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Judge: Citibank isn't entitled to $500M it sent to various creditors last August

• bilekas 6y ago
  > he noticed there was something drastically off about the previous day's figures I thought I've had bad mornings..
• MattGaiser 6y ago
  Used to work in banking innovation and have plenty of friends that work/have worked at banks. Bad UIs cause errors and inability to help customers all the time.
  • mstade 6y ago
    I have worked for tier 1 banks for 6+ years in total and concur with the aforementioned statement about bad UI. My experience though is that no one wants to be bad obviously, and there’s plenty of effort to improve things, but big banks move slowly and corporate structures often inhibit swift innovation. Edit: regulation doesn’t help either. Very often not enough time and effort is spent translation legal requirements into usable UI, and you have be both a legal and software expert to understand what you’re doing. If you get it wrong, you may well have just signed away all your money. Case in point: power of attorney features, pretty much everywhere.
• meagher 6y ago
  Technology as a literal cost center.
• airstrike 6y ago
  > Raj thought that checking the "principal" checkbox and entering the number of a Citibank wash account would ensure that the principal payment would stay at Citibank. He was wrong. To prevent payment of the principal, Raj actually needed to set the "front" and "fund" fields to the wash account as well as "principal." Raj didn't do that. I don't even have anything to add. The paragraph speaks for itself... You can't make this up
  • gzer0 6y ago
    If you read literally the next few lines: > Citibank's procedures require that three people sign off on a transaction of this size. In this case, that was Raj, a colleague of his in India, and a senior Citibank official in Delaware named Vincent Fratta. All three believed that setting the "principal" field to an internal wash account number would prevent payment of the principal. As he approved the transaction, Fratta wrote: "looks good, please proceed. Principal is going to wash."
    • airstrike 6y ago
      I'm not sure that changes anything. The human error here is in the design, not in the execution.
      • hjek 6y ago
        It speaks even worse of that interface. It means that the design was not only bad enough to confuse a single individual but also the two others meant to act as safety mechanism.
    • yrgulation 6y ago
      Unrelated, but is it a good idea make the names of those employees public? Wondering how this will end up affecting their lives, when in fact it was caused by a UI issue and lack of proper training on how to use it.
    • m12k 6y ago
      Thing is, even with a UI as shitty as this, you would still have caught this if before actually committing the transaction, the software had a "before" and "after" view to show the effect of the change. Raj caught the error during a routine inspection the next morning, so the same view he used for that, presented before the change had been committed, would have allowed him to avoid the error.
      • pdpi 6y ago
        That would, by itself, make the UI less shitty. Also, if you're the sort of person who thinks in those terms, you're also likely the sort of person who'd have come up with a better design overall anyway.
• taylorwc 6y ago
  As usual, it's worth going out of your way to read Matt Levine's column on the matter [0]. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-17/citi-can-t-have-its-900-million-back https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-02-17/citi-c...
  • edf13 6y ago
    Not really - that site hijacks the browsers back button!
    • hjek 6y ago
      There's these web browser extensions that let you disable JavaScript for that reason. Websites can do way more than just hijack your browser button if your browser just runs any and all JS it receives. See for example https://theannoyingsite.com/ https://theannoyingsite.com/ but at your own risk.
• onli 6y ago
  This really is an awesome example of a bad UI. These are exactly the kind of UIs you see in the enterprise all the time, with the article containing the totally crazy description of what was expected plus the screenshots to show that there was absolutely no way to get this, if not being the programmer who wrote it (and even then, no guarantee at all to get it right). To have a somewhat exact approach of detecting and fixing issues like this, that is what usability is all about. So it's really the design of the software and not just the style of it that was wrong and had to be improved. A usability professional would have caught that immediately - and would have been way cheaper.
  • DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
    > A usability professional would have caught that immediately - and would have been way cheaper. To be fair, lots of risk-mitigation investments are cheaper in hindsight, once you know the risk actually got realized.
    • onli 6y ago
      That's true in general, but not in this case. The UI shown in the screenshot violates every single usability principle for dialogues as defined in DIN ISO 9241-110 - and that's just one part of the screen! I'm 100% you put that in front on a random usability professional and he will immediately see that the UI is wrong. Explain on top of that the scheme for the interest payments and he will notice that the UI does not fit to that purpose at all. Why would paying interests involve a wash account and a real money transfer at all? If that's the job to do the UI has to facilitate it directly, not with crazy schemes. That's Aufgabenangemessenheit (to be fit for the purpose, not sure about the official translation) and it's the highest dialogue principle. That got completely ignored here. This was never usability tested, I'm certain - or if it was the results were ignored.
      • DoofusOfDeath 6y ago
        Sorry, I think my post above was confusing. Please let me clarify: There seems to be a huge number of fields-of-expertise that potentially have bearing on my life or work. E.g., urologists, transmission repair techs, indoor air quality experts, sleep therapists, house painters, early childhood education consultants, therapists/counselors, sports trainers, physical therapists, housecleaners, etc. In my experience, most of those fields have practitioners who are sure they could help you avoid future problems; you just have to hire them to see the benefit! Or at the very least, invest time in helping them understand your particular situation so they can give more detailed advice. I could easily believe that most of them are correct, too. But each of us, even in a business setting, has limited funds and time/bandwidth to deal with such specialists. In my post above, I was trying to say that knowing which of these many specialists one should have engaged with isn't always clear ahead of time. E.g., maybe I didn't need to bring my car to a transmission repair shop, when the only real problem I'd have in the near year is back pain from poor sitting posture.
• kumarharsh 6y ago
  Wow, what an interesting piece of UI to manage such a critical piece of financial process. Banks are probably one of the worst offenders of UI and UX design, and half the times, I can't even reason why.
• netsharc 6y ago
  They should just add a checkbox that says "Dry run" to see if the money would be transferred to the right place... I'll take $100,000 for this consultancy recommendation, thanks Citibank. ;)
  • ed25519FUUU 6y ago
    Or a confirmation box with actual numbers: “Do you really want to send $XX to account A and $XX to account B”? Even if you think you have an excellent, fool-proof UX, always make people confirm big things.
    • JackFr 6y ago
      Matt Levine's article, which has some greater detail, pointed out that there was an "Some of this money is going to an external account. Are you sure this is correct?" confirmation pop-up. The problem was they intended to actually send the interest, so there was an assumption that that's what the dialog was referring to.
      • PeterisP 6y ago
        What I read in parent post is that if instead of a generic message it would tell what exactly it is doing ($xxx is going to AAA and $yyy is going to BBB) then that would have helped.
    • mdpopescu 6y ago
      You forget the first law of UI: nobody reads messages. And the second law of UI: if the user wants to see porn^H^H^H^Hdancing bunnies, they will do everything they can until they get to the dancing bunnies.
    • 1996 6y ago
      You are unfairly downvoted, while giving the proper answer. For complex actions, the UI should summarize the future result of the comment - not so little as to be useless (ex: "some of the money will go to an external account" = how much money? on which external account? only one? more?) and not much as to be a description of the underlying software process (as a debugging output would) This requires both domain knowledge and software literacy, so it is hardly found, if ever.
• bravoetch 6y ago
  I bet flexcube is extremely expensive software too. And I dont just mean because of the mistakes that must be made all the time.
