Operations
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People Anatomy™
A spotter’s guide to the men and women of finance.
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Operations
/ˌɒpəˈreɪʃənz/ (n.)
The dirty, undignified business of making real, and then keeping on the road, all the fantastical confabulations that between them sales, trading and the legal eagles dream up to put the bank into.
It is astounding how little resemblance the manicured legal contracts bear to the real operational ebbs and flows in a bank’s systems — or, at any rate, it would be astounding, to anyone having the systems access and technical competence to understand them and compare them. Alas and alack: there are no such persons in the organisation: the impermeable division and atomic itemisation of responsibilities rendered by the service catalog will have seen to that. It’s odd, really: we call this “specialisation”. Brain surgeons call it “lobotomy”.
Since the legal eagles never see the operational work, this is of no moment to them. They will spend weeks arguing amongst themselves to shut down the paranoid contingencies that populate the Cartesian theatre of a lawyer’s imagination, notwithstanding that they've never manifested themselves in anyone’s actual experience, are not monitored, can’t be monitored, and do not feature in any operational flows. See, for example: close-out netting; cross default; NAV triggers.
Operations staff have no more interest in what the legal contracts say. Honestly, what does it matter? They’ve got enough on their plate already, thank you very much, just trying to make the jury-rigged cats cradle of systems from the 1980s that comprise the operations infrastructure even work, let alone talk to each other, let alone perform the simple operations than modern financial markets require. The story of the Citibank error on its Revlon loan — part modern morality tale, part psychological horror — tells you everything you need to know.
That is, in short, that all operations personnel are, eventually, damned. There is only one way out that doesn’t involve a toe-tag and a cardboard box, and that is up.
Now up to a certain level of seniority, operations folk see themselves as misshapen bell ringers of the financial services world[1], doing the grubby but necessary work to ensure the congregation is on time, well dressed and properly presented for evensong.
Imperceptibly, as they grow, they will discover a taste for the contorted figures of speech of the sedimentary middle management layer that sits over them generating byzantine PowerPoints, segueing from opco to steerco. These young scallywags soon intuit that, if they wish to avoid the executive recommendations of these steercos — that their functions be outsourced, right-sized, or delegated to a fleet of chatbots — they need to ascend into that management layer so they can be the ones making these recommendations, and overseeing their inevitable remediation, rather than being systematically dismembered by them.