The title might suggest that the rollout of new software was the issue, but the article states the very contrary: it was the old software that was the culprit:<p>> An internal review at the bank found humans manually operating the <i>old</i> software were ultimately at fault
This is the key part:<p>"But the employee didn’t select the correct system options -- instead allowing the loan to be repaid in full with interest. Colleagues who are supposed to catch such errors didn’t."<p>Saved you a click.
I'm put on a banking project (as external) which already flushed down the toilet around ~$500M. Based on my experiences of the meetings and meetings about meetings, I totally understand how the incompetence lead to this clusterfuck.<p>My question to my boss was rather: "but _where_ do these banks get this huge amount of money from? I guess it's not from the $5 account fees." He answered that although he is in the banking business for decades, he still doesn't know.<p>These 100s of Millions of losses are not necessarily threatening core business. I find it amusing.
I worked at Citi for a very short time way back when. We were doing some things I thought were a bit “sketchy”, and was wondering if we were breaking the law.<p>The response from my boss: we’re only breaking the law if we get caught, so theoretically we’re not actually breaking the law since no one has “caught us.”<p>Guess there was some logic there. Of course this was a very long time ago. And sure they follow those pesky banking rules now
, never, ever “breaking the law.”
From the blameful-postmortem:<p>Q. Why did we click `Send $900M?`
A. Not sure. Tom felt all clicky-clicky, so he clicked it.<p>Q. Why did we hire Tom?
A. Also not sure. [Action Item: Fire Tom]
Somewhere in your company hiring queue is a resume with:<p>Strengths: Architecting risk management systems<p>Weaknesses: Sometimes I click on things to see what happens
reminds me of that missile alerting system gif..<p><a href="https://giphy.com/gifs/emibob-ads-missile-warning-system-xULW8wq0KtPBfXPRpC" rel="nofollow">https://giphy.com/gifs/emibob-ads-missile-warning-system-xUL...</a>
stupid article. Reveals nothing of what contributed to the human error.<p>They had been using the legacy software for many many years, w/o significant issues around human errors.
Expected, someone should have caught it in code review. Switch statements are generally harder to follow than if/else chain and fallthrough etc make it even more complicated.
I assume financial software has the concept of a set of atomic transactions - ie. "debit bob $X and credit mary $X".<p>Given that, presumably all buttons an operator clicks should generate a set of atomic transactions between customers and the bank.<p>An automated system can then check that the total loss to the bank after these transactions have been executed isn't too big.<p>I can't really imagine how any bit of software didn't have those checks in place...