  • noisy_boy 6y ago
    Flexcube was developed by i-Flex Solutions which was originally called Citicorp Information Technology Industries Ltd (CITIL) and was actually spun off Citibank. Citibank invested about USD 400,000 in it and though I don't have direct details of how much they paid to use it, it wouldn't be a bad guess to assume that as the original/founding investor in the firm, they probably got a very sweet deal. Oracle buying Flexcube from i-Flex happened much later. I remember using Infosys's Finacle in 1998 (it was called Bancs2000 then). It had a TUI interface and was very snappy until they moved to a web based version and called it Finacle. We hated it because it couldn't keep up with muscle memory everyone had developed on the TUI. Flexcube came a bit later and started to gain momentum around 2005-2006. PS: also wanted to add that most of the issues I've seen in these banking software are due to never-ending customizations demanded by the banks. The core products are usually well designed. There is basically an entire industry around core banking customizations and a lot of people working in that are basically old-school bankers who have migrated to technology (nothing wrong with that) - a good portion of them have excellent business knowledge but not much idea of UI/UX.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• m3kw9 6y ago
  Ambiguous UI for bank operations can be deadly
• gzer0 6y ago
  > Ordinarily, the law would be on Citibank's side here. Under New York law, someone who sends out an erroneous wire transfer—for example, sending a payment to the wrong account—is entitled to get the money back. > But the law makes an exception when a debtor accidentally wires money to a creditor. In that case, if the creditor doesn't have prior knowledge the payment was a mistake, it's free to treat it as a repayment of the loan. There's a major UI issue here, no doubt about it. But, it's important to also point out how bizzare this exception is, how did this even get included as the one and only exception?
  • taylorwc 6y ago
    Just from a 30k foot view, the lender has a valid legal claim to that money. If you accidentally paid your mortgage or rent without meaning to, should the lender have an obligation to return it?
    • trackrn6 6y ago
      Yes they should, but the banks carved out an exemption in the law so they don't have to. Sorry citi
    • kempbellt 6y ago
      For an unintentional payment, I agree. For an accidental overpayment, an argument could be made that the payer has a legal claim to a refund of the overpaid amount. If you take out a $200,000 home loan with $200 minimum payments and accidentally make a $2000 payment ($1800 over the required minimum), I can see a request for an $1800 return being legally valid - granted you aren't behind on payments. If you are behind, I would argue that including the total past-due, whatever is still overpaid, can legally be requested for return. So if you owe 3 payments, a request for $1400 returned would be legally valid. However, if you are behind on payments, it could also be argued that you've breached trust with the lender and any money they receive from you is now theirs until the balance is $0. This is something that should be explicitly discussed in a loan contract prior to agreement. Comparing an bank-to-individual loan and a bank-to-bank loan is a bit apples to oranges, but a massive unintentional overpayment can have serious ramifications, and I wouldn't write it off as simply as, "Well, you owe them a grand total of X, and even though you only owe them Y per month and overpaid, you don't get any of what you overpaid back".
• pratio 6y ago
  3 people were required to okay the transaction and none of them saw anything wrong with it. This is not just bad UI but bad user trainings as well. Mistakes happen and in systems as complex as these with very few visual cues this was an accident waiting to happen and when it did, it was an expensive one. I was moaning when i had to use SAP for a little while
  • airstrike 6y ago
    Ideally, nobody should ever be trained to memorize convoluted incantations to make software behave as expected. This is 100% bad design.
• cambalache 6y ago
  So, we have Citibank, a shitty financial institution. Revlon who is in terminal phase and who screwed up its creditors. Money-lenders. This is like a Roman-Empire time gladiator combat of criminals who were sentenced to death.
• maxwell 6y ago
  Wasn't actually about the UI, here's the buried lede: > Ordinarily, paying back a loan early wouldn't be a big deal, since the parties could simply negotiate a new loan on similar terms. But in this case, some of the lenders were not on good terms with Revlon and Citibank.
  • kcg 6y ago
    That's not actually the point of this article. Many many lenders are not on good terms with their counterparties. Distressed debt and bankruptcy exist. And yet, I've never heard of another story of a bank accidentally wiring nearly a billion dollars to creditors. Source: spent several years working in the loan and high yield space at a well-known fund.
    • PeterisP 6y ago
      The amount is unusually large for this type of mistake, making it newsworthy, but it isn't particularly unique. I have personally seen a couple cases of various mistakes in banking (both on customer and bank's side) causing accidental repayment of debt that otherwise would be unrecoverable as the payer became insolvent. Mistakes happen. Human processes and technical processes can help make a bit less mistakes, UX is part of that.
• pyreal 6y ago
  Kitboga would find this supremely ironic.
• Jtsummers 6y ago
  If you're involved in designing critical systems (whatever critical may mean to you and your customers), I can recommend this book for a collection of case studies of where things went wrong: Tragic Design by Shariat and Saucier https://www.amazon.com/Tragic-Design-Impact-Bad-Product/dp/149192361X/ https://www.amazon.com/Tragic-Design-Impact-Bad-Product/dp/1... If you have an O'Reilly subscription, you can read it on their site.
• EGreg 6y ago
  $900M
  • Smaug123 6y ago
    Nope: some of the recipients sent back the money Citibank hadn't intended to pay.
    • joshgoldman 6y ago
      Did you even read the article?
      • cobythedog 6y ago
        > Some of the creditors sent the money back. But others refused, leaving Citibank out $500 million.
• mumblemumble 6y ago
  If ever there were a direct challenge to the (regrettable) idea that UX experts are just a luxury, it's this.
• lefstathiou 6y ago
  I would like to point out that Flexcube is built by Oracle. Citi's mistake here was in tying themselves to what is likely the "safest", "market leading" solution. If you all could see how frustrating Ariba (by SAP) is, you'd have a great laugh.
  • kibwen 6y ago
    Does Citibank have a case against Oracle? OSS licenses all have that "this software is not fit for any purpose at all, don't even think about suing us if it goes wrong" clause, which would seem to imply that licensing poorly-made software can be grounds for a lawsuit.
    • peeters 6y ago
      > which would seem to imply that poorly-made software can be grounds for a lawsuit. That doesn't necessarily follow, lawyers have a long tradition of including "cover your ass" clauses even if they don't think it's likely that they would be liable without it.
    • lostcolony 6y ago
      It could just as easily imply that OSS looked at commercial software and said "holy crap that's a lot of legalese; we better have some of that to make sure we don't get sued, since we don't even get to decide who uses what we put out there"
    • tedunangst 6y ago
      Sounds like the software does exactly what the (absurd) specification calls for. Somebody at Citi asked for a "front" knob, and they got one.
    • PeterisP 6y ago
      Ha - whatever OSS licences say, when you're dealing with terms written by Oracle lawyers, you're getting even less chances of successfully suing them if it goes wrong. You can argue about their technology, but the legal part of Oracle is quite capable, so much that I would assert that Citibank does not have a case against Oracle no matter what the software did. Pretty much all commercial software contracts includes similar idemnification clauses - they can't include the "not fit for any purpose" but the "if it goes wrong, it's not our problem" part definitely is there; and if it turns out to be not fit for purpose (which is ridiculously unlikely to prove for any actual product that's not totally made-up-nonexistent-fraudulent thing) then you might get back some of what you paid for it, but not for the losses you had due to it failing, assuming the licence/contract wasn't written by incompetent idiots.
