Banks Worldwide Get Ready for the October Surprise

Originally posted by ProtoplasmicTraveler

There is a reason the media serves up 24 hour a day anger, fear, angst and vitriol. They are very much trying to and succeeding in getting people to focus on negatives, use negative energy and manifest negative things.

This is one of the best and truest words I've ever read on here.

I spent a month back in August over at my families house in the US. They watch and listen to the news all day long because they are old people. Being away from the States so long I get particularly sensitive to the differences. I got the impression that there was no news and they were doing exactly what you stated above. It was crazy, I felt like I was being put through an attempted hypnotization or programming.

Originally posted by AmethystSD
My local credit union is available and as far as I can tell it always was. I have to say, when I read that blog it made me think, "what a clever way to get people to tell you what bank they use." I've seen a few people even post how much money they have in their account.

Be careful!

I agree. Nothing like a wolf lurking around.... . Go back people and edit your posts.

[edit on 26-10-2009 by blue_fish]

Originally posted by AmethystSD
My local credit union is available and as far as I can tell it always was. I have to say, when I read that blog it made me think, "what a clever way to get people to tell you what bank they use." I've seen a few people even post how much money they have in their account.

Be careful!

I have $24.15 in a 5th/3rd Bank account .... go and get it if you can!

I live in wales in britain, I went to the bank the other day and the ATM was spitting peoples cards back at them, so I went in to withdraw money and was told that all systems were down across the UK.
Strangely enough I came on here and read the topic and has got me thinking, if this is worldwide and is blatently happening everywhere to all major banks, then something is definitely up!?
If you've ever heard of the echelon system then perhaps it's being installed, updated??
Or maybe it is just a system upgrade? but for every bank or most in the world? at the same time? fills me with a sense of foreboding.

The ATM's here in Scotland are fine. I think paranoia are causing an exaggeration of minor problems. Oh....and today is the 27th Oct, the US is supposed to be going to hell in had basket.......oh well yet another dom and gloom prediction....that wasn't.

I read the beginning of the thread and I must admit I skipped most of the rest, because as a former member of IT of a major US bank, I know the following:

a) the source quoted in the OP just doesn't seem knowledgeable, he doesn't know what the heck he's talking about

b) yes there is a link to Federal Reserve at major banks, this is old news as it has existed for decades now and guess what, it is used to loan money from the FED and repay it later

I just don't see a sliver of interesting info in this thread and it's funny how people jumped on the doom and gloom bandwagon. Bleh.

Make sense!
articlesofinterest-kelley.blogspot.com...

reply to post by Iamonlyhuman


The October surprise has been delayed, no idea how long,
but they are pumping funny money into the system to keep
it afloat.

How long they can keep back channeling the Fed into buying
our own T-bills vs. selling them to other nations I have no idea.

The paper going in a circle though will eventually lead to
some pretty nasty inflation.

When that happens they will be inclined to raise rates like
they did in the 80's and when that happens, the party is
likely over.

But they have a lot of power, and a lot of paper and ink,
so who knows how long the fiat farce will fly.

reply to post by ProtoplasmicTraveler



Ever work in a Bank's IT department? Didn't think so.

I have. Three different banks. You are quite wrong about your assessment.

Don't use T-1? half right. T-1 connections are too slow for many systems, so faster T-carriers are used when appropriate. Individual branches would have no need for even a T-1 connection. They used to use ISDN leased lines to the branches but that is pretty old technology these days, not certain what they use now, possibly ADSL or maybe fiber optic. Between data centers Banks have very tight service level agreements between their various systems and they will use the fastest biggest capacity pipes they can get. I'd be willing to bet that T-carrier was 'invented' specifically for Banks, but the Airlines might disagree with me.

Hack a T-carrier? Not bloody likely, and if you do you will just find the strongest encryption in existence. (yes I know, everything is crackable given enough computer power and time).

DOS based? wrong again. If there is one thing you can be sure of, it is that Banks will never use software or hardware that is out of support for critical systems. Back office systems that "just work" may hang around for a while if nobody has to hassle with it, but a DOS based system is laughable.

It is true that banks don't upgrade their systems and hardware every other month, but most hardware will be upgraded/replaced every three years or so.

Don't use wireless? Half true at least. Certainly not for branch platform stuff or at the Computer center, but quite possibly for 'normal' office stuff.

For the most part, Banks security systems are the best available outside of Military/Intelligence grade. Almost all mistakes resulting in a security breach are customer caused. But when the occasional screw up happens it can be quite spectacular.

