I worked at an investment bank which made daily FX transactions to cover trading in world markets to their nostro accounts, and these could easily be in the 10-100 million range on a given day. Transactions like these are not particularly surprising in that context, so processes will be in place to reduce the workload on operations staff, so that they only need to validate exceptional transactions.
If you have 10 business units trading 50 world currencies, checking 500 transactions for FX every day is a total chore hence it would get automated, and only unusually large transactions would be flagged. Rules like <10m goes through automatically would be tuned over time so that the workload on operations team members would add actual value without being onerous on their time.
So, depending on the business we are talking about, a 25m transaction could basically be lost in the noise. Given the mention of the CFO being london based and the operations team being in HK, it sounds like a typical investment bank setup to me.
but i assume these daily transactions are going to same validates target accounts, that are nnot changing daily. in this case i assume this was a transaction to a random account.
Yes, that's a good point. The nostro accounts don't change often, but they do change as new business lines come and go, but I don't remember the validator having any rules based on the target accounts in the system I was involved with. However I may be wrong, and that was 10 years ago, so things have probably moved on.
If you have 10 business units trading 50 world currencies, checking 500 transactions for FX every day is a total chore hence it would get automated, and only unusually large transactions would be flagged. Rules like <10m goes through automatically would be tuned over time so that the workload on operations team members would add actual value without being onerous on their time.
So, depending on the business we are talking about, a 25m transaction could basically be lost in the noise. Given the mention of the CFO being london based and the operations team being in HK, it sounds like a typical investment bank setup to me.