• noxer 6y ago
  misleading title They send back money before they had to some returned it back but 500M didn't came back that's not a 500M mistake at all. stop support that click-bait nonsense
  • u678u 6y ago
    I thought so too, but the Matt Levine article says the debt was trading at 42c in the dollar, so likely people didn't expect the debt to be repaid. This makes the loss $300mm instead of $500mm, but is worse than your (and mine) initial take.
• fudged71 6y ago
  Do you think they’re going to fix some Software UI, or just pile on more training to their employees/contractors?
• hnedeotes 6y ago
  So they put 3 guys who seem to never had done such a thing in charge of a $1B transaction, that requires special parameters, and they didn't even checked if their assumptions were right? And here I am, tearing out my hair, sleepless nights, wondering if using iodash instead of pure JS incurs in needless overhead for people I don't know from anywhere visiting my website. (probably someone got a nice check out of it though)
  • sn41 6y ago
    It was not a 1B transaction. It was supposed to be a 7.8M transaction. Not trivial, I admit. But from what is written in the article, it seems that even if they had transacted just 1$, they might have ended up in the same situation of losing 900M. With 1$, there might not have even been the added layer of 3 people checking the transaction.
    • hnedeotes 6y ago
      Yeah, that UI looks like it could perhaps use some improvement, it's a bit on the 80's side (which isn't a bad thing in itself, I mean, I like my emacs, but I only use keyboard there unless I forget the bindings, which is not totally everyday). Maybe they can re-write it in rust and add like help tooltips and some confirmation popups? Like "You're about to do this X with Y to W. Confirm?"
      • denvercoder6 6y ago
        A warning saying that X amount would go to Y. X2 would go to Y2 might have prevented this.
• CivBase 6y ago
  > The actual work of entering this transaction into Flexcube fell to a subcontractor in India named Arokia Raj. > Citibank's procedures require that three people sign off on a transaction of this size. In this case, that was Raj, a colleague of his in India, and a senior Citibank official in Delaware named Vincent Fratta. The names of these individuals seems like an unnecessary detail, especially since the article names the software interface as the culprit. I can't help but think about the recent NYT/SSC incident.
  • CPLX 6y ago
    It's a strange new world we are living in where people don't understand why journalists report the names and details of notable and newsworthy things that people do. The information is drawn from public court documents and the incident is something with nearly a billion dollars in consequences that affects multiple publicly traded companies. What do people think the word "news" means if not this?
    • sillysaurusx 6y ago
      It means "The people's names are irrelevant to the actual event that happened. Especially when they're rank-and-file engineers and not people in positions of power."
      • orthoxerox 6y ago
        They were not even engineers, they were glorified data entry officers and their boss.
    • lostcolony 6y ago
      Umm, who exactly cares about what 'mistake' Vincent Fratta made at work? But who cares that Citi lost half a billion dollars because of an interface mistake? The latter is news. The former is not. The story loses none of its impact or relevancy leaving the names out.
      • CPLX 6y ago
• jonplackett 6y ago
  Wonder how many other times this has happened with smaller amounts of money and noone noticed. That form looks like it's been around a loooooooong time.
• redkoala 6y ago
  Oracle Flexcube is a packaged banking product. While Citibank did make the choice to purchase the product, the UI design flaw is really inherent in the product itself. https://www.oracle.com/industries/financial-services/banking/flexcube-universal-banking/ https://www.oracle.com/industries/financial-services/banking...
  • freebee16 6y ago
    on the link they say "A rich and intuitive user experience that helps bankers enrich customer guidance, advice and product recommendations to customers".
    • lostcolony 6y ago
      And to be fair to Oracle, it might be, now. And Citi is just using a twenty+ year old version of it. Because Oracle charges more for upgrades than support.
  • 35fbe7d3d5b9 6y ago
    Is it? Or is it like most Oracle enterprise products (E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, yadda yadda) – and the actual UX is bespoke constructed by an army of contractors across the world?
    • NearAP 6y ago
      I personally know folks who work in Oracle Fusion Apps and they do the design for Fusion Apps (and not contractors)
  • bigpeopleareold 6y ago
    If the numbers don't convince, maybe the cozy picture of the man who enjoys doing large corporate transactions will seal the deal!
• jacklolo 6y ago
  Shirt only $ 18 https://rdbl.co/37qNJy4 https://rdbl.co/37qNJy4
• qzw 6y ago
  When faced with UI as shitty as this, they could’ve (and in hindsight obviously should’ve) instituted a two step procedure where not just the principal gets put into an internal wash account, but the interest also goes to an internal account. Then the next day they can pay out from the interest only account. That way a mistake would be caught before the money leaves the bank. But hey, I don’t feel too sorry for them if they still haven’t figured out this whole banking thing after 208 years in the business.
• amelius 6y ago
  Any modern UI should at least support undo.
  • jacurtis 6y ago
    You are dealing with wire-transfers here. So there isn't really a way to undo a wire transfer. The recipient would need to voluntarily create another wire transfer back to you of the same amount. So an interface like this only controls the money on Citi's end. Once the wire transfer occurs, there wouldn't be any way for this software to undo that transaction. You could create a psuedo-undo in this software tool, which is how Gmail creates an "undo send" feature. Like a wire-transfer, once you send an email, there is no way to undo it. The email is sent to the recipients servers, there is no way to reverse that. Gmail creates a Psuedo-undo which means that they basically wait after you click "send" and they don't send the email right away. They wait 30 seconds or so before actually sending the email. So if you click "undo" during that artificial waiting period, then it simply cancels the send that hasn't occured yet. It feels like "undo" to the sender, but in reality an artificial waiting period was created, which allows you time to cancel it before sending. Not a proper "undo", but it acts similarly. But it is worth noting that once that artificial waiting period is up and the email is actually sent, then there is no undo anymore. In the case of this story, you could potentially create a psuedo-undo. The software could create an artificial waiting period before initiating the wire transfer, which would allow time to undo. But the problem is that no one would have noticed it until the wire transfer was completed anyway. Someone noticed that $900M left the account when they thought money was staying in the bank. Only then did they realize that the mistake was made. Three people signed off on this transaction before it was sent and all three thought it was correct. So a psuedo-undo wouldn't have helped in this case.
  • nnurmanov 6y ago
    Or they can ask Thanos with his time stone.
• perlgeek 6y ago
  OK, so they payed $500M about two years early, right? That's very bad for your cash flow, and you lose 2 years worth of interest from that, but in the long run, citibank isn't $500M poorer, right? I'm trying to understand what the real financial impact is. Interest rates aren't very high right now, so can maybe a few percent of the $500M per year? Regarding the UI issue: Not only is it bad that the user interface is weird, but that approval seems to use the same bad UI as entering the data. The approval stage really needs a line like "this will result in a $ X being sent out on $Date to $Recipient".
  • civil_engineer 6y ago
    Citi accidentally transferred the very real risk of default from the creditor to themselves. Revlon bonds trading at 42 cents on the dollar... So, you could say that Citi is out 58% of $500M today. Edit: The 'creditor' in this case is composed of 10 investment advisory firms, who, at one point, thought the interest payments were a good deal for them. But, rest assured that they are quite pleased to be made whole on their bad investment. Source: https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-lawsuit-ruling/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/business/citibank-revlon-laws...
