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Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

theregister.co.uk

11–20 of 114 posts

Re: Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

#11

what were these transactions for?

There is mention of trading data which suggests to me that it might be to do with traders employed by Citigroup ie staff members whose job it is to use a block of the bank's money or outside investor's money to buy and sell shares, commodities and pretty much anything where they believe they can buy and sell to turn a profit.

Re: Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

#13
post #6

I think the most impressive part is that apparently the same system and code had been running for 15 years as the number of transactions reported on had increased exponentially

I think it's the bad kind of impressive, one where ATMs still run COBOL.

i think the bad kind of impressive would be replacing a system that's had thousands of man-years of real world user testing without a really really really critical reason.

Re: Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

#14
post #6

I think the most impressive part is that apparently the same system and code had been running for 15 years as the number of transactions reported on had increased exponentially

I think it's the bad kind of impressive, one where ATMs still run COBOL.

I'd have to disagree on that part. The ATMs that the company I work for run Windows. We are the largest manufacturer, until the other 2 big ones finish merging.

Besides, C is 44 years old and used on a ton of stuff.

Re: Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

#15

$7m is pocket change for Citigroup. No wonder the big banks keep shitting the bed. There's never any real consequences for their fuckups.

> Citigroup failing to send information on 26,810 transactions in over 2,300 such requests.

26810 requests, do you think they made more than $7m on this?

It's about proportional fines. Just because they're a giant company doesn't mean we should find then $1b for forgetting to put a handicapped parking space at one of their offices.

Re: Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

#16
post #6

I think the most impressive part is that apparently the same system and code had been running for 15 years as the number of transactions reported on had increased exponentially

I think it's the bad kind of impressive, one where ATMs still run COBOL.

Why do you think it's necessary to constantly re-write code using the latest popular trends?

Programmers reinvent the universe every few years, but really nobody else does.

Re: Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

#17
post #6

I think the most impressive part is that apparently the same system and code had been running for 15 years as the number of transactions reported on had increased exponentially

They did, it just left out a few transactions (26,810 transactions over 15 years is a very small number).

Re: Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

#18

$7m is pocket change for Citigroup. No wonder the big banks keep shitting the bed. There's never any real consequences for their fuckups.

These fines are fundamentally stupid: yes, Citi's IT fucked up, but the fault is with the regulators for having such braindead reporting requirements to begin with.

Instead of something sensible like "you trade, you report", the regulators have set up a patchwork of formats, inclusion criteria and target agencies that pretty much ensures that lapses like this occur. Turning Frank-Dodd into workable code is fucking hard: I spent a couple of years pushing that boulder up the slope until I ragequit a couple of months ago.

The regulators should be ingesting data in one place and running analytics on a data lake. The banks are so sick of spending money dealing with the lack of regulatory technical competence that they'll probably happily pony up a couple of billion dollars between them to set up the surveillance system for the Feds; doing it once is cheaper in the long run than repeating the same set of mistakes at every bank on the Street.

Re: Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

#19
post #2

They didn't lose anything, they were FINED $7m for submitting incorrect reports. With the number of mergers that they have gone through it's not surprising they have trouble with company wide reporting.

This is the gist of it:

"But in 1998, the company started using alphanumeric branch codes as it expanded its business. Among them were the codes 10B, 10C and so on, which the system treated as being within the excluded range, and so their transactions were removed from any reports sent to the SEC."

Re: Citigroup fined $7m after legit transactions mistaken for test data for 15 years

#20
post #5

Seems to be something like "089" < x < "100", should never use "range" to handle string ids.

There's probably a comment above it // XXX: too general, revisit when we have more than 100 branches

Should have written TODO
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