Ac Revelations Bank Glitch

[James Talbot]

Employeesfrom all five of Canada's big banks have flooded Go Public with stories of how they feel pressured to upsell, trick and even lie to customers to meet unrealistic sales targets and keep their jobs.

A financial services manager who left BMO in Calgary two months ago said he quit after having a full-blown panic attack in his branch manager's office as she threatened to stifle his banking career because he hadn't met sales targets.

He claims his manager once told him not to tell clients who wanted to invest more than $40,000 that the markets were down, because putting their money into GICs wouldn't earn the branch as much sales revenue.

The revelations about other banks came pouring in after Go Public revealed last week that front-line staff at TD were under pressure to sell customers products and services they may not need and that some employees were breaking the law to hit their sales revenue targets.

They also resulted in hundreds more emails from TD workers past and present, including a teller who recently stopped working in Bramalea, Ont., who said the requirement to meet ever-increasing goals was so unprofessional, "I thought this was not a bank but a flea market."

Employees at several RBC branches in Calgary said there are white boards posted in the staff room that list which financial advisers are meeting their sales targets and which advisers are coming up short.

While working in Waterloo, Ont., she says her manager also instructed staff to tell all new international students looking to open a chequing account that they had to open a "student package," which also included a savings account, credit card and overdraft.

"We expect banks to be honest with their clients ... and now we are learning that those employees are under considerable pressure to sell, sell, sell to boost profits of the banks," he said. "This is so greedy. It is not acceptable."

A spokesperson for Finance Minister Bill Morneau said the minister wasn't available for an interview, but sent a statement that says Morneau "expects all financial institutions in Canada to adhere to the highest standards when it comes to their consumer protection obligations."

TD shareholder Allan Best says he's concerned about more than the bank's bottom line after last week's stock dip, telling Go Public, "It is my position that employees are our most important asset and we have to do all we can to keep them in good mental and physical condition."

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According to reports in UK tech rag The Register, the junior technician in India accidentally wiped out a queue of batched payments while backing out of a routine software upgrade.

Quoting a 'source familiar with the matter', the Register says that the situation spiralled out of control during an attempt to reverse a planned upgrade to the bank's mainframe-hosted CA-7 workload automation engine.

"When they did the back-out, a major error was made. An inexperienced person cleared the whole queue ... they erased all the scheduling," says the source. "That created a large backlog as all the wiped information had to be re-inputted to the system and reprocessed. A complicated legacy mainframe system at RBS and a team inexperienced in its quirks made the problem harder to fix."

Earlier this year the bank moved to recruit CA-7 batch support staff in Hyderabad on a salary of 9000-11,000 per annum while slashing higher paid equivalents in the UK.

If substantiated, the revelations could prove damaging for the bank's embattled boss Stephen Hester, who on Tuesday denied claims that the breakdown was in any way connected to underinvestment in IT and the offshoring of jobs to India.

In an interview with Sky News that touched on the outsourcing rumours, Hester said: "Well I have no evidence of that. The IT centre - our main centre, we're standing outside here in Edinburgh, [is] nothing to do with overseas. Our UK backbone has seen substantial investment."

Analysts at Ovum point to the problems faced by large banks in running mission-critical processes on ageing legacy systems with a diminishing pool of skilled and experienced staff.

"With most banks under heavy cost pressures, this means relatively junior staff are often given responsibility for systems where they have little experience beyond the routine, particularly in a stress situation (as with RBS) where things go outside normal operations," states Ovum. "The challenge for banks is that an operation (e.g. the software update to CA-7) that would score relatively low on the risk register escalated rapidly into a critical error. It illustrates that conventional cost versus risk decisions can be problematic, particularly for mission-critical (and their supporting) systems."

Separately, the FT is reporting that RBS is considering legal action against Computer Associates, the supplier of the CA-7 software. The board of the bank spent much of Tuesday in crisis talks, says the FT, after which it decided to launch a full-scale review.

