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It is always mesmerizing to be a part of the inner circle regardless of your role. As long as you are there, your vibration is received by someone else. Who knows? You and I can change any sort of dire straits into something better.

One time, the retail banking system was attacked by an IT engineer of another Japanese mega bank. This IT guy created a program to send a fund transfer request of 1 yen every minute, just to jam our transaction queue. He ran the program on the final day of the month, the busiest day. The bank’s system slowed down for number of hours. Data center was alarmed. Customer complaints poured in to the call center and branches.

Someone from Compliance Division approached me to find out when IT management would be ready to report to Financial Services Agency (or Bank of Japan) about this embarrassment. I do not remember which authority it was any longer. I just remember that they do not work together. I was told that they have jurisdiction issues between them. I believed it because I learnt quite a lot about bureaucrats by then. This compliance guy was hissing many times when he delivered the simple question to me. I could hear his unspoken message so loudly and clearly: the general public already pointed the finger at us as the disgraced bank! IT’s poor decisions, poor management or system glitches are not exactly what we need now!

It was how the majority of employees perceived of our Indian Chief Information Officer and his non-Japanese sidekicks. The bank staff saw their bank collapsed and the expensive, flashy banking program was marked as “a legacy” and dumped. Instead, they are told to use a cheap foreign program. A cheap foreign program is never good enough for our intricate services with long tradition!!