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Comment by tvanantwerp | Hacker News Reader

100% agree. My wife works in private banking, and her descriptions to me of the IT/software environment they have to deal with are absurd.

Recently, the integration of a new loan management system was badly botched and several clients have been hit by it. Bills not going out, therefore not being paid, therefore money being taken forcibly from their accounts without notice. And these are customers with millions each in the bank. This has been ongoing for a couple of months now. The client managers themselves are irate--they've been cultivating these relationships for years, and it's all been jeopardized.

How can so many banks be so blind to the fact that everything they do depends on getting the technology right?

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My theory has always been that the people in senior positions at these companies tend to be older and have come up through the ranks before IT was quite as integral to their operations.

So they don't understand technology and therefore tend to not take it as seriously as they should.

That said, that argument starts to hold less water these days. I had my first job in a web-focused bank 18 years ago now!

One of the consequences I've seen (and I'm guessing its even more prevalent these days with easy access to cloud computing resources) is that bad IT in banks leads to the rise of Shadow IT where departments take it on themselves to work around the main corporate IT function.

I studied business school in the mid 00s where most textbooks/classes still insisted that IT systems could be procured as standardized off the shelf products, despite the fact that all serious studies show that process management* and IT systems form a symbiotic relationship that makes it almost impossible to change one without the other.

*Business management is process management for most organizations.

I'm positive this is it. You see this all the time with medicine and government too - lots of old, successful people who don't like having to adapt to something new and difficult to learn

Why is it always the "notifying" part that breaks with shitty software like this, and not the "money being taken forcefully" part, which always seems to work flawlessly? Doesn't that seem a little suspicious?

If they were uniformly bad at writing software, the critical money handling part should fail at roughly the same rate. If they can get that part to work reliably, failure of other parts of the system seem particularly inexcusable.

The product owners most likely decided to budget their time/resources accordingly so if something did fail it wasn't critical money handling part.

Always my favorite. You can take money out of my account instantly. Refund? "You should see that in your account in 3-4 weeks". Just brazen, at times.

It's possible the withdrawals do break sometimes, but undercharging people results in far fewer irate phone calls.

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