Benjamin Franklin – one of the founding fathers of the United States – is widely credited with saying that there are only two certainties in life: death and taxes. To this a third can perhaps now be added: technology failures.
Breakdowns in technology infrastructure are going to happen from time to time. They simply cannot be avoided. Even worse, just because you’ve fixed today’s glitch in your technology infrastructure doesn’t mean you’ve prevented others from emerging in a whole other guise.
The repercussions can be serious enough when technology falls over within a bank or other financial institution. The consequences can be even more far-reaching when the very infrastructure underpinning financial markets is threatened by systems failures.
This is starkly highlighted by a recent software glitch that came to light within the futures trading platform of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Unable to fix the systems bug, the exchange had no choice but to suspend trading, which meant that issuers of listed products on the Hong Kong market struggled to properly hedge risk and to deliver a fair price to the market.
Confusion…
