Has RBS run out of cash?

joe_blotts

purch wrote: »

Welcome to the forum.

Hopefully your future postings will be less moronic that your first :eek:

Thankyou.:)

sabretoothtigger

grizzly1911

BigAunty wrote: »

My partner works as a software tester and has long complained about the poor calibre of outsourced indian colleagues who are responsible for testing or maintaining the test environments.

I'm aware that in her field there are a lot of UK testers/developers who are bitter about the degree to which their field has moved overseas to save money. One of my software managers (a developer who worked in a defect management team) would tear his hair out at the quality of the testing work - "Do they grab these people off the street and say 'now you are a tester, get on with it'?"

My partner's frustration is around poor communication, poor documentation, weak processes, quality of work. They've lost count at the amount of time a test environment is taken down with no warning - up to a day's work regularly lost because the Indian back end teams can't manage simple scheduling activities and forewarn those using the environments when they will go offline. So they apologise and promise it won't happen again, and it happens regularly for the whole duration of the project, in fact pretty much any project my partner has worked on for any client, it's a standing joke.

Also, my partner maintains there are perhaps business/cultural issues which mean overseas colleagues won't say if they can't meet a deadline or have difficulty with a task - it simply doesn't get done. Or if a process isn't followed and they are notified about this, chances are it will be breached time and time again. Some kind of saving face or passive-aggression thing going on, perhaps.

So I wouldn't be surprised if there are ex RBS staff rubbing their hands with glee at the devastation wreaked by poor quality staff based in India.

EDIT - oh, dear me, the IT glitch originated in Edinburgh....Outsource more of the processing at once!!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2166379/RBS-boss-Stephen-Hester-forgoes-bonus-revealed-IT-glitch-originated-Edinburgh-NOT-India.html

FME it isn't just an issue with outsourcing it is also a drive to develop and apply applications rapidly. The argument being that it is cheaper to tweak errirs than spend hours/weeks/months testing to the nth degree.

The degree of operational risk accepted obviously being dependent on the sanctity of the system due to be impacted. Unfortunately those boundaries become ever greyer in effort to save cost.

Testing /support/recovery/resilience/documentation are poor bed fellows as are tried and tested back out procedures. It is one thing to have an known error it is another not to be able to rapidly retrieve functionality once found.

Doubt BAU teams will want to take that this one over from the project team in a hurry.

Generali

There can be advantages to outsourcing to India that go beyond cost saving.

We have a system at work that is supported by 1 person. The system is required to offline for no more than an hour in any working day under Aussie banking rules.

The trouble is, because only 1 person is wanted/needed to support it, holiday and sick cover isn't really acceptable as the person covering had limited experience, although is excellent at his normal job.

By outsourcing supporting this system we get to have a team that supports this system worldwide. That means we have a team of 7 people who all work on this single application all the time. I am confident that the quality of support will increase as well as the quantity because of this move.

I confess that I also have many examples of ops functions being disastrously outsourced or offshored. One went so badly that we had to bring the process back to London and try again! We were paying ten of thousands in late settlement fines (where you get penalised for delivering shares later than agreed) every day!

kabayiri

Computers eh?

Years ago it used to take a whole army of crooked people to ruin a bank.

Now with the aid of 'puters it can be done in a mere few seconds by a lax IT support person many miles away; or a rogue trader making hay with the 'special 9's account'; or the RBS board saying that they were quite happy to pay 9 million for ABN Amro but sadly some staff member mistyping the bid into ebay substituting the 'm' with the 'b'

Debt_Free_Chick

AIUI, the update was deployed at the weekend, but by Tuesday "things were not well". The upgrade was backed out, but didn't succeed and resulted in some data files, in the queue, being deleted.

A manual process was then necessary in order to determine which of the files in the batch had been applied; and which had not.

I don't get the impression that this was a sloppy process - but that the nature of the error was very unusual.

Still, we shall have to wait for the full explanation.

sabretoothtigger

The ABN price was €70bn plus another 21bn from BOA

Google insists RBS is valued at 120bn but its actually 12bn now I think or 23bn including unlisted government shares? http://www.investors.rbs.com/share-price-info
To buy that much and be valued so low is Alchemy in reverse

Rbs is eligible to pay dividends again now

Years ago it used to take a whole army of crooked people to ruin a bank.

Its nothing as organised as an army, its just human nature. The army would be the general population, computers allow that process to accelerate which is far more efficient and time saving.

If it wasnt for government we'd have gone from the ABN take over in 2007 to broke in 12 months, that is a perfect wrecking machine.
Instead we are luddlites protesting the inevitable and here we are wasting time 4 years later