The FT quotes an insider at the meeting: "It was certainly an issue with this software. We will still have to establish if this was their fault or if it was our handling of the software."

These are choppy waters for the bailed-out bank group, with politicians also demanding answers. The chairman of the Treasury Select Committee, Andrew Tyrie MP, has written to RBS chief Hester, and FSA chairman, Lord Turne, calling for action. "We need to know exactly what went wrong and what will be done to give us confidence that similar mistakes are not repeated in the future," says Tyrie. "Basic bank functions are crucial in a modern economy. It is deeply concerning that they appear to have been put at risk again."

Inexperienced RBS operative's blunder led to bank meltdown - The Register

"The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) Group is an international banking and financial services company. From its headquarters in Edinburgh, the RBS Group operates in the United Kingdom, Europe, the Middle East, the Americas and Asia, serving over30 million customers worldwide."

Having a single IT failure point for a global company of that standing (and, especially, if such a point is represented by "inexperienced (!) IT operative") is laughable (and doesn't sound convincingly plausible). If that is indeed the case, it's time to grind that axe.

Situations such as this should never be attributed to the failure of an individual - its a failure of the 'System' that should have been designed to prevent a series of unfortunate incidents excalating into a major disaster... Sadly it does appear that RBS are suffering from a condition that affects people who skip servicing or who cannot afford the best oil, filters and spares for their cars.... breakdowns are an inevitable consequence..... Someone at RBS may have taken a view that reducing costs, in order to securing a better bonus last year was a risk worth taking..... its a form of casino banking where you can win... but only if you dont lose (big time)

The fault is most probably not with the outsourced ITer who managed to delete schedules whilst backing out - the fault lies with RBS management trying to offshore too agressively without ensuring knowledge transfer and bulletproof procedures to deal with such a situation.

They were offlien for a week, and as Keith Appleyard reports here on a Finextra blog, there are still severe consequences for customers. Has anything like this happened before? A top nationwaide bank going offline (more or less) due to an IT incident?

During the 2010s, international media reports revealed new operational details about the Anglophone cryptographic agencies' global surveillance[1] of both foreign and domestic nationals. The reports mostly relate to top secret documents leaked by ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The documents consist of intelligence files relating to the U.S. and other Five Eyes countries.[2] In June 2013, the first of Snowden's documents were published, with further selected documents released to various news outlets through the year.

These media reports disclosed several secret treaties signed by members of the UKUSA community in their efforts to implement global surveillance. For example, Der Spiegel revealed how the German Federal Intelligence Service (German: Bundesnachrichtendienst; BND) transfers "massive amounts of intercepted data to the NSA",[3] while Swedish Television revealed the National Defence Radio Establishment (FRA) provided the NSA with data from its cable collection, under a secret agreement signed in 1954 for bilateral cooperation on surveillance.[4] Other security and intelligence agencies involved in the practice of global surveillance include those in Australia (ASD), Britain (GCHQ), Canada (CSE), Denmark (PET), France (DGSE), Germany (BND), Italy (AISE), the Netherlands (AIVD), Norway (NIS), Spain (CNI), Switzerland (NDB), Singapore (SID) as well as Israel (ISNU), which receives raw, unfiltered data of U.S. citizens from the NSA.[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12]

The extent to which the media reports responsibly informed the public is disputed. In January 2014, Obama said that "the sensational way in which these disclosures have come out has often shed more heat than light"[19] and critics such as Sean Wilentz have noted that many of the Snowden documents do not concern domestic surveillance.[20] The US & British Defense establishment weigh the strategic harm in the period following the disclosures more heavily than their civic public benefit. In its first assessment of these disclosures, the Pentagon concluded that Snowden committed the biggest "theft" of U.S. secrets in the history of the United States.[21] Sir David Omand, a former director of GCHQ, described Snowden's disclosure as the "most catastrophic loss to British intelligence ever".[22]

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