Syntel Error costs $1 Million
By Sandhya

Over the last 20 months, Techgoss had published a series of exclusive reports giving details of all that was happening inside the BPO, KPO and IT divisions of one of India’s most successful IT-ITES companies Syntel.  One report showed how that in the past Syntel BPO was overly reliant on couple of key clients. Also, reported were the sudden exits of the CEO and key HR people.

Regular readers of Techgoss are well aware that a large number of our articles are crowd sourced.  People send in tips, photos, story ideas and even articles. Many of our contributors have full times jobs in IT - ITES, and so prefer using a pseudonym. A Tipster who does not work with Syntel, but is with an associated company, and who has asked us not to publish his name, tells us

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A financial claim of at least 1 Million US$ is expected to be paid out by Syntel in the near future.

What happened? 

Syntel client IBT Norges had placed a trade for approximately 2 Billion Indonesian Rupees and the amount was to be moved (repatriated) to US$ currency.  While the client IBT Norges had given clear instructions, a Syntel employee erroneously instructed the custodian to place a FX deal for that amount.  It was also accidentally repeated the next business day which resulted in duplication of the FX trade.

Even as the powers that be at Syntel scrambled to rectify this clerical error, the damage was done.  Syntel will pay about $ 1 Million to their client for this mistake which lead to losses of approximately the same amount.

Not surprisingly, the top most managers at Syntel have had 2 rounds of meetings to work out checks and balances to ensure such an error never happens again
“

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