  • jdsully 6y ago
    The debt was trading at nearly $0.50 on the dollar because it was questionable whether Revlon could pay. So the funds got a very nice payday.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • reverend_gonzo 6y ago
    Not quite. They paid on behalf of of Revlon which is unable to pay. Effectively, Citibank bought a 500m loan at par when its trading at 43c to the dollar. So Citi just gave the lenders a little over $250m and now is stuck with a non performing loan.
  • Frost1x 6y ago
    The sort of financial gymnastics all these groups participating in hoping to leech money off gambles in the structural system vs creating real value makes it difficult for me to have sympathy for any of the parties involved gambling on what will happen. It's like playing poker and you decided to flip one of accidentally showed your hand. Sorry, but you already joined passing the risk game and shamefully faulted out on the low risk scenario due to negligence.
• anonymouse008 6y ago
  Hmmm, I'm having fun dreaming that this was in BTC and they fat fingered the wrong address...
• Angostura 6y ago
  This looks like one of those delightful UIs where basically some database field are thrown onto the screen, with very little though as to the U and the I
• TimMurnaghan 6y ago
  This isn't Citibanks UI design. This is about Oracle's core banking software Flexcube. It's way deeper than UI. The loan entity didn't support the update they needed to make so they tried delete and re-create - which involved paying off the first loan - but the counterparty didn't agree with the "re-create" bit. Take the "U" part of CRUD seriously people.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• boatsie 6y ago
  Obviously Citibank was at fault here for not understanding how the software was supposed to be used, but they did not write the software Flexcube, Oracle did. And if you look at some of the manuals for the software, it is all very poorly designed: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E53393_01/homepage.htm https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E53393_01/homepage.htm However, Citibank's real mistake was trying to use the software for something it probably was not really designed for. It seems they created a "hack" to make this type of interest-only and rollover payment possible so that they didn't have to bother trying to figure out the correct interest payments for the loan holders.
• polote 6y ago
  Same thing happened 2 years ago in Hawaii https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16140761
• xwdv 6y ago
  How could they have trusted some Indian subcontractor to do something so important with their money? Guess it's also a lesson in "you get what you pay for".
  • mikewarot 6y ago
    They didn't. They had a US employee approve it.
• jdhn 6y ago
  As a product designer who works in the enterprise space, it's good to know I'll have a long career barring any personal failures due to programs like this.
• spoonjim 6y ago
  I know they’ve outsourced customer service agents to India but didn’t think they also outsourced the execution of billion dollar transfers. Hope the wage arbitrage was worth it boys!
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• adrr 6y ago
  I wonder if that weird rule if you accidentally send the wrong amount to a creditor comes from credit card industry lobbying. Say if a consumer accidentally sends $10,000 to his credit card company instead of $1,000. Consumer can’t claw back the money. Citibank has probably benefited from the law.
  • cmckn 6y ago
    Right, this exception seems predatory; and I think it should only apply if a loan is delinquent. That seems to be the intention of the law, but it's probably broad thanks to a lobbyist.
    • PeterisP 6y ago
      It's worth noting that in many (perhaps most?) cases of such payments "creditor" does not imply a loan, but rather debt caused by unpaid obligations for goods or services - e.g. there's a shipment of coal or iPhones and there's an invoice that's due to be paid by date X, and it gets paid on date Y. In many cases Y<X - perhaps there's some discount or other negotiations involved, perhaps some people or companies don't leave payment to the absolute last day. This clause means that if someone is paid for their goods or services, the debtor can't come back afterwards and say "ahhh, this was a mistake, give us back our money, we weren't delinquent and still had 20 days to pay it, we intended to use that cash for other things like payroll and we pinky-swear that we won't go insolvent during that time" - if you got paid, you got paid, period.
      • adrr 6y ago
        Even if this exception to the law didn't exist which it doesn't in many states. I am sure no judge is going to let you float your company by claiming it was a loan payment a "mistake". You need to prove it was mistake like Citibank did and show that you attempted to immediately fix the mistake like Citibank did when they noticed the next day.
• dekerta 6y ago
  Not surprising that Oracle's promotional video for Flexcube is all corporate-speak and buzz-words, and doesn't actually show the product or even explain what it does. https://videohub.oracle.com/media/t/1_mxpp4dyv https://videohub.oracle.com/media/t/1_mxpp4dyv All enterprise software is terrible like this. It's because the people ordering the software are disconnected from the people who will have to use it
  • alecco 6y ago
    This is golden. It's spoken like a voice synth. "cut operating costs, deliver high volumes, and transfer these benefits to its customers", then "meanwhile, at the back office, ... Oracle's new Machine Learning adapter unlocks intelligence ingrained in indivudual operational patterns".
    • brobdingnagians 6y ago
      Makes me wonder if they used GPT-2 "AI" to generate the video... Might make more sense if they had...
    • coldcode 6y ago
      Well, they did transfer high volume benefits to the customers, only $500M worth they weren't expecting.
  • zucker42 6y ago
    I couldn't stop laughing while watching that video. It sounds like a parody. Does that type of video seriously convince CTOs to buy FlexCube?
    • wjamesg 6y ago
      “Infusing operational agility” - WTF?
  • sebmellen 6y ago
    > "Oracle's new machine learning adapter unlocks intelligence engrained in individual operational patterns." This made me laugh so hard, I can just imagine some bank executive hearing this and nodding, thinking they're going to change the world somehow.
• myro 6y ago
  I truly wonder if this chsnge at least something in the industry. Like, you know, it is loud news, and huge numbers. Will the competitors look into their systems, involve some ux'ers to sleep calm?
• austincheney 6y ago
  Imagine working on the complexities of financial software for a major financial institution. I don’t have to imagine this as I work for a much larger financial institution with many more financial products. Now take that complexity that is in your imagination now and couple it with internal software. Think about the last megacorp you worked at and how awesome the internal tools are. Now imagine writing the applications and processes that govern and that internal software. The internal end product doesn’t get the product attention it deserves, because well... it’s just internal and not seen by customers. The stuff you write to support that end product gets even less product attention. It’s an act of God to get a few more lines in on top of the millions of redundant lines already present. Now couple that with the inane process of financial management internal to the financial industry. Shitty enough yet knowing the product management requirements to make this good user facing software? Try imagining then testing it with automation. The complexities are vast enough that converging, in my area, to git for version control from various other tools was a multi year effort to avoid completely halting the business requirements.
• mdoms 6y ago
  It's a shame they doxxed the Indian contract worker who made the mistake.
  • nnurmanov 6y ago
    With our local bank, a developer made a mistake and some amount went into wrong customers. They made him to visit all those companies, ask them to return money. Eventually they forced him to pay the transaction commission.
• cm2187 6y ago
  I am baffled that most developers seem to see (even in banks) thousands separators as a useless gimmick, and somehow expect users to mentally count the number of digits when they are dealing with amounts in billions (or even more in JPY).
  • sn41 6y ago
    Great point. Luckily my bank interface writes out the amount in words before asking me to commit. Once while entering the amount on a mobile, I had an extra 0 by mistake. Caught it just because I had to read the amount in words before confirming.
    • cm2187 6y ago
      Oh and the other great sin: left aligned numbers!
