In the days when I worked in branch banking, if someone
asked me what I did for a living I would say that I worked in a bank. Most people
probably thought that I was a cashier, despite the fact that in most branches
there were about ten times as many people doing back office jobs as there were
cashiers, and I was only on the counter for about three of the ten years I
spent working in branches. Later, when I had left branch banking to work in
other areas I would say, if asked, that I worked for a bank rather than in
one, which meant that I then had to elaborate on what I actually did.
In fact over the years, despite having only one employer,
Midland Bank/HSBC, I had any number of different jobs; conservatively I reckon
it was about seventeen diverse roles. Having worked through a number of jobs, I
ended up at Barking branch as Foreign Clerk in 1981, which was a varied role
including selling foreign currency and travellers cheques to customers,
handling Bills of Exchange and processing inward payments, creating overseas
payments and issuing bankers drafts.
Processing Outward Bills of Exchange was a tedious process
involving the completion of a seven part form that required six sheets of
carbon paper and a heavy touch on the typewriter[1].
We had one customer, a record exporter who twice won the Queens Award for
Exports, whose work required me to complete these by the dozen.
What was frustrating about working in branches was dealing
with International Division, particularly trying to track down incoming
payments. The image that I, and probably a lot of other people had of
International Division, of highly sophisticated systems, straight through
processing and little paper, was
completely different from what I experienced later when I worked there, the
reality being paper, paper everywhere and an almost entirely manual process. No
wonder it was so hard to track down a payment. Years later the boot was on the
other foot and I was the one answering calls from branches desperately seeking
a payment.
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| HSBC Barking Branch |
I was a Foreign Clerk at Barking and Eastcheap branch, where I spent virtually
all my time processing inward and outward Bills of Exchange, it was on to
Threadneedle Street International Banking Centre (IBC), where foreign work from
many branches in the City of London had been centralised. At the IBC I was in
the Payments team, processing payments to banks overseas and to other London
banks in foreign currencies. Further centralisation followed, with payments
being taken out of the various IBC's around London and absorbed into
Multicurrency Payments Department (MPD) in 1990. And in one way or another, it
was in the payments environment that I remained until I retired. The payment
system we used when I started in the department was called VOPS. Technically
the VSAM Operated Payment System[2],
it was known (not entirely affectionately) as the Very Old Payment System. When
not on payments at Threadneedle Street I sometimes worked on Foreign Exchange,
which our manager made it very clear did not make us Dealers, using the
wonderfully named Super DORIS system (DORIS being Dealer Operated Rate
Indication System), or on Admin, where I had my first introduction to Microsoft
Office; I think it must have been Windows 2.0 operating system.
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| Threadneedle Street branch is now a hotel and restaurant. |
I appreciate that to non-Bankers, and even to some people in
the industry, payments could be as dull as ditchwater, so I don't intend
launching into a detailed description of the subject, but I found the whole
area fascinating. And on the basis that if you enjoy something you tend to do
it well, and if you do something well you tend to enjoy it, I got a lot of
satisfaction in the various roles I had in payments. As with any job, I needed
to learn the basics, and in payments one of the first is understanding the
difference between Nostro and Vostro accounts[3].
It's an obvious difference and the principals are not that hard to grasp, but
until you do there is great potential for error. Once you have made the mistake
of threatening a bank in New York that
you are going to debit them when in fact you should be asking them ever so
nicely if they would not mind crediting you, you tend to learn your lesson.
From processing payments, it is a logical step to working
queries on them. The majority of payments get processed without any problems, only
a small percentage go wrong, but when you are processing tens of thousands of
payments a day, that small percentage equates to a lot of queries. Sorting them
out is an immensely frustrating task, particularly when dealing with banks in
the back end of beyond who are often disinclined to answer your enquiries, but
satisfying when you solve a knotty problem. There is a popular misconception
that once someone presses a button to send a payment to a bank somewhere else
in the world, it is there instantaneously. That is not the case everywhere, it
wasn't even the case where I worked twenty years ago when the amount of manual
processing involved in handling payments was phenomenal. In banks in many parts
of Asia and Africa, and even in Europe, the majority of payments went through
any number of human operators, with the attendant capacity for loss or error.
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| The Cheetah telex machine. Telexes were largely superseded by SWIFT as time went by. |
Naturally for the customer who phoned to say that the
payment that they sent last week had not arrived it was a matter of supreme
importance, for us it was only one of dozens of similar queries we had received
that day. Sometimes it would take weeks to prove what had happened, and
invariably the payment had turned up, albeit somewhat late, but on occasion it
would mean pulling out all the stops to locate it. For instance, one Christmas
Eve we had a phone call to say that a payment destined for someone stranded in
the Canary Islands without any money had gone astray. A series of increasingly
fraught telephone calls to banks in Madrid and The Canaries finally established
where the funds were and they were paid to the beneficiary barely an hour or so
before the banks closed for the holiday. It was nice to sort that out and avoid
someone having a very unhappy Christmas.
You would expect that working in a department processing
overseas payments requires a rudimentary knowledge of geography. Some of the
errors I had to remedy stemmed from some people having only a sketchy familiarity
with the subject, for example the payment sent to New Zealand in favour of an
account with the Puget Sound Bank: Puget Sound Bank are based in Seattle,
Washington State in the USA. Or my all time favourite, the payment from Midland
Bank, Paris in favour of a beneficiary at Midland Bank, Montpellier Branch that
was sent back to Paris instead of Cheltenham where Midland Bank, Montepellier
was located. Even for someone with only the most tenuous grasp of geography,
that one made no sense.
In those days all of our files were on paper and one of the
biggest challenges was finding a file when you needed it, particularly if you
had an impatient customer or branch on the phone (oh, how I learned about being
on the other end of such a call, very much like one of the ones I might have
made just a few years before), so the decision was made to develop a computer
based query system. And so was born The Midas Project.
To be continued
[1]
Seriously, when was the last time you used a piece of carbon paper? Or a manual
typewriter?
[2] Virtual
Storage Access Method (VSAM) is a file storage access method introduced by IBM
in 1970's and is used to organize data in form of files in Mainframes. And VOPS
may have been VSAM Outward Payment System.
[3]
Nostro, our account with you (for example a UK bank's US Dollar account with a
bank in New York) and Vostro, your account with us (say, the same New York
bank's Sterling account with us).
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