As someone who works at a financial institution, it's news generally because money laundering activity tends to be highly profitable for banks, since they get to collect fees on those transactions. There are almost no incentives for us to flag transactions on our own (unless we're being super humanitarian) without legislation/regulation, because as long as they get their money there's no downside except for victims of the crimes that the money originally originated from.<p>At least in my opinion, the legislation and big-deal-making is merited in cases like this, for the benefit of society.
If you read the original article cited by the NYT (it's in German), it is using 'bug' not in the sense that all software has bugs, but in the sense of 'basic functionality was not working'. And that should be alarming, for critical software.<p><a href="https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=de&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sueddeutsche.de%2Fwirtschaft%2Fdeutsche-bank-it-panne-1.4456987" rel="nofollow">https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=de&tl=en&u=htt...</a>
This is a little different because Deutsche Bank is already under scrutiny in this area and therefore this is one piece of a larger story. It is similar to when Facebook has bugs that expose private user information. It raises questions like whether the "bug" is truly a bug or whether it is intended behavior, whether no bug exists and this is simply an easy excuse for inappropriate actions, whether the company actually cares about fixing the issue, and so on.<p>EDIT: I am sure what happened in this thread. Several comments, including this one, were decoupled from the comment they were responding to even though the original wasn't deleted or flagged. Removing that context makes some of these comments harder to follow.
You need to consider the larger context of this story, especially given Deutsche Bank's notorious reputation for allowing money laundering to happen under it's watch. Also, take a look at the story published last week about American Deutsche Bank executives refusing to pass along information to federal regulators regarding suspicious transactions involving the President of the United States and his son-in-law.<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/business/deutsche-bank-trump-kushner.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/business/deutsche-bank-tr...</a>
Financial software doesn't have bugs like web applications have bugs. In one place I worked the software was older than every person who worked in the company (from the time of punched cards) and the system had 5-9s uptime. The majority of bugs had been caught and fixed by then and to change anything in the software you had to submit a ten-page form. Plus, nobody I knew ever got to work on the actual code running the company's main business - you only got to write job running scripts and the like.<p>In that kind of shop a bug is a big deal.
Paul Jorion, a french writer and ex-"the Bank of the European Union" employee, said that he was pushed out of the company when he revealed a bug in risk-calculation software<p>I'm pretty sure this bug was known for some time as well
how convenient, with this in context <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/business/trump-deutsche-bank.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/business/trump-deutsche-b...</a>
The Base Rate Fallacy [0] suggests there's often a lot more true negatives than true positives. In this case a true negative is ignoring a non-fraudulent transaction and a true-positive is catching a fraudulent transaction.<p>As someone who never engages in fraudulent transactions, if I were a DB customer I'd be much more concerned about the false-negative rate of such software.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_rate_fallacy</a>
Financial software is special. It has to be. The value of our currency is literally directly dependent upon it. Imagine what would happen if tomorrow we woke up and it was revealed that there had been a persistent manipulation of the financial systems. When Walmart or some other large company goes to another country and says "we have $5 million, we need good and services" they would be met with "we don't believe those numbers in your bank software MEAN anything. PROVE they represent money and aren't just a bug." At that point, everything stops.<p>Well, everything that has no built-in means of proving legitimacy. I've read multiple times that the only real thing Bitcoin offers is protection against counterfeiting and no one gives a damn about that because faith in the system backs our money so counterfeiting isn't a big problem. In the hypothetical scenario, though, it becomes the primary problem, and overnight only cryptocurrency can be proven to mean anything at all. Everything else would just be unreliable nonsense numbers based on rotted code.
It would be interesting to know what the bug is.<p>I can't translate the German site as I can't really get to it due to a popup.<p>A math problem, just not checking some transactions, something else?
I remember similar answer was given from a bunch of corrupted employees after the Greek state found that their anti-corruption algorithms (written in Python btw) stopped reporting for incidents. In the end, after the inspection from major supervisors found that those guys working at the post over there "accidentally disabled" the reporting service and blamed the software.
The software was as buggy as management overseeing regulation of shady transactions at the firm: <a href="https://duckduckgo.com/?q=deutsche+bank+whistleblower&t=canonical&ia=web" rel="nofollow">https://duckduckgo.com/?q=deutsche+bank+whistleblower&t=cano...</a>
This is news?! All software has bugs. NYTimes is taking advantage of the general public’s ignorance of this fact to imply something sinister. Without additional information - such as it specifically targeted certain transactions - that is misleading.<p>Remember this when you read articles about subjects you are not knowledgeable about.<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect</a>
Bug or feature?<p>Also, wonder how they're verifying "The bank maintained that no suspicious transactions had slipped through as a result."
For the ones that don't see the links, Trump had to show his bank records of Deutsche Bank in the accusation of Russian money laundering.<p>And now they found a bug :)
Subjectively it feels like NYT publishes a lot more negative articles about Deutsche Bank than about any other bank, or at least those articles get upvoted much more frequently here. Does anyone know what's up with that? I would've assumed that most banks are equally terrible.