  • Slartie 6y ago
    There is no amount in the entire screenshot - the number in the "principal" field is an account number, not a monetary amount. And nobody would put thousand separators into account numbers.
    • cm2187 6y ago
      Yes, but the topic is bad UI in banking
• tppiotrowski 6y ago
  A lot of people are pointing to the UI here but I think there’s a more fundamental problem of using a system in a way it wasn’t designed to in the first place. The need for transferring principal to your own “wash” account in order to make an interest payment to other parties seems unconventional. It’s violating the problem domain. Similar to using special int values like -1 or -2 in an orderId DB field to indicate that order was cancelled or in progress instead of creating an explicit orderStatus field.
  • scatters 6y ago
    Oh, it's worse than that. They wanted to roll the portion of the loan with one specific creditor into a new loan, in a sweetheart deal that was going to screw over the other creditors. To do that they needed to make an interim interest payment to that one creditor, and mark the loan as paid off to that creditor; but the system wouldn't let them mark the loan as paid off without making payment of the principal in full, and it wouldn't let them pay creditors individually. If they'd just been "repaying" the principal they'd have caught the issue when it said (paraphrasing) "Money actually leaving, are you sure [Y/N]", but they were expecting some money to go out as interim interest (they'd got the OK to pay the relatively small amount of interim interest to the other creditors).
    • Ekaros 6y ago
      And at that point I would expect them to run the transactions to some people who are exactly trained or capable to verify that this transactions is correctly recorded. If you are doing something really really specific against usual procedures no UI can save you...
    • tppiotrowski 6y ago
      This should be top comment. I didn’t really understand the article but you’ve explained it perfectly. Did you read a more thorough explanation somewhere?
      • scatters 6y ago
• JohnTHaller 6y ago
  This is widespread at Citibank. Citibank's website will show you the correct minimum credit card payment on the summary screen, but when you click through, it will show you a different lower payment. If you only pay that one, your account will be flagged as not paying your minimum payment every month. This has been reported to Citibank multiple times over the last few years. It won't be fixed.
• beachtaxidriver 6y ago
  My takeaway is that by now every company is a "tech company" whether they want to be or not, and needs a bench of in-house software engineers, NOT contractors.
• leesalminen 6y ago
  One of the major detractors to Bitcoin et. al. That you hear about on HN is that transactions in USD has a legal recourse to recoup funds in these types of oopsie situations. Does this court decision make anyone feel more bullish about Bitcoin seeing that there isn’t always a legal recourse in USD? Does it at least temper that discussion slightly?
• agumonkey 6y ago
  A lot of finance software is really subpar. I'm a tiny tiny bit eager to know how the defi crowd will do there, they come with a different culture and might find cute ipodsy ways to design financial UIs.
• nnurmanov 6y ago
  There is a big issue with UX with Oracle products, I have been telling it for ages, no changes. Even Thomas Kurian said “I want to make sure that the entire HCM dev organization understands what a disgrace your UI [user interface] is and stop living in denial on that.”
  • nnurmanov 6y ago
    I guess they need some tectonic shift to really to start listening to the customers. Another example, I get long list of options in a LOV and guess what, it is not sorted! I have to go through each value until I find the needed one.
  • NearAP 6y ago
    That UI looks like a very old version of the software (kind of like when you still had stuff like Oracle Forms or whatever it was called). Oracle UIs (since they launched Fusion) look different (I think they are now all web-based)
    • nnurmanov 6y ago
      The above comment was about Fusion HCM, not old Forms based UI.
• larodi 6y ago
  Oracle Forms ftw. so much software built just to make it run, without any UX design put to work. well.. there's so much more of these forms running worldwide, so - just get used to it..
• arey_abhishek 6y ago
  Their UI sucks! Poorly designed form, no tooltip explaining the fields, bad contrast ratio, and a button with just an icon. A bank will spend $$$$$ on consumer facing UI, but spare almost no thought on UI used by employees. But this is definitely not as bad as some of the other UI I've seen in SAP, Oracle, etc. It's certain that nobody who ever uses this UI actually approved this UI. Even if you do use it, hate it, you have no way of asking for a change. Shameless plug, I run an open source project to build internal and enterprise apps. We've built it so you can set up warnings and confirmations to prevent such errors. Our pitch: Use Appsmith and save at least $500M https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith https://github.com/appsmithorg/appsmith
  • NearAP 6y ago
    That's an old version of that App. Kudos on your project but if you want (need) to compare it against others, do it against their more recent offerings
• isolli 6y ago
  Isn't this a core design failure, rather than merely a UI failure? << On Flexcube, the easiest (or perhaps only) way to execute the transaction was to enter it in the system as if paying off the loan in its entirety, but to direct the principal portion of the payment to a "wash account" (an internal Citibank account) to help ensure that money does not leave the bank. >>
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
  > To believe that Citibank, one of the most sophisticated financial institutions in the world, had made a mistake that had never happened before, to the tune of nearly $1 billion—would have been borderline irrational This seems weird. There are all sorts of novel mistakes all the time, even by very competent groups. Even if it’s not a mistake, it would be a surprising action to take. But most of all, it seems really weird to say it would be irrational to expect what happened would happen. Like people who profited off of 2008. Were they irrational or prescient? It’s impossible to tell a lot of the time, so “it would be irrational to be correct” seems like a very over strong statement.
  • stingraycharles 6y ago
    > This seems weird. There are all sorts of novel mistakes all the time, even by very competent groups. I think the point is more that it’s entirely reasonable to assume that the receiver of the funds, in good faith, assumed that this wasn’t an error.
    • 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
      Maybe I’m just taking offense to an irrelevant point then. Conclusion A is rational and conclusion B is too (and in this case correct). Judge says B is irrational. But all that matters is that conclusion A is rational.
• DonHopkins 6y ago
  I'd reword the title "Citibank just got a $500M penalty for bad UI design", because "lesson" implies they actually learned something.
• Zelphyr 6y ago
  I'm surprised it took this long for the kind of UI's that are typical in enterprise software to cause a problem of this magnitude.
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  That screen is terrifying. I expect to receive a Jakob Nielsen newsletter, soon, discussing this.
• Gene5ive 6y ago
  Everything about banking is devoid of aesthetic. Banks don't care how things look. My nearest BoA has fake plants and dinged-up furniture. This is the kind of culture that would put up with horrendously bad UI/UX until it bit them in the ass and then they would probably just fix the problem with lawyers instead of finding or demanding a better software. Design matters. Now let's talk about Flexcube. Oh, it's an Oracle app! Guess who else is rich, has no interest in aesthetics, and loves lawyers. I'm seeing a pattern here. Design. Matters.
• 1MachineElf 6y ago
  Under New York law, someone who sends out an erroneous wire transfer—for example, sending a payment to the wrong account—is entitled to get the money back. But the law makes an exception when a debtor accidentally wires money to a creditor. In that case, if the creditor doesn't have prior knowledge the payment was a mistake, it's free to treat it as a repayment of the loan. I wonder if folks here on HN agree with this law or not. It sounds like it could be construed as an unfair rule put in due to lobbying by lenders. Thoughts?
  • Ekaros 6y ago
    I think it's reasonable. If I were lender got repayment early, found another lendee now sometime later original lendee would want the money back. I don't have it anymore and thus can't return it. Should I now be forced myself to lend the sum to cover it? Could that cost more than I make from either transaction?
