Making the rounds is the story of how Citi accidentally transferred $900 million dollars to various hedge funds. Citi then asked the funds to reverse the mistaken transfer, and while some of the funds did, others said, “no, it’s ours, and we’re keeping it”, and Citi took them to court, and lost. The wonderful finance writer Matt Levine has the whole story. At this center of this is horrible UX associated with internal software, you can see screenshots in Levine’s writeup. As an aside, several folks on the Hacker News thread recognized the UI widgets as having been built with Oracle Forms.
However, this post isn’t about a particular internal software package with lousy UX. (There is no shortage of such software packages in the world, ask literally anyone who deals with internal software).
Instead, I’m going to explore two questions:
- How come we don’t hear about these sorts of accidental financial transactions more often?
- How come financial organizations like Citibank don’t invest in improving internal software UX for reducing risk?
I’ve never worked in the financial industry, so I have no personal experience with this domain. But I suspect that accidental financial transactions, while rare, do happen from time to time. But what I suspect happens most of the time is that the institution that initiated the accidental transaction reaches out and explains what happens to the other institution, and they transfer the money back.
As Levine points out, there’s no finders keepers rule in the U.S. I suspect that there aren’t any organizations that have a risk scenario with the summary, “we accidentally transfer an enormous sum of money to an organization that is legally entitled to keep it.” because that almost never happens. This wasn’t a case of fraud. This was a weird edge case in the law where the money transferred was an accidental repayment of a loan in full, when Citi just meant to make an interest payment, and there’s a specific law about this scenario (in fact, Citi didn’t really want to make a payment at all, but they had to because of a technical issue).
Can you find any other time in the past where an institution accidentally transferred funds and the recipient was legally permitted to keep the money? If so, I’d love to hear it.
And, if it really is the case that these sorts of mistakes aren’t seen as a risk, then why would an organization like Citi invest in improving the usability of their internal tools? Heck, if you read the article, you’ll see that it was actually contractors that operate the software. It’s not like Citi would be more profitable if they were able to improve the usability of this software. “Who cares if it takes a contractor 10 minutes versus 30 minutes?” I can imagine an exec saying.
Don’t get me wrong: my day job is building internal tools, so I personally believe these tools add value. And I imagine that financial institutions invest in the tooling of their algorithmic traders, because correctness and development speed go directly to their bottom lines. But the folks operating the software that initiates these sorts of transactions? That’s just grunt work, nobody’s going to invest in improving those experiences.
In short, these systems don’t fall over all of the time because the systems aren’t just made up of horrible software. They’re made up of horrible software, and human beings who can exercise judgment when something goes wrong and compensate. Most of the time, that’s good enough.
Surfing Complexity 