Most IT Programmers wouldn't know how to program banking systems? Half right maybe. Most programmers don't work for Banks, and banking platform systems and ATM systems are highly specialized systems. The generic platforms are purchased from IBM or Seimans or whoever, and customised for the Bank's operations. Backoffice stuff, like loan processing, general ledger, and management reporting will almost certainly be on SAP a computer package used by virtually every large company in the world, so there are a lot of people that can program its internal language called ABAP. And SAP can be programmed with Java too, but 'most' IT Programmers don't know Java either (just a very large number). Customer Management Systems are, for the most part, written in Java these days, if the Bank customizes it for themselves. Human Resources will be either from SAP or Oracle (there are a few others), and these systems are used by the majority of large companies.

The bottom line is that there are a lot of people that can program Banking systems. Specialist systems will have specialist programmers that are trained in the specific systems. However, systems that use standard languages and techniques predominate, so most IT programmers will not be out of their depth.

1980's terminal mindset? Hardly. You won't find any dumb terminals at any bank branch. They will almost certainly be stripped down Windoze based machines running specific branch platform front end programs, though in some cases that could be a Java applet running in a browser . There will be no email, no minesweeper, no connection to the internet so they won't be hackable. Even old applications built with CICS and IMS that used to send IBM 3270 terminal data streams just need to be pointed at a new terminal terminal type in the terminal controller program to send an HTML stream instead.

[edit on 3/11/2009 by rnaa]

[edit on 3/11/2009 by rnaa]

reply to post by Iamonlyhuman


Must be new to the bank.

Banks will generally have an internally known software upgrade schedule. A typical schedule would be Monthly for program fixes, quarterly for new implementations, half yearly for application upgrades, yearly for operating system upgrades.

Notice we are not talking about adding new desktops, or installing Office, we are talking about the critical banking systems at the data centre, generally on the mainframe.

Any downtime is scheduled to minimize front office hassles and interruption of backoffice processing. So monthly upgrades would be done when the branches are closed and after the general ledger has been closed for example. They would normally try to schedule bigger things during 3 or 4 day holiday breaks.

There are always, and I mean always, changes to applications to implement Government requirements. I expect that there are new reporting requirements as part of the fallout from the GFC. But there is nothing new about the cycle or the concept.

If the bank is going to be fined or something if they don't get the new reporting happening by a certain date, then you can be sure Management is going to be leaning on IT to get it right. And the IT department would be remiss if it didn't warn the rest of the company that their could be outages if it goes pear shaped, especially if there are major changes, done hastily, outside the 'normal' development cycle.

Originally posted by Iamonlyhuman

I know that Bank of America's systems were scheduled to be shut down for a few days due to taking in Wells Fargo customers (at least that's what they told me). I learned this because I was planning to pay off my mortgage and when I called for a payoff amount, I was told to make sure to do it before that date or wait until November to do it.

This is a highly unlikely scenario. It has been estimated, way back in the 1980's that if a bank's computer systems are offline for as little as 4 days the bank will be out of business. A 2 day shutdown would cost them many many billions of dollars. No way that is going to happen.

Adding customers is a fundamental feature of their systems. Even if they don't normally do it by the thousands at a time, there is no reason to shut it down. Even if they have to provision new hardware - disks or CPU's - that can be done without shutting down the system. OK, I am not personally aware of BOA or WF systems, but I do know, for a fact, that the BOA data centre was a pioneer in maintaining uptime for its critical systems.

They might very well need to take parts of the system down for a few minutes, even an hour, but absolutely not for days.

well i don't know if this is relevent or not but sunday while in checkout at walmart the csm went to each checkout and said credit cards and debit cards were not being accepted because of something happening with all the banks i walked over to my bank 20 foot from checkout and took all of mny money out but 200 bucks paid for my groceries and left. monday people at work were talk,ing about that happening to them on monday

Surprise!

It is November...

Originally posted by proteus33
well i don't know if this is relevent or not but sunday while in checkout at walmart the csm went to each checkout and said credit cards and debit cards were not being accepted because of something happening with all the banks i walked over to my bank 20 foot from checkout and took all of mny money out but 200 bucks paid for my groceries and left. monday people at work were talk,ing about that happening to them on monday

Comms lines go down occasionally, street repairs cut phone lines, message servers break or are rebooted, there are lots of points of failure that don't indicate a bank plot to stop doing business with you.

Merchant's just blame 'the bank' when that happens, they seldom know the actually cause of the failure, just that they can't talk to the bank. Just like people who blame the computer when they can't spell your name and can't find your records.