Banking and Markets
Trading systems, payment rails, and the settlement plumbing underneath them, where a single mistyped field moves in seconds and unwinds over years.
4 articles in this arc
45 Minutes: How a Dead Feature Flag Destroyed Knight Capital
One server out of eight ran old code. A repurposed feature flag woke that code up at the opening bell. By 10:15 a.m., a firm whose trading was about a tenth of all US listed equity volume had lost 440 million dollars and, within a year, its independence.
The 900 Million Dollar Checkbox
Citibank meant to send 7.8 million dollars of interest. A confusing loan software interface sent the entire 900 million principal instead. Then a court ruled, for a while, that some recipients could keep it.
Sell One Share for 610,000 Yen. He Typed 610,000 Shares for 1 Yen.
A Mizuho trader inverted a price and a quantity. The order was for 41 times the entire company's shares. Then the system would not let him cancel it.
The Batch Job That Locked Millions Out of Their Own Money
In June 2012 an upgrade to the batch scheduler at RBS was backed out along a path nobody had tested. Jobs stopped reaching the overnight queues, the backlog compounded nightly, and millions of customers could not be paid, could not pay, and could not trust their own balances.
