Citi Spends $9 Billion on Tech Overhaul After Series of Costly Errors (yahoo.com) 12
Citigroup spent over $9 billion on technology and communications last year, almost a fifth of total operating expenses and a larger proportion than competitors, as the bank works to fix legacy software systems that have produced costly errors including accidentally wiring more than $900 million to Revlon creditors.
The bank has consolidated 12 international sanctions screening systems into one platform, retired 20 cash equities platforms and launched a replacement, and automated high-risk processes where "fat-finger" errors previously occurred. Recent mistakes included crediting one account with $81 trillion after an employee failed to remove zeros from an electronic form and a copy-paste error that almost missent $6 billion.
The bank has consolidated 12 international sanctions screening systems into one platform, retired 20 cash equities platforms and launched a replacement, and automated high-risk processes where "fat-finger" errors previously occurred. Recent mistakes included crediting one account with $81 trillion after an employee failed to remove zeros from an electronic form and a copy-paste error that almost missent $6 billion.
Too big too fail? How about too stupid to live? (Score:2)
I think you're pushing your low UID too far, but probably going for Funny. Maybe the moderators will think so someday?
My reaction to the story is that Citi is the worst bank I've ever dealt with, and that's saying something. I'm not sure if they are the bank that most deserves bankruptcy, however. After all I couldn't even open an account with Bank of America when I was stationed in California, and at the time that struck me as pretty evil and deserving of bankruptcy, too.
Three Internet points for anyone wh
Re: (Score:2)
Wells Fargo is pretty bad. Citibank strikes me more as incompetent than outright dishonest like Wells Fargo seems to be.
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Yeah my company's CEO thinks the same thing about our company's software. It seems so easy to create some web data input forms, right???
It is easy, until you have to deal with a million regulatory compliance rules, efficient, and reliable operation at scale, and security like Ft. Knox, and interoperability with a thousands of external APIs and data pipelines. Yeah sure, easy.
I'm glad I spent it quickly (Score:2)
More details on the $900M error (Score:4, Interesting)
The background on the $900M error. Citibank was supposed to make a payment on a loan on behalf of their customer. They accidentally paid off the loan. The problem for Citibank (and their client) was the client did not have $900M in the account to pay off the loan.
They sued to get the money back; however, a judge ruled against them. Part of the judge's reasoning was the $900M was supposed to paid off eventually so the recipients were not gifted money they were not entitled to get. If they accidentally deposited $900M in my bank account, they probably could get it back. I do not know internally what Citibank had to do to make up the shortfall themselves but it was clear it was all on Citibank to fix.
no (Score:1)
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I've actually seen something similar to that happen. A company I worked for accidentally doubled everyone's pay on a payrun. They could successfully reverse the transactions when the payment went into a regular bank account. But for employees who had their wages go directly towards paying off a mortgage, the transactions couldn't be reversed. They had to deduct it from the next payrun instead for those employees.
Will not make a difference (Score:2)
Citi was always the laughingstock of banking IT and that is not a money problem or a tech problem. That is a leadership problem. They made utterly pathetic errors 20 years ago and have learned nothing since then.
cost (Score:2)
This is just the cost of not keeping your internal policies and software up to date. They could have spent a million dollars (maybe less) every year since they were founded and avoided this to begin with, but no, they'd rather wait until critical failures start piling up.