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by pfarnsworth 3075 days ago
I used to work in payments. This happens sometimes, it's a bug it's not something nefarious, and it's really disruptive.

Many, many people will be put in a negative balance. Wells Fargo is probably one of those banks that don't order bill payments chronologically, but probably by amount, so things could get very very messy. There will be a lot of NSF charges that will need to be reversed, or Line of Credit charges for those accounts that have automatic line of credit to avoid NSF charges. But missed payments because of NSF will also be a problem as well, unless Wells Fargo foots the entire extra amount so that customers don't get massively fucked up.

1 comments

I work in payments too. I don't know how this happens using an ACID DB. Everything is done within a transaction and extra checks are done to make sure that payments/debits happen ONCE and all once.
Probably two separate databases.
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