A live experience shared by one of our Consultants.

This incident happened when I was working as a Consultant for a East European bank. The bank had just gone live on 1st December, and I had recently joined the project. Right on the second day of go live, the Bank faced a major issue in terms of financial implications. The problem was with all the migrated Term Deposits on first day after the Bank had gone live. The migrated Term Deposits had principal and interest coming from the older system, but due to one parameter having a wrong value during migration, only the principal amount was getting taxed, and not the interest that came from the older system. For the resolution of this issue, our task was clear cut: we needed to identify the original interest that came initially from the older system, and provide a solution to calculate and deduct the appropriate tax from that interest amount.

We prepared a list of all such deposit accounts. The challenge was that since the bank was live, many such deposits had already matured by the first two days. So as first step, we moved the interest into a GL from all such accounts to prevent the customer from withdrawing the entire amount without tax. As the second step, we prepared a script to calculate and deduct the tax on all such deposits, and put the remaining interest amount back into the deposit account. Once this was done, and the impact for the first two days was negated, we set out on the bigger task, which was to identify all such deposits across the system, and do the same for them. Being new in the team, I was not involved in the script preparation, but assigned the task of identifying all such accounts. I had to search for 2 days to make an exhaustive list of all these deposits, and provided the list to the bank. The bank had also prepared a list, but it turned out that my list was more exhaustive, and covered everything.

By then, we also had the script ready for the bank, and once the bank verified the list of deposit accounts sent by me, we ran all the tests in our test environment to make sure our scripts will correct the issue, and finally sent the scripts to be run on specific dates to the bank.

The bank acknowledged the point, and appreciated the efforts shown by the entire team over the 3 days which helped avert a major financial disaster for the bank.