  • mmmmmbop 6y ago
    I find it fair and agree with it. General case: I receive an unexpected wire transfer from someone I wouldn't expect to pay me. It would be unreasonable for me to expect that the money is fairly mine. Exception: I loan out money to someone and ask them to pay me back no later than one year from now. Six months in I receive a wire transfer for the entire amount back. It's reasonable for me to expect that the money is mine and I'm free to spend it as I like. If now the debtor comes and asks for the money back because their wire transfer was a mistake, I may not even have the money anymore and would be put in a bad spot through no fault of my own.
    • bdowling 6y ago
      > If now the debtor comes and asks for the money back because their wire transfer was a mistake... One of the questions here was at what point in time is notice of mistake required. The defendants argued that notice was required prior to funds actually being received. Citibank argued that notice prior to the debt being discharged should be sufficient. The court held that notice should be required prior to the funds being received. In the case of a wire transfer that happens instantaneously, that interpretation essentially eliminates the possibility of giving notice of a mistake.
• selimnairb 6y ago
  Tell me again how it’s cheaper to keep crappy legacy systems running rather than upgrading?
• trinovantes 6y ago
  Reminiscent of the therac25 incident except the poor UI led to loss of money instead of lives I wonder if the CS education in countries that critical software often gets subcontracted to teaches about software disasters like this
  • sn_master 6y ago
    the way your boss approaches tasks always trumps any CS education you might have had.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• _pmf_ 6y ago
  How is this a UI design issue? There is no UI design involved. It's a generated form.
• timrichard 6y ago
  If this followed along the lines of the Thomas J. Watson anecdote, Citibank would say "fire him? We just spent $500M training him."
• tobipristupin 6y ago
  test comment
• 1024core 6y ago
  HN Discussion when the case was filed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24222045 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24222045
• AcerbicZero 6y ago
  There is some beautiful poetic justice in watching a major financial institution suffer from a choice they lobbied for. They wanted accidental repayment of loans to be a one way street, and that’s exactly what they got.
• ab_testing 6y ago
  I have a contrarian view that this is not a UI design issue - instead a user training issue. Oracle and bad UI design often comes up on HN and every time the debate is that Oracle software is very bad and ripe for disruption. However, most of what Oracle has built or bought is complex because the purposes it serves is complex. You cannot expect a user to just sit in front of this screen (or any other Oracle screen for that matter) and figure it out. There is a lot of tribal knowledge involved and most of the times it is a user training issue. If the user and his manager was unsure, they should have tested it on a dev system or with a smaller amount. Blaming bad software is easy. But having worked with complex ERP systems for more than a decade, I can easily say tat most of these systems are designed keeping user feedback in mind. In fact a lot of modules that Oracle sells were systems that their users built as add-ons to Oracle and were finally embraced by Oracle. Everybody blames bad ERP systems from Oracle (PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, Oracle EBS) and SAP. Yet noboody is building competing systems at a mass scale. Because they are complex and needs lots of integrations. That is why, you see lots of small business ERP systems but very few complex full scale ERP systems -the kind Oracle dabbles in.
  • rootusrootus 6y ago
    I tend to agree. It seems likely that Citibank handles transactions of this magnitude with some regularity, so even if the UI is crappy I would expect the employees involved are used to the quirks and know how to work with the system. Given that my company uses similar shitty Oracle software, I'm sympathetic, but we have people at the company whose only job is to work with this software and make sure things are done correctly.
  • jariel 6y ago
    Yes, for these things you can expect to figure it out - and/or it should be obvious what you are doing. There's no need for that level of ambiguity. You're dealing with large sums of money. The parameters described in the video are superlatively ridiculous. It's their fault. FYI verticals of ERP are usually not that complex. And there are other reasons people don't compete, it's because of the inherent flexibility needed in these systems and their vast incumbency.
• jamesgreenleaf 6y ago
  I'll state the obvious: UI/UX isn't a nice facade that you put on top of critical infrastructure. It is critical infrastructure.
• fungiblecog 6y ago
  Why so surprised? 80% of 'enterprise software' is similarly terrible. Nobody involved in the business of creating this crap gives two shits about users or quality except for a few developers that nobody listens to.
• dec0dedab0de 6y ago
  This seems like the kind of thing that was originally a paper form that got coded 1-1 to avoid friction, and then decades later someone was not trained properly on how to use.
• vmception 6y ago
  How much did this really cost them? It is essentially a prepayment for something they were already going to pay So, given the time value of money this cost them closer to 2%/yr of that balance?
  • IshKebab 6y ago
    They essentially bought the debt at face value whereas its market value is 42% so they lost 58% of $500m or $290m.
• remoquete 6y ago
  And the importance of proper UX writing and user documentation.
• ineedasername 6y ago
  But the law makes an exception when a debtor accidentally wires money to a creditor Okay, but Citibank wasn't the debtor here, they were simply the middleman. And: "To believe that Citibank, one of the most sophisticated financial institutions in the world, had made a mistake... would have been borderline irrational" Sure, if you hear hoofbeats, the likely guess is horses, not zebras. But if someone calls you up and says "Hey, I got some nice pics of zebras running by your house" then you know the probable guess was wrong, and should act accordingly. Absolutely the mistake was Citibank's fault. Maybe you think that means, inherently, that they should lose the case. But if you look at the actual laws on the books, I really don't understand how the interpretation of the laws comes down against Citi here. Though a half $billion mistake on UI design might still be a very beneficial lesson for the entire UX design community to remember.
  • DangitBobby 6y ago
    I see rulings like this and lose even more faith in the law. Clearly the spirit of the law should have protected Citibank here, but the letter of it fell short. I imagine a bunch of self-important lawbook-warriors patting themselves on the back for how they manage to miss the forest for the trees on a daily basis.
• pixel_tracing 6y ago
  I like the some debt is society is paid off even if it is a mistake haha, maybe this will have overall net positive results in our economy
• hikerclimber 6y ago
  good. there own fault for hiring a incompetent person.
• bob1029 6y ago
  I had to share this with my team today. We produce an app for banking that is used at the front line (i.e. in the branches). We have explicitly acknowledged the fact that the bulk of our users are going to be new to the business & are going to be paid peanuts while simultaneously being expected to produce consistent business outcomes. As a result, we have tailored our interfaces for self-discoverability and intuitiveness. Making a UI intuitive is a book all by itself, but suffice to say that we spend a lot of time agonizing over how UI elements are laid out so that users are less likely to make errors in judgement. Our application is not immune to exposing exceptions to the business. But, we have added measures throughout to minimize this as much as possible. In areas where there is a lot of jargon which might confuse new employees, we put help buttons which allow a user to quickly review important terms & other documentation in-line with the actual functionality. This makes our application almost a training course in and of itself. Additionally, in cases where we identify that poor choices could have broader impacts to other parts of the business (i.e. lighting 500mm on fire), we add explicit validations with hard cutoff limits to prevent insane things from happening. In this specific case, we would probably walk the user through a decision tree to force them down a valid path and ensure the funds were being tagged to the correct account(s). We also have approval loops in our application for more sensitive operations, but even these have integral validations & other measures to ensure that "experienced" employees don't screw up either.
