Thread by @patio11

Matt Levine in rare form today on a subject near and dear to my interests which for obvious reasons I cannot go into too much detail about: the UX and human interface design factors of a UI capable of initiating very large wire payments.

If you’ve ever wanted to work at a shop which really cares about the quality of the software their operations professionals use every day, Stripe is hiring.

stripe.com/jobs

The Matt Levine piece: bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…

(I try to avoid that feeling of the hard to spell German word and instead focus on “Here were a group of professionals attempting to do an important thing who were poorly served by their infrastructure. What can we, as a community, learn from this experience.”)

Underappreciated about wires:

1) They’re less dangerous than people believe them to be, particularly domestic wires.

2) Simultaneously, the number of things that have to go wrong between a wire getting cut and a going concern warning for a financial institution is single digits

“Really they’re less dangerous? But they’re generally irreversible?”

What do you take us for, Bitcoiners? No, financial institutions are a high-trust community who are almost never willing to burn multi-decade-or-century reputations for probity over a single client transaction.

A very large mistaken wire normally gets settled by operations professionals on a phone call within a few minutes.

This story stops being an ops story and starts being a legal story when the decisionmakers come to the conclusion “We have a legally colorable claim to this money.”

For similar reasons, if you were hypothetically credited with $100M as a result of a fumble fingered wire, your default assumption should be “You’re going to get a phone call from the bank after they reverse it. Your cooperation is appreciated but absolutely not required.”