[kchoudhu]

These fines are fundamentally stupid: yes, Citi's IT fucked up, but the fault is with the regulators for having such braindead reporting requirements to begin with.

Instead of something sensible like "you trade, you report", the regulators have set up a patchwork of formats, inclusion criteria and target agencies that pretty much ensures that lapses like this occur. Turning Frank-Dodd into workable code is fucking hard: I spent a couple of years pushing that boulder up the slope until I ragequit a couple of months ago.

The regulators should be ingesting data in one place and running analytics on a data lake. The banks are so sick of spending money dealing with the lack of regulatory technical competence that they'll probably happily pony up a couple of billion dollars between them to set up the surveillance system for the Feds; doing it once is cheaper in the long run than repeating the same set of mistakes at every bank on the Street.

[eru]

The banks are sick of this, but just like the grass that doesn't want to be eaten by the cows, they also depend on this complicated regulation to keep our competitors.

[kchoudhu]

I'm not sure complicated reporting is how banks are maintaining margins. They're diverting billions into complying with these requirements, for very little gain.

[sseveran]

And anyone entering their business would have to as well. The large banks are happy to have these regulations in some ways as it makes it hard for midsized banks to grow and compete with them.

[eru]

Yes. Or for scrappy upstarts to compete from their garage.