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

[CF <theworldinunion@example.com>]

> 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/