alt Hacker NewsHonestly, as someone else who does a lot of data plumbing, there is so much FTP servers with excel sheets being used as the means for official clearance processes.
There are constant data bugs in the feeds provided by major exchanges, market makers, etc, and so many iffy business rules that are basically all encoded in 100+ tab excel sheets.
Maybe this article focuses on a very specific niche of banking, but most of it is tied together with FTP and excel sheets.
I think the author would be shocked just how flaky a fundamental banking protocol like SWIFT is.
I’ve worked in Brazilian banking stacks that were literally FTP + spreadsheets for years. So yes, the ecosystem is often messy and protocols can be flaky.
That’s exactly why I argue for stronger internal modeling: when the boundary is dirty, explicit state machines/ADTs + exhaustiveness + idempotency/reconciliation help ensure bad feeds don’t silently create invalid internal states.