  • CobrastanJorji 6y ago
    This is a great lesson. However, I'm afraid for you're designing your product to be good for the people who are being paid peanuts and are new to the business, but those are not the people who are buying your software. They're just the users of the software. Oracle put basically no thought into their UI but put a lot of money into promotional videos and sales, and they sold their software to giant international banks because the people buying the software experience it only through videos and salespeople. I'm terribly afraid that you're going to be punished for focusing on the right things.
    • bob1029 6y ago
      The entire point of our software is to be intuitive enough so our clients can hire cheap labor. Its a first class feature. Why would we be punished for this?
• williesleg 6y ago
  Just doing the needful!
• gregoriol 6y ago
  Everyone here seems to focus on the bad UI and blames those who made the software because this particular operation was complicated to perform and failed. But all this is missing the points: the UI reflect the business, the UI has likely been designed to perform many very complex banking operations and works well for that, we just don't know how powerful it is from the screenshot and are not experts in the field. It's as if we were shown a shell and people were like "wow look at that horrible UI, no wonder they deleted the production database". Sometimes a basic UI is the most efficient at some tasks, but one has to be trained to use it properly and processes have to be in place to prevent horrible issues. This is the problem here and this is where they failed.
  • peterkelly 6y ago
    This problem seems like it could have been fixed by a better UI though, specifically one which included a confirmation step that showed the implications of the decision i.e. the amounts that would be transferred and who they would be transferred to. If there was a screen that said "the transaction you have selected will result in a total of $900 million being sent to the following parties, broken down as follows: ...; Please confirm you wish to proceed" - then the outcome would have been very different.
• dreamcompiler 6y ago
  This UI resembles a register transfer language; it's what programming in microcode looks like. It doesn't even rise to the abstraction level of assembly language. Expecting humans not to make errors at this level of abstraction with high consequences for failure is moronic. It's sad that the only motivation for improving outsourced lowest-bidder enterprise crapware like this is when it costs the company $$$.
• xyzelement 6y ago
  To be sure, this is an ugly UI but this is not necessarily a pure UI issue at root. Internal applications have to be more complex that external applications - that's why you sometimes have to call a company to do something the consumer frontend doesn't support. The employees are expected to operate a more powerful/flexible system than the customer, and I think there's always a risk inherent there. In this case, it's likely that it's not just a dumb UI thing that the employee "needed to set the "front" and "fund" fields to the wash account as well as "principal." I suspect thank "front" and "back" are actually real business concepts in how the bank models transfers which the employee/reviewer did not understand well. Instead they expressed a different model of a transfer (an external one) which is a totally legitimate use case, just not the intended one. That's kinda one level of empathy, I suspect this really happened because these users think about these operations as "I check this box, then I check that box" rather than "I get how transfers work and I am going to express my intention using that understanding." So it's probably much more of a training issue, because to give these people a very narrow and polished consumer-style frontend would take away the flexibility they likely need to actually execute their roles.
  • onlyfortoday2 6y ago
    To be sure, this is an ugly UI but this is not necessarily a pure UI issue at root. of course it is...
  • shuntress 6y ago
    There are limits to this. A ten pound sledge hammer can be used to drive finishing nails in fine furniture but it would be absurd to claim that all the dented furniture coming out of your shop is a result of poorly trained workers rather than inadequate tooling. A generic hammer, like this UI (at least, as much as is apparent from the screenshots in the article) can drive basically any nail. But specialized hammers exist for good reasons. This is equally applicable in software tools. A good tool should enable you to do things you couldn't do without it but the best tools make it easier to do what you want and harder to do what you don't want.
    • rkagerer 6y ago
• coding123 6y ago
  More about training. Walk into any shop, heck a title company, and you'll see UIs that have no explanations or anything just abbreviations that are understood by internal people. Look at the screen they use in Grease Monkey. There's probably people at your insurance company that still logs into a Telnet session to do things with your account. There's more software out there like that than your Twitter UI for posting a message than you can imagine.
• drummer 6y ago
  Everyone who received the money by mistake should give it back. Anything else is immoral. Mistakes happen.
• avi_vallarapu 6y ago
  Well, why just the blame on the UI unless it is a glitch ? In general, It is the blame on the process, trainings and Users not participating in the Development life cycle. Why would someone not want to refer to some true documented procedures while processing such large transactions ? Firstly, is there such a documentation or a procedure or a checklist in place ? Documentation and process is a key to every unique tool or solution.
• graycat 6y ago
  The CITI event was a real disaster, likely enough for the importance of UI design to be taken more seriously around the world. IMHO, there are some quite good contributions in this thread with several excellent ones. I will chip in my 2 cents from my experience on both sides of user interfaces: In parts of user interface (UI) design, there has long been a principle that to make good use of the UI the user should have accumulated experience with the UI where they ran essentially experiments to discover how the UI and associated system worked. So, with this principle, the CITI people just needed more experience with experiments, at ~$900 million per experiment! So, right, the principle is flawed and for some applications expensive/dangerous. While this principle of users getting experience from experiments has worked for the UIs of a range of applications, to be careful a principle should be that a user should be able to use an application as intended the first time and with no experiments. Case 1. Last week I went to the Web site of my bank and used its UI to transfer some money from one account to another. The experience was Excedrin headache #394,325,757,110: I entered the data, and nothing happened. So, I had to start running experiments. I hit Enter and left/right single/double clicked on everything in the window, and nothing happened. It appeared I was seeing all of the window horizontally, so I checked vertically, and to do that I looked for a vertical scroll bars. There were none. So, I converted the application to full screen and still saw no vertical scroll bars or way to make the money transfer happen. So, I did some more study and finally discovered that the window was so tall that the bottom of the screen was hidden by my tilted keyboard, and the part I could not see had the HTML push button for approving the transfer. So, the UI designers just assumed, insisted, never told anyone, that, naturally, of course, all the users will be using their Web site with the windows expanded to full screen. And for some reason, whether their window is full screen or not, the UI designers don't like vertical scroll bars. The screen for the transfer had only a few lines of text and didn't need so much vertical screen space, but the designers seem to like using as much screen area as they can. Okay, I learned how to use their UI. Still not so good: (a) The bank keeps changing their UI, and in this case made it worse. So, with that bank I will have to go through such mud wrestling nonsense several times a year. (b) To me, the original HTML controls were nicely designed, including the scroll bars, and one result was that nearly all the many millions of Web pages worked somewhat the same. Then somehow many UI designers wanted their screens to work in some unique way until they changed to another unique way a few months later. The power of JavaScript made this problem much worse. Case 2. Also last week, in a weak moment, I decided to get a user id and password (PW) at one of the social media Web sites. They stated some rules for passwords; I followed those and typed in a password in a file where I keep such things; copied that PW to the system clipboard, pasted it into their HTML single line text box for passwords, and nothing happened. I hit Enter, clicked around, etc. and nothing happened. I pasted the password in again, reloaded the page, closed the browser and tried again, etc. and nothing happened -- no messages, nothing. I still don't know what is wrong except it isn't me. As I've mentioned at Hacker News before, for my startup I have 100,000 lines of typing of software for a Web site ready to go live. In that code I used eight design principles in UI: (i) No icons. Instead all the links are words in the English language that clearly describe the function of the link. For icons, I usually am not sure what they mean, can't look them up in a dictionary, and can't pronounce them, spell them, or type them -- IMHO, bummer. (ii) There are no acronyms. None. (iii) The only controls used are standard HTML. I wrote no JavaScript at all although Microsoft's ASP.NET wrote a little for me; apparently it has to do with cursor positioning but is optional. (iv) Each page (screen) has a link "Help" to explain the screen in detail. (v) Each screen has both vertical and horizontal scroll bars. (vi) The screens are designed for a window 700 pixels wide and are still usable in a screen 300 pixels wide. (vii) All the fonts are large and have high contrast. (viii) All HTML control bounding boxes are bold and black with high contrast. IMHO (i) - (viii) help UI design.
• fireeyed 6y ago
  What is the strategic advantage to a bank to oursource an important transaction (ie transferring money in ginormous amounts) outsourced to India ?
  • Ekaros 6y ago
    Bonuses for high level people? You cut a ten thousand pay from 100 lower level clerks and you have saved million. Time to get that 100k extra...
• njovin 6y ago
  One of the most fascinating parts of this story, to me, is that Revlon's creditors were able to use a mistake made by Citi and a legal loophole in New York to recover debt that had increased in risk due to some allegedly-shady asset management by Revlon. It's like a perfect storm formed to repay bad debt.
  • bdowling 6y ago
    Exactly. Revlon's creditors received a windfall because they were paid back 100% on a risky debt investment. Citibank, on the other hand, is now an involuntary creditor to Revlon and has taken on a lot of risk because of the mistake.
• ineedasername 6y ago
  subcontractor in India named Arokia Raj... Citibank official in Delaware named Vincent Fratta Raj probably still has a job working on non-Citibank accounts. I doubt Vincent Fratta is still employed by Citi. I guess this is fair? Raj made a mistake for one client where the client-- the experts-- signed off on it.
• templarchamp 6y ago
  The next generation of software is going to include check boxes and text fields to confirm to enter data in "front", "fund", "but*" and check boxes to confirm "I am not smoking", "Yes, I understand the software cryptic codes 110%", "I acknowledge that the workflow is super dumb down" and "We all thank Oracle consultants' support for super intuitiveness". It is a question of time Oracle gets dodo dna. The one trick pony has outlived itself..
• gist 6y ago
  > Ordinarily, the law would be on Citibank's side here. Under New York law, someone who sends out an erroneous wire transfer—for example, sending a payment to the wrong account—is entitled to get the money back. But the law makes an exception when a debtor accidentally wires money to a creditor. In that case, if the creditor doesn't have prior knowledge the payment was a mistake, it's free to treat it as a repayment of the loan. Judge Furman ruled that that principle applies here, even though Citibank notified its creditors of the mistake the very next day. Key point 'wrong account' is not 'right account but for the wrong reason'. The article most likely written by a non business person confuses a mistake (money sent to the wrong account) with money sent to the right account. The law almost certainly doesn't allow a wire transfer sent to be recovered for that reason and type of mistake. Importantly though it does (by design) allow a transfer sent to a mistake (like a typo) to be recovered. This actually makes sense and here is why: A wire transfer is payment for 'goods or services' let's say. Often that 'goods or services' is released (or relied upon) when money is received. In the sense that it is not reversable under any and all circumstances. A wrong account is 'going to the wrong place'. The right account is the right place. Wire transfers are by design 'final'. ACH is not. An ACH can be reversed (for a number of reasons). If you could claw back wire transfers all sorts of things (that depend on them being final) would break down and you'd have many problems down the transaction line.
• chmod600 6y ago
  > "To believe that Citibank, one of the most sophisticated financial institutions in the world, had made a mistake that had never happened before, to the tune of nearly $1 billion—would have been borderline irrational," Really? People make mistakes. Institutions make mistakes.
• ChuckMcM 6y ago
  I find this somewhat hilarious, but on the plus side it allows Citibank to put a $ figure on what it could cost to outsource key software infrastructure.
• dcl 6y ago
  I'm so glad the blockchain is coming to prevent and fix these mistakes in the future /sarcasm
• Friedduck 6y ago
  Inept judge, or certainly one not steeped in the ways of finance. People make wire errors all the time. Fraud occurs, things happen. I haven’t read the statute but as written the exception doesn’t even apply (Citibank being an agent and not the lender.)
  • bdowling 6y ago
    From the 105 page opinion [0], here is the relevant statement of law: > A creditor of another or one having a lien on another’s property who has received from a third person any benefit in discharge of the debt or lien, is under no duty to make restitution therefor, although the discharge was given by mistake of the transferor as to his interests or duties, if the transferee made no misrepresentation and did not have notice of the transferor’s mistake. RESTATEMENT (FIRST) OF RESTITUTION § 14(1) (Am. Law Inst. 1937). (Note: The ALI Restatements are not law per se. This section, however, was explicitly adopted by the New York Court of Appeals in a prior case. Here, the federal court applies this law because it is the relevant law of New York.) [0] https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.542310/gov.uscourts.nysd.542310.243.0_2.pdf https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.542310... at p. 36.
• BuckRogers 6y ago
  The genius business folks at Citi can get their $500,000,000 out of the money they saved outsourcing to India. I've always had a great experience with my onshore and offshore Indian colleagues, I have family of east Indian origin. But all of the offshore call centers and IT should be banned or hit hard with high penalties by the US government given the COVID pandemic.
• mandevil 6y ago
  Human error is a terrible concept, a crutch for bad engineering. Take the story of the VSS Enterprise (SpaceShip Two) that broke up back in 2014. It broke apart because the co-pilot hit a button four seconds early[1]. But if hitting one button four seconds early is the difference between nominal flight and falling from 15 kilometers up without a pressure suit that's really the fault of the person who designed and built the thing[2]. [1]: Outside analysis, sync up a video from an earlier flight with the failed flight, sync'd up to T-0 ignition. The successful flight the co-pilot Alsbury hit the button at T+13s, the fatal flight at T+9s. The fatal flight was the first test of a new engine, so there is some error in this calculation. Wikipedia claims it was 14 seconds too early, but I'm not sure how much I trust the source it cites. [2]: The feathering device was a clever idea that the designer, Burt Rutan, had: if you fold the entire spacecraft in half while you are up in space then it will pretty much always be in a safe attitude for reentry and you don't need to have much maneuvering authority in space. But below Mach 1.4 there isn't enough aerodynamic pressure to keep the spacecraft from folding in half when you don't want it to (and then the spacecraft gets torn apart by all of the aerodynamic pressure that is there- not enough to keep it from folding in half, but too much to survive if it does fold in half). So they put in these big honking locks to prevent it from folding when you don't want it to. But now you have a new problem: if those locks prevent it from folding while you are up in space now you burn up in the atmosphere because you don't have enough control to keep the spacecraft oriented in a safe manner. So you have to undo the locks above mach 1.4 but before you have burned enough of your rocket fuel that you are committed to going into space: if you try and undo the locks and they don't go, you immediately stop the rocket engine and glide back down to a safe landing. So you have a very narrow window that the button has to be hit, and if you are out of that window you can either accidentally feather and die or fail to feather and die. At a certain point you just have to give up on your clever ideas and admit that they are not helping you.
• iamleppert 6y ago
  This is what happens when a company is penny wise and pound foolish.