“A poor workman blames his tools”. So, why help the workman?

“A poor workman blames his tools”. So, why help the workman?

In Financial Services, our operations teams who are at the coal face, getting through the day’s work, generally do sterling work. There are no mistakes, things go to plan and the day is done. Every institution has one or two superheroes who know exactly what to do and how to do it; they spin plates and juggle balls based on years of acquired expertise. We also know that things go wrong, and shit happens; nobody, no place, is perfect.

Over the years, I have been the one making operational errors and I have been the one leading the drains up post-mortem to figure out what caused the problem and how we make sure it doesn’t happen again. Whilst I am getting long in the tooth in things FS, time served means I have a time-polished view of why things go wrong and how to stop those errors happening.

As you look to 2025; dealing with new challenges, trying to get more done with the same resources, or the same done with fewer resources, here are some ideas on where you might tighten the screws. These are all true stories, so you might like them just because you want to read about stuff going wrong at Goldman Sachs, and/or because you want to know how you can do better.

Tale #1: In the 90s, before the introduction of the Euro, an operational oversight meant that Goldman Sachs did not do an FX trade on time to fund an IPO in Portugal (click here for the full story).? In this case, the paper reports the Ops teams relied on to review positions were so lengthy that the analysts could easily overlook the exceptions which needed attention in the midst of hundreds of items which didn’t. The tool did not help the staff home in on the specific items which needed attention.

Tale #2: Way back, I lost $2mm of Goldman’s money (click here for the full story) because I missed a corporate action announcement. One of the ingredients in creating the problem: I was standing in for one of the team who was on holiday, so hurried as I was, I didn’t follow the right steps, and I missed something.

Tale #3:? This one a near miss in which we avoided a fatal error (click here for the full story). In this case, we lost track of whether something had been done or not and then did something twice. The error turned out to be harmless, albeit after getting a few pulses racing. A key ingredient in creating the problem: we had a checklist, but the Ops team had been paying it lip service and just ticking off the whole list at the end of the day. On a particular day, two of the team took the afternoon off and handed over to somebody else. Now both the guys who took vacation were superheroes, juggling operational balls and spinning operational plates every day to get the work done. They were great. But their custom way of working fell flat when they had to handover to a deputy to complete the day. He was lost and didn’t even know where he was.

My top tip on matters resilience or OpRisk if you prefer is not to be defeatist and just assume that shit happens, but to make the investments which help ensure things do not go wrong in the first place.

With that mindset, I would like to point you at a tool that would have helped me avoid 2 of the 3 incidents above. And, as the late, greats Jim Steinman wrote, and Meat Loaf sang: “Two out of three ain’t bad.”

The clever tool I am talking about is from the folks at Swedish start-up Daymi where I am the Global Ambassador . Go take a look, if only for a sneak peek of what good might look like. Putting a proper tool in the hands of your Ops teams will help them and that will ultimately help you.

The foundation is a build-your-own checklist tool, coupled with the ability to add procedures to each task, as well as alarms if things are not done on time. And you can add the evidence that a task was done. That alone is every auditor’s wet dream. Many team members can work on the same list in parallel without any danger of not knowing what has been done and what has not.

More on me and the company: https://daymi.co/new-global-ambassador-at-daymi/

More on the company: https://ops.daymi.co/introduction/

A quick demo:?https://app.arcade.software/share/yYYtj6YpzZ37esgyK6Pm

More good news. This clever little tool is built for bottom-up implementation. Any one team can start to use it on their own; straight out of the cloud and without any integration to other systems. No big-ticket enterprise license, just a simple pay-per-user model. No limit on the number of checklists or procedure detail. Yes, the tool will show you some stats over time. Lovely stuff, nice colours and that will all help you fine-tune. Most importantly, you can put the power in the hands of your team. Give them the tools to make their day easier and make it much more easy to juggle multiple processes.

Thanks for reading.

Would you take two minutes and share your thoughts with me? Feedback via the comments would be great.

If you would like to get in touch, please just type: “Can we talk?” into the comments box.

Please feel free to get in contact: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/bankersplumber/ and [email protected] .

#Oprisk #checklists #procedures #resilience

Want to know how?banks?really work? Maybe you are in a?FinTech, a?bank?or a?consulting?firm. Maybe trying to do something new.?Understanding how to make things work properly is a good investment of your time.

The Bankers’ Plumber’s Handbook is about how investment banking works, how to do operations?properly and keep control.?

The book tries to make it easy for you and includes a collection of real-life, true stories from 37+ years of adventures in banking around the world. True tales of Goldman Sachs and collecting money from the mob, losing $2m of the partners’ money yet still keeping my job and keeping an eye on traders with evil intentions.

So, you might like the tool kit, you might like the stories, or you might only like the glossary, which one of my friends kindly said was worth the price of the book on its own.?Or you might like all of it.

Go ahead, get your copy! https://lnkd.in/eac5zWBD ?