{"id":31675,"date":"2021-02-18T20:20:02","date_gmt":"2021-02-19T01:20:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=31675"},"modified":"2021-02-18T20:20:02","modified_gmt":"2021-02-19T01:20:02","slug":"citibanks-500-million-ui-lesson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2021\/02\/18\/citibanks-500-million-ui-lesson\/","title":{"rendered":"Citibank&rsquo;s $500 Million UI Lesson"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/2021\/02\/citibank-just-got-a-500-million-lesson-in-the-importance-of-ui-design\/\">Timothy B. Lee<\/a> (via <a href=\"https:\/\/news.ycombinator.com\/item?id=26180785\">Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n<blockquote cite=\"https:\/\/arstechnica.com\/tech-policy\/2021\/02\/citibank-just-got-a-500-million-lesson-in-the-importance-of-ui-design\/\"><p>A federal judge has <a href=\"https:\/\/www.courtlistener.com\/recap\/gov.uscourts.nysd.542310\/gov.uscourts.nysd.542310.243.0_2.pdf\">ruled<\/a> that Citibank isn&rsquo;t entitled to the return of $500 million it sent to various creditors last August. Kludgey software and a poorly designed user interface contributed to the massive screwup.<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>However, Revlon was in the process of refinancing its debt&mdash;paying off a few creditors while rolling the rest of its debt into a new loan. And this, combined with the confusing interface of financial software called Flexcube, led the bank to accidentally pay back the principal on the entire loan&mdash;most of which wasn&rsquo;t due until 2023.<\/p><p>[&#8230;]<\/p><p>The subcontractor thought that checking the &ldquo;principal&rdquo; checkbox and entering the number of a Citibank wash account would ensure that the principal payment would stay at Citibank. He was wrong. To prevent payment of the principal, the subcontractor actually needed to set the &ldquo;front&rdquo; and &ldquo;fund&rdquo; fields to the wash account as well as &ldquo;principal.&rdquo;<\/p><p>Citibank&rsquo;s procedures require that three people sign off on a transaction of this size. In this case, that was the subcontractor, a colleague of his in India, and a senior Citibank official in Delaware. All three believed that setting the &ldquo;principal&rdquo; field to an internal wash account number would prevent payment of the principal.<\/p><\/blockquote>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Timothy B. Lee (via Hacker News): A federal judge has ruled that Citibank isn&rsquo;t entitled to the return of $500 million it sent to various creditors last August. Kludgey software and a poorly designed user interface contributed to the massive screwup.[&#8230;]However, Revlon was in the process of refinancing its debt&mdash;paying off a few creditors while [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"apple_news_api_created_at":"2021-02-19T01:20:06Z","apple_news_api_id":"170edd98-600b-4a1e-9af1-50bcb7fc546e","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2021-02-19T01:20:06Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/AFw7dmGALSh6a8VC8t_xUbg","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":false,"apple_news_is_paid":false,"apple_news_is_preview":false,"apple_news_is_sponsored":false,"apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":"\"\"","apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[77,1195,209,96],"class_list":["post-31675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-design","tag-financial","tag-legal","tag-web"],"apple_news_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31675"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31676,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31675\/revisions\/31676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}