The core issue seems to be that a company named Synapse was a middleman to a lot of fintech startups and spread money around various banks but didn't actually keep very accurate records of balances. Evolve bank noticed this and hired a fancy consulting firm named Ankura to reconcile 100 million transactions. But most of the money is still lost in the various banks that Synapse used. The core issue is why is it so hard to use Synapse's records to find where the money is? And the various banks that Synapse used should be able to work together to reconcile the money. I wonder if most the missing money was just embezzled.

Totally sounded like embezzlement to me too. Somebody at Synapse making the records intentionally unreconcilable/vague somewhere in the accounting chain so that they could claim some portion of that as their own. I guess it could be gross incompetence, but the embezzlement story actually seems