Operator

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Who management inevitably blames when system errors make themselves known. We see an unfolding example in the horrifying case of Citigroup v Brigade Capital Management, wherein a right-shored, outsourced operations center in India — staffed of course, with the proverbial School-leavers from Bucharest, or Hyderabad at any rate — erroneously sent out nearly a yard of cash to some lenders to a distressed cosmetics firm ho weren’t expecting it, and then refused to give it back.

Now Revlon had a number of related loans of different seniorities, different lenders, paying different amounts on different days, and it was quite the exercise in mental yoga for Citi’s team in India just to sort out who was owed what. But that was nothing compared to the cognitive trapeze artistry required to trick Citi’s antiquated system pay the right people the right amounts: something it did not seem capable of doing straightforwardly. This extract from the judgment rings horribly true of IT installations the JC has encountered in his unglamorous career:

On Flexcube, the easiest (or perhaps only) way to execute the transaction to pay the [other] Lenders their share of the principal and interim interest owed as of August 11, 2020, and then to reconstitute the 2016 Term Loan with the remaining Lenders — was to enter it in the system as if paying off the loan in its entirety, thereby triggering accrued interest payments to all Lenders, but to direct the principal portion of the payment to a “wash account”—“an internal Citibank account that shows journal entries ... used for certain Flexcube transactions to account for internal cashless fund entries and ... to help ensure that money does not leave the bank.”

This, we humbly submit, was an accident waiting to happen. Not because of poor or substandard operators, but because of manifestly inadequate software.

You can be sure an entire concatenation of people up the reporting line from the poor fellow who pushed the buttons to — well, the Chief Risk Officer and ultimately Citi’s CEO — were handed their pink slips, but we ask was the error really the individual’s, or the bank’s strategic, management decision to outsource, its tactical decision to design poor interface where this kind of thing

See also

• Sidney Dekker’s The Field Guide to Human Error Investigations