Barclays not releasing funds due to India lockdown

mcpitman

Crashy_Time said:

mcpitman said:

Crashy_Time said:

Exposure limiting move IMO.

Doubt it.

Why?

Because what the OP has put simply isn't true.
There are no issues with Barclays fund dispersal's for mortgages.
What the OP has experienced is a poor excuse from a solicitor.
So nothing to do with "exposure limiting".

John_

Crashy_Time said:

Thrugelmir said:

The outstanding case work is being transferred back to the UK. India was completely locked down without any prior warning due to the virus threat. 

People can work from home though? How would that affect the transfer of funds?

You’re right, and every worker in India no doubt had a home office set up with a secure connection to the bank, and sufficient conferencing facilities that they’d simply wake up the next day and keep working as per normal...
My team in the bank mainly work from home now, and even in Western Europe we had to expend some serious effort to equip them to do this. We did manage the same for support staff in India, but these jobs are critical to the bank’s functioning, we could be in severe trouble if we lost a couple of days of their work. It’s idiocy to assume that a bank will waltz through an incident like this in a way that the less urgent functions transfer seamlessly to home working.

Bossypants

John_ said:

Crashy_Time said:

Thrugelmir said:

The outstanding case work is being transferred back to the UK. India was completely locked down without any prior warning due to the virus threat. 

People can work from home though? How would that affect the transfer of funds?

You’re right, and every worker in India no doubt had a home office set up with a secure connection to the bank, and sufficient conferencing facilities that they’d simply wake up the next day and keep working as per normal...
My team in the bank mainly work from home now, and even in Western Europe we had to expend some serious effort to equip them to do this. We did manage the same for support staff in India, but these jobs are critical to the bank’s functioning, we could be in severe trouble if we lost a couple of days of their work. It’s idiocy to assume that a bank will waltz through an incident like this in a way that the less urgent functions transfer seamlessly to home working.

I can only speak for my own firm, but it is a major multi-national bank, and our 'home office equipment' is two downloadable programs only, one for your computer, which gives you your full desktop access that you'd have at work (minus printing - you can still print but it comes out of the office printer, not your home one, so not much use if there's no one there), and one for your phone, for secure video conferencing. It's all Citrix-based, as were my previous firms, using the token system (either a hard token or a phone app). The thing that takes the longest is getting the approval for permission to get the token. 

Edit to add: Bear in mind that firms with outsourced locations will have business continuity plans for them (or they should do) in case of disaster-type scenarios. Any firm which doesn't and ends up majorly impacting UK customers as a result is about to get a very stern talking to from the regulator.

md258

You're assuming that all staff will have as many computers at home as people needing them and they have a good Internet connection. Probably true here, but not in India.  We only have one personal laptop between 2 of us (although both of us have work ones so that doesn't affect our ability to work).

John_

Bossypants said:

John_ said:

Crashy_Time said:

Thrugelmir said:

The outstanding case work is being transferred back to the UK. India was completely locked down without any prior warning due to the virus threat. 

People can work from home though? How would that affect the transfer of funds?

You’re right, and every worker in India no doubt had a home office set up with a secure connection to the bank, and sufficient conferencing facilities that they’d simply wake up the next day and keep working as per normal...
My team in the bank mainly work from home now, and even in Western Europe we had to expend some serious effort to equip them to do this. We did manage the same for support staff in India, but these jobs are critical to the bank’s functioning, we could be in severe trouble if we lost a couple of days of their work. It’s idiocy to assume that a bank will waltz through an incident like this in a way that the less urgent functions transfer seamlessly to home working.

I can only speak for my own firm, but it is a major multi-national bank, and our 'home office equipment' is two downloadable programs only, one for your computer, which gives you your full desktop access that you'd have at work (minus printing - you can still print but it comes out of the office printer, not your home one, so not much use if there's no one there), and one for your phone, for secure video conferencing. It's all Citrix-based, as were my previous firms, using the token system (either a hard token or a phone app). The thing that takes the longest is getting the approval for permission to get the token. 

Edit to add: Bear in mind that firms with outsourced locations will have business continuity plans for them (or they should do) in case of disaster-type scenarios. Any firm which doesn't and ends up majorly impacting UK customers as a result is about to get a very stern talking to from the regulator.

We have disaster recovery sites in each country where I have staff, but that’s no use when we have to distance staff.

To work at home properly we need dealer boards, speaker buses, Bloomberg keyboards, recorded lines, four screens each, and so on.

We then needed compliance and regulatory approval to carry out regulated activities out of office, cross-border agreements to allow staff who lived abroad to work from that phone, it was quite a list of efforts.

Crashy_Time

You don`t need all or most staff to have a full office set up at home to transfer money.

Bossypants

You certainly don't need Bloomberg and other trading floor bits to process mortgages, and the work a Barclays offshore centre won't be considered 'regulated activity', as they are merely the admin function supporting the regulated activity done here in the UK. Of course there will be exceptions, but for most functions performed by those centres, you really don't need much more than a PC, a smartphone and somewhere to sit and work, even if some processes might be more cumbersome remotely.

Crashy_Time

Exactly...