By Thursday the number was 85. I watched the World Wide Web grow by fourteen Fortune 1000 companies in four days.
I flew home convinced the Internet was going to be enormous. And the best part? The USER pays for it.
No more expensive Points of Presence. The customer connects on their own dime and we just show up waiting for them.
I wrote up a trip report and recommendations the day I returned.
I presented this to Matt, who looked at me the way you'd look at someone who just suggested we commute to work by hot air balloon.
This was, after all, 1995, and the Internet was still widely regarded as a place where academics argued about things and nobody made any money.
I explained it again.
One line from the conference had stayed with me, and I made sure Matt heard it too:
"The next three years are to learn, rather than earn."
A few months went by while I continued to research what it would take to integrate our existing infrastructure with a web front-end.
By August I had written a Product Concept and Development Proposal for something we called Web Teller.
The conclusion was blunt: "If we hesitate, we will find ourselves selling a commodity product against larger service companies against whose resources we cannot compete effectively."
Matt finally agreed to green light the project, told me to keep it simple, and allowed me to hire one programmer.
Our total development budget: just under $14,000.
For that, we were going to build one of the first internet banking systems in America.
We had one problem. We needed a browser with the strongest available encryption to secure transactions between the bank and the customer.
At the time, Netscape was king. But here was the thing - Netscape didn't include strong enough encryption in its standard version.
They had another version that did include a higher form of encryption but it was expensive.
For a scrappy little company trying to build internet banking on the cheap, that was a real problem.
Then in October I went to Internet World in Boston.
Larry Ellison took the stage and essentially declared war on the personal computer.
He called the PC a "ridiculous device."
He had a vision for cheap, diskless terminals - Network Computers - that would run everything off central servers.
And Oracle was building their own browser.
It was bold. It was provocative. It was exactly the kind of big swing that gets a crowd buzzing.
After the speech I found the Oracle PowerBrowser product manager and asked one question: does it support encryption?
It did. And it was going to cost a fraction of what Netscape wanted.
I flew home feeling like I had solved the puzzle.
We had a path. We had a browser. We had a bank - Wilber Bank - that was interested in what we were building, even if we were being somewhat... selective... about how we described the technical architecture to them.
We got to work.
Then one morning in November I picked up a copy of Computerworld magazine.
There on the cover: Microsoft's announcement of a new version of Internet Explorer. Free. Encryption included. Available to anyone running Windows.
I called the Oracle product manager immediately.
"Have you seen the latest Computerworld?" I asked.
He said he hadn't.
I told him he should probably find a copy as soon as possible.
I never spoke to him again.
What followed was something you rarely get to witness - an entire industry moving at once. Every browser maker followed Microsoft's lead.
Our encryption requirement went from being our hardest problem to the easiest line in our product spec: use a browser that supports encryption. Any browser. The customer's choice.
We kept building.
On December 4, 1995, our CEO Matt Lawlor announced Web Teller at the Bank Administration Institute's Retail Delivery Conference in Atlanta. A banking consulting firm preparing a report for the Department of the Treasury cited Online Resources as a "best-in-class role model" for data security.
We began testing before the end of the year.
On July 24, 1996 we launched Web-based home banking and bill payment services - available to any financial institution in America.
One week later, on July 31, Wilber National Bank in Oneonta, New York went live, becoming the first bank in America to offer its customers real-time internet banking and bill payment through any browser, on any device, connected to the ATM network.
The secret sauce wasn't just the browser. It was that we were already connected to the ATM network through Matt's patented infrastructure, which meant banks could plug into internet banking far faster than building systems from scratch.
Wells Fargo is often credited as the first major bank to offer online banking, having launched a website in May 1995 that allowed customers to view account activity and statements.
But viewing a statement and actually conducting a secure banking transaction over the internet are two very different things.
While Wells Fargo's customers were submitting feedback asking when they would be able to check their balances online, we were building the system that would let them do exactly that - and pay their bills at the same time, securely, connected directly to the ATM network.
By October we had signed our 50th financial institution.
As our head of sales put it at the time: "Other providers are scrambling to provide this type of real-time, integrated service - but the fact of the matter is, we're the only ones that can do and have done it."
At some point one of our early bank clients asked us to come in and explain in detail exactly how the system worked.
We gave a very thorough presentation.
They listened carefully.
There was a long pause when we finished.
I'm fairly certain that if they had fully understood what we were doing six months earlier, they never would have let us do it.
But there we were.
By the time everyone understood what we had built, it was already live.
Sometimes it really is better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
