Sending money across countries should be easy, and normally so. Not unless you are unlucky and run into a snag like I had in the last two weeks. What was supposed to be a simple transfer became a painfully long nine-day drag and still with no money arriving at the other end.
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As Murphy's Law has it, if things can go wrong, they will! And it can't choose a worse time than this, as the money had to reach some businesses quickly or they will go bust. Employees will be laid off and families will be affected.
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Understandably, the bank will not reveal what went wrong, but based on my discussions with them and my twenty odd years experience as a IT and management consultant for banks in major international banking centres, this was probably what happened:
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1. When the bank staff entered the transfer details on screen:
The beneficiary account details was too long and exceeded the field space provided. As a result, the account details got truncated.
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2. When sent to the beneficiary bank, they didn't know what to make out of the truncated data (beneficiary account details) and the transaction just sat there.
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Diagnostic tedium:
1. The banking software that facilitated the transfer should have a longer field size. If this field size is exceeded, the bank staff must not be able to press the 'send' button.
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2. So granted that the software is poorly designed and failed to prevent it to be sent, there should then be automatic error handling to auto-correct the beneficiary account details before proceeding to 'send'.
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3. If it failed to implement corrective actions for 1 and 2, then the transaction with truncated data should be flagged in the transaction log when it reaches the beneficiary bank. I suspect, there is such a log, but the operator sitting in front of the screen was probably 'sleeping'.
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Moral of the story:
What started as a 'minor' mistake of poor user-interface design and error handling, can result in business going bust, employees being laid-off and families spiralling down into a financial grind.
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So in whatever you do, even the seemingly mundane ones, do them mindfully, for the ripple effects whether big or small,always travel a long way. It is harder to see this in the cold and impersonal Internet and mobile phone age, but nevertheless the impacts on humans, other life forms and the environment remains unchanged from the ages of old.
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Rule of Thumb:
Put love first in whatever you do. When you do that, everything falls in place. In this instance, if the designer had done so, he would have captured the user requirements more comprehensively. He would then not just see the entry fields as just a place to handle account data, but an opportunity to serve and help the end user send money to a chosen destination on time.
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The operator sitting in front of the transaction log screen, admittedly a mundane role, will get his drive from being able to serve his clients so that many others will be happy and sing praises for him. If he treats it as a 'job', then it would be mundane and possibly fall 'asleep' like many others.
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Conclusion:
While it is important to get the technology right during software development, quite often, a disproportionate amount of time is spent on the aesthetics of the screen, the programming language to use, the server to use, the communications protocol to adopt...etc, compared with the user requirements.
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In the end, any system will be a system to serve others. If it doesn't serve others, then it would have fallen short of its purpose.If the designer of the banking software could cut his mind across time and space, he would be able to take delight that I would be able to send the money on time and save some people from going bust and families away from financial hardships.
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PS. I cancelled the old transfer and re-sent a new one today. The bank branch manager offered to lend me the money personallly to re-send, as re-calling the money will take too long. I was touched! So, even in a critical fallout like this, pleasant things do happen. In darkness, there is light; and in light there is darkness. Perhaps such events occur so that we have opportunities to exercise compassion. :)
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