Paul Wallis's Blog Posts Tagged 'operations' (18)

On New Year’s Eve 2012, late afternoon, customers of three of the UK’s largest banks were unable to withdraw cash or use internet banking - some complaining that account balances were incorrectly showing ‘00.00’.

There can’t be many worse times for such a “glitch” to occur, and the (further) damage to those banks’ reputations must have been considerable. The financial cost was also considerable with, for example, Lloyds Bank setting aside £125 million to “compensate…

During July we attended the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, for the formation and launch of the Financial Stability Board’s (FSB) Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) Private Sector Preparatory Group.

The group was created by the FSB in response to a call from the leaders of the G20 countries to proceed with development of a, “unique identification system for parties to financial transactions.” […

 “Assets will always fail at some point, and with any asset failure there is a chain of consequential loss which is triggered by an originating event.”

Last year, I discussed the vulnerability of the modern city to interruptions in the various critical supply flows that keep it going.

When key flows – water, electricity, natural gas or sewage – are…

Over at the FSClub Blog, Chris Skinner summarises a discussion he had with a senior manager in finance about bank operations.  He writes,

“...most firms struggle with enterprise management.

It is down to the very nature of fragmented structures, legacy systems, merged and acquired operations, that make the enterprise view hard.

Hard but achievable, so why is it not…

Three assertions that I hold to be true:

1. The understanding of the flow of data is fundamental to an organization’s financial well-being. [more]
2. Business resources, including people and IT assets, are either providers of data, consumers of data, or they provide the conduit through which the data can flow. […

The citizens of both California and Japan live in the shadow of ‘The Big One’ – earthquakes of catastrophic and devastating power that will inevitably occur, one day.

 

Before these events, numerous ‘foreshocks’ will take place, smaller earthquakes, associated in time and space with the ‘mainshock’.

 

Unless things change, the finance sector will one day suffer its own ‘Big One’ – a combination of events that will cause…

As I walked away from the bank HQ 6 years ago, Han Solo’s famous Star Wars quote came to mind,

“I got a bad feeling about this”

During the meeting I’d just attended, a manager from the bank had explained how some transactions with other financial institutions occurred.  The transactions were very valuable, worth millions of pounds, and happened regularly.  To paraphrase,

“...basically, traders transact deals, each using their own…

Last week, in “Systems Thinking, Safety and Risk Management”, IBM Fellow Irving Wladawsky-Berger discussed a round table breakfast about, ‘Protecting Financial Markets in the Age of the Cloud’

“...Several participants cited the sharp rise in volume and speed of high-frequency trading over the past decade as an example of a current practice that is…

Strike!...Everybody Out!

It’s hard to imagine a group of people less likely to go on strike than the floor traders at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.  But, a few weeks ago, brokers in the Eurodollar options pit did just that.

They were protesting because they were unable to participate in the pricing of ‘block trades’ in Eurodollar futures, believing the system is ‘…

The dubious events at brokerage MF Global demonstrate yet again how vulnerable investors are in today’s data flow-reliant financial markets.

During late 2011, MF Global had been losing money on its currency market bets, and, to stay afloat, it delved into customer accounts and used customer money in attempts to cover its precarious financial position.

The attempts failed and the company had to file for bankruptcy.

According to the liquidator’s…

In my last blog about data flow and the development of ‘autonomous vehicles’, I argued that,

“...while the dream of a safer, and more efficient, road transportation system is worthy, it won’t be happening on a large-scale anytime soon...

 

...computers aren’t yet intelligent enough to reliably make safe, on-time decisions about everyday driving…

For some years now, technologists have been developing ‘autonomous vehicles’ - cars which will be driven by computers, without direct human intervention.

Google, for example, is a pioneer in the industry.  In road trials, the company’s computer controlled cars have racked up 200,000 miles without any accidents.

Real-time flows of data will be critical to the operation of such vehicles in a…

During the last 15 months, here at OBASHI Think we have written a few blogs about IT in today’s data flow reliant finance industry.  For example,

Data flow disasters can sting

If a data flow is interrupted or compromised, it can cause chaos in the financial markets.

 …

Researchers at Ruhr University, Germany, recently informed Amazon Web Services (AWS) of security holes in the AWS cloud architecture, enabling AWS to fix them before any “customers have been impacted”.

The research team believes similar flaws exist in many other cloud services, potentially enabling, ‘attackers to gain administrative…

When you are growing up, some television programmes bury themselves deep into your brain and just stay there.

For me, one such was the BBC series “Connections”, by the science historian, James Burke.

First broadcast in 1978, the documentary explored the ways our modern technological world came into existence.

As a kid, I would watch fascinated, as Burke would weave a thread through historical eras, making “connections” between seemingly…

In July, Information Age ran a roundtable debate with IT leaders to discuss various bank industry issues.  Here are comments made by some of the delegates:

“We still don’t understand what the exposure of the banks is to each other.”

 

“Some retail banks are running on 40-year-old…

Here at OBASHI we believe that there is a pressing need for finance to “understand precisely how its product [money/data] flows and interacts with people, process and technology”.

This belief was further reinforced recently by the BBC’s ‘Business as Usual’, a radio documentary about continuing complexity in the financial sector.

The programme demonstrated that,…

Formula 1 racing is one of my favourite sports.

From a technical standpoint, what is really interesting about F1 is how data intensive the industry has become during the last 10 or so years.

Today, the driver, engineers and car never stop communicating with one another.  Everything the driver does with the car on the track, in testing or during a race, is monitored and recorded using telemetry: a data transfer system that allows remote measurement and…