February 19, 2004

Currency Follies

Romania is not in the Euro zone but lots of people use euros and you can open up an account in euros, which somebody did, and my wife wants $100 worth of euros transferred there.

It's interesting that people have been talking about euros becoming an alternate reserve currency since before the actual introduction of the thing yet, here we are years later and Citibank's online setup is unprepared for just the sort of transaction such a reserve status would require, the wiring from a dollar account to a non-euro country in euros. You can do it, but it requires a branch visit.

It's always interesting to see how business rules assumptions crop up unexpectedly in code. It would have been very easy to make the screen a bit different so alternate reserve currencies could be handled on-line but somebody didn't put it in the spec so the programmers never accounted for this particular use case.

Posted by TMLutas at February 19, 2004 10:24 AM