Indian software companies like TCS are useless

TCS software running the SBI Securities share-trading portal lost ₹30,000 of my money and is unable to restore it. This is indicative of a massive flaw in their software. They

• do not log transactions effectively
• have no reconciliation system for failed transactions
• cannot match inflows and outflows of money to maintain the integrity of the system

What this means is that money can disappear on the site, like in a black hole. Clearly, TCS lacks competency to design financial websites They are obviously fooling their customers like the PSU bank SBI.

Last month, I tried to make a purchase order on the SBI Securities share-trading portal. (In a previous blog post, I have referred to this site as a sarkari bank. Now, the gloves are off.) The order failed and no shares were bought. However, the SBI Securities had placed a hold for ₹30,000 on my bank account. Now, SBI Securities has no knowledge about this hold. The TCS software seems to have provided no option to resolve such failed transactions so the support personnel are clueless as to how to solve the problem.

When I started using this trading site, I was less than impressed. It is like an aircraft built by Boeing — a fibreglass contraption stuck together by chewing gum and prayers.

The problems with trade.sbisecurities.com are too numerous to list but I will make an attempt:

• Site availability is not 100%.
• The URL does not change from trade.sbisecurities.com/authenticate even after a successful login. It remains the same throughout the session.
• Sometimes after login, site menu gets partially hidden and becomes inaccessible.
• Site menu is voluminous and confusing.
• Buy/sell orders
  • can take a long time to finish.
  • may not succeed at all and the page can become unresponsive
• Popups seem to float but cannot be moved or minimized or closed.
• Multiple popups may float over each other and the page can become unresponsive.
• Useless information about stocks are easily available. Useful information, on the other hand, is not.
  • Behind-the-scenes operations in transaction such as bank funds release and holds are displayed and require multiple confirmation steps.
  • Important information on when the payout will happen (after selling stocks) is not available. ICICIDirect.com displays a schedule of post-order steps that will clearly tell you when your bank account will be credited by them.
• The complaint portal (crcf.sbi.co.in/cc) says it will accept messages smaller than 500 characters but it will only accept messages less than 300 characters. Thus, most complaints are never received by SBI employees. A cunning trick by TCS to reduce complaints about their system!
• The chat system floater interferes with all the other floats in their page. (The AI-driven system provides useless answers. If you try the option to chat with a human, no humans are available.)

I looked at the source code and I found several other blunders.

• Loads Javascript from Google CDN.
• Uses bloatware Javascript frameworks such as Bootstrap and JQuery.
• Loads fonts from Cloudflare CDN.
• Login authentication code is written in an amateurish way and not minified/obfuscated.

Why do I have to suffer this poor SBI service? Why did not I use some other trading site? I used to trade on ICICIDirect.com but now that site does not even open on my Net connection. Sometimes, it appears and sometimes it does not. Same with the ICICI banking website. The main website is available but the netbanking site at infinity.icicibank.com is sometimes not accessible. I think this problem is caused by the usual suspect Cloudflare, owned by the dumb Amazon of the USA. It is the tyranny of the stupid, world over!

As I have said in my previous post, the private sector ICICIDirect site is a lot simpler but it also suffers bloatware. It used to be coded in Classic ASP and was fine. When they tried a makeover in ASP.NET, it became very poor. Now, they have fixed some of the problems but the CloudFlare is blocking access intermittently to the site. There is also a Whatsapp link in the menu system! Because it is cheaper for them to send transactions messages through Whatsapp than through SMS. Whatsapp subsidizes these messages because it provides access to financial transactions data of its users, which is a valuable marketing goldmine for its advertisers. This shows you how cheap ICICI is. ICICI would rather expose their customer data to Facebook-owned Whatsapp rather than pay for bulk SMS.

The world is falling apart. It is coming off the seams. The reason for this mess by Indian software companies is that they do not have system to store institutional knowledge gained by executing different projects over so many years. Each new project is executed by some new guy. The success or failure of the project depends entirely on his abilities and those of his team members. The company executing the project brings no value-addition. Thus, the outcome of the project is very much similar to that of a coin toss.

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UPDATE 1

After over two dozen emails back and forth, SBI Securities put the forgotten lien amount in a fake hold and let me release it to my bank account. I had conducted several other transactions after this failed transaction, and several other holds and releases had been placed successfully. The 30k lien disappeared from the bank hold and release report. But, after they fixed the code or manually updated the database, they seem to have made the lien amount back under hold so I had to release it.

Now, I conduct most of my trades back on ICICIDirect. Not that they are good but they are better than the worst, which is SBI Securities a.k.a. TCS.

UPDATE 2

The SBI Securities continues to work like the Obamacare 1.0 website. I sold a stock for nearl 30 thousand rupees. The order was accepted but the order book does not get updated. Ditto for the tradebook. If not for the SMS from CDSL (the depository), there was no record of the transaction.

After a stock is sold, the money does not go to your bank account automatically. I manually requested a payout and the payout book got updated … initially. The amount disappeared from the book even before amount was credited. There is also no record of past payouts.

It is clear from these examples that TCS should not be in this business. They do not understand it. I have not had so many problems with ICICIDirect.com. I have been using them since 1998. The interface is workable if not great. It is not intentionally designed to give panic attacks like SBI Securities.

UPDATE 3

This happened in June. On the watchlist float, I found that some trades of some scrips on BSE were at an unusual discount on NSE. I checked live BSE stock quotes on other sites. They did not show this disparity. I put in a few orders to take advantage of these unusually low quotes of LTP but they did not get executed. I checked the live orders and they did match several bids and offers at those low prices. This went on for at least an hour before the discount disappeared. (I doubt these trades were from futures segment. You see that EQ suffix in the stock IDs? That indicates these quotes are from the equity segment.) I do not know who to pin the blame on — BSE (unlikely) or TCS (likely).