Has RBS run out of cash?

Generali

PaulF81 wrote: »

Out of interest gen, what were the procedures in force for moving such sums? Was it down to an individual, or did you have to have a cross check before executing the transaction with another party?

The office I was in supported an FX and money market dealing room so we did a lot of trades for different reasons.

Most often, we would pay the money to the same place every time: when company X bought AUD from us they always wanted them paid to the same place so that was where they went. In that case, the funds were basically paid automatically. What happened after that wa neither my concern or my business.

If Company X wanted us to pay that AUD somewhere else then the control was that they had to send a message, probably a fax at that time, to their Relationship Manager. It was the RM's job to sanction us paying the funds to a third party.

It would be between Company X and the bank exactly what controls were in place around Co X authorizing payment. Normally there'd be a list of people that Co X trusted to sign payments, perhaps with limits attached to them so Dave could sign up to £1,000,000 but needed Diana to sign anything above that.

On the bank side you had someone prepare a payment and then 2 managers had to agree it.

The biggest single payment I ever made was $4,500,000,000 which I paid on behalf of a UK utilities company. It was the result of an FX trade. I have no idea what the money was used for. We made a packet on it though, I know that much.

paddyrg

Generali wrote: »

That was certainly the case for one of the other clearing banks in 2000. I was paying £000,000,000s a day across the world on an orange-screened terminal.

I fully believe it! Those mainframes were huge and expensive, but they *worked* brilliantly. When they advertised 'five nines' uptime, the downtime was a scheduled fornight each decade for maintenance! And the software running is actually relatively simple and very stable as it was written by mathematicians with no system resources to waste on flashy menues or other shinyshiny, and has been in service for decades with (at lastt!) all the bugs ironed out! It is all the layers of homebrew surrounding it that cause problems!

kabayiri

Listening to the news it seems that the bank was a victim of a change to existing software having unpredicted results in the batch. This situation can always occur, regardless of how thorough you may believe your testing processes are.

The next line of defence is then well integrated checks and balances to spot any changes in the batch operation - things like a simple count of transactions compared to a previous period. Then it comes down to the efficiency and quality of your recovery procedures.

We may never know the actual detail here, but we should have some transparency in the investigation. It isn't a solution just to fire someone. They need to examine the monitoring systems and recovery processes and use this as a learning exercise.

Generali

paddyrg wrote: »

I fully believe it! Those mainframes were huge and expensive, but they *worked* brilliantly. When they advertised 'five nines' uptime, the downtime was a scheduled fornight each decade for maintenance! And the software running is actually relatively simple and very stable as it was written by mathematicians with no system resources to waste on flashy menues or other shinyshiny, and has been in service for decades with (at lastt!) all the bugs ironed out! It is all the layers of homebrew surrounding it that cause problems!

They did work. I was there 4.5 years and I can't recall us not being able to make payments for more than the occasional few minutes. I reckon organising the Friday breakfast run took more time out of work than failures in the payment systems!

I reckon that we used to pay and receive £30,000,000,000 a day easily in that office. I used to reckon on a very rough average of $3,000,000,000 a day going through my hands and there were about 40 of us in the team.

paddyrg

Off-topic for a moment... well kinda...

Question: Who is the odd one out from the following list?
Lord Stevenson, former chairman, HBOS
Andy Hornby, former chief executive, HBOS
Sir Fred Goodwin, former chief executive, RBS
Sir Tom McKillop, former chairman, RBS
John McFall MP, chairman of Treasury select committee
Alister Darling, Chancellor of the Exchequer
Sir Terry Wogan, presenter of Radio 2 breakfast show
.

.

.

Answer: Sir Terry Wogan. He is the only one with a banking qualification.
Acknowledgement: Private Eye

The_J

A lot of this is a result of transferring to new systems.

Just because a computer (hardware or software) was built in the 60s doesn't make it bad. In fact, because everything back then is comparatively so simple they rarely go wrong. Sure, you can't do much with them and they look like Tetris but for the tasks they were designed to do they are absolutely fine. It's the new stuff, with layers upon layers of functionality and additional coding, where a small change can !!!! everything up.

Remember, man put people on the moon with 60s computers.

The_J

Generali wrote: »

That was certainly the case for one of the other clearing banks in 2000. I was paying £000,000,000s a day across the world on an orange-screened terminal.

I can't believe you had colour... :rotfl: You babies had it easy.

purch

Generali wrote: »

The office I was in supported an FX and money market dealing room so we did a lot of trades for different reasons.

You'd have hated working in my back office Gen.

No time for a breakfast run, you'd be spending all day sorting out the !!!!-ups I'd made on me deals :eek:

beaujolais-nouveau

PaulF81 wrote: »

Seems a pretty lame excuse that "the software wasn't tested".

The software upgrade story looks to be a red herring.

http://news.sky.com/story/952931/fraud-ring-in-hacking-attack-on-60-banks

Some 60m euro is stolen from bank accounts in a massive cyber raid, after fraudsters raid dozens of banks around the world.

pinkteapot

beaujolais-nouveau wrote: »

The software upgrade story looks to be a red herring.

http://news.sky.com/story/952931/fraud-ring-in-hacking-attack-on-60-banks

Some 60m euro is stolen from bank accounts in a massive cyber raid, after fraudsters raid dozens of banks around the world.

Eh? The banks affected aren't mentioned so you can't assume it included RBS-Natwest. And EUR60m really isn't a great amount in the grand scheme of a group the size of RBS-Natwest even if they were affected.