Mailing List Archive


[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [tlug] [OT] Japan and 海外 credit cards



2 hours of work just to close the regular day? I think it definitely
sounds like something to be fixed in their system - it's either bad
design or extreme bureaucracy (or both :)

Among other reasons, with the offering of more and more complex services to become competitive and mega-mergers, bank IT systems generally boils down to horrendous complexity and lots of inefficiency.

Mega-bank mergers are a nightmare. When the merger is decided, effectively you end up with 2 systems, each performing similar operations but with different software and databases. And it takes years to streamline the process and merge everything together, including the UI and backend. (And before this is completed, management decides to merge with another bank again. Yay.). Banks do not have much luxury of saying "you can't check your bank balance next week because we are merging databases". On top of that you need to be 100% accurate. Google doesn't get penalized by the government if Gmail is down or behaves badly. Banks get their licences revoked and faces heavy fines.

Then the bank-next-door is offering some new service, and your bank wants to play catch up. The usual way is for management to push this out of the door "as-soon-as-possible". Along with clueless managers, "quick and dirty" solutions are introduced, and suddenly you find a nasty process that involves tons of paperwork and human intervention, and horrible IT "patches" by your friendly vendor who wasn't given ample time to do this properly. This piles up.

Then you have all these problems like clueless US/European/Indian software developers who don't understand that the Japanese Yen have NO decimal places. Or you'll find problems like excel only supporting 65,535 lines and it will suddenly crash on the poor lady who was only instructed to match figures. Or some unsupported multibyte Japanese character appears in a .csv text file (yes, haha, legacy *comma seperated* text files :-) that transfers data from one system to another that breaks the process. Please don't make me mention "COBOL" :-)

So at the end of day everyday, everybody in the bank battles with inefficient procedures and crap customized IT systems. And it's not easy to say "let's change this procedure" without thinking of the consequences.

As this is OT, I'd better stop here. If you want more horror stories (like really scary ones) I'll share it with you in the next nomikai :-)

Chiew

On Aug 3, 2009, at 3:09 PM, Alexei Anisimov wrote:



Having previously worked in a (non-Japanese) bank, I must beg to
disagree.  End of day accounting/closing procedures take that long to
finish--my bank closed at 3 and it was a race to get everything done
and reconciled before 5pm.  I don't think Japanese banks can actually
_force_ people to stay and do zangyou, even if there's unspoken
pressure--if the clerks (and notice how most of them are women) want
to go home and cook/care for their children, the banks can't stay open
for transactions.

2 hours of work just to close the regular day? I think it definitely
sounds like something to be fixed in their system - it's either bad
design or extreme bureaucracy (or both :)

Best regards,
--
Alexei Anisimov


--
To unsubscribe from this mailing list,
please see the instructions at http://lists.tlug.jp/list.html

The TLUG mailing list is hosted by the award-winning Internet provider
ASAHI Net.
Visit ASAHI Net's English-language Web page: http://asahi-net.jp/en/



Home | Main Index | Thread Index

Home Page Mailing List Linux and Japan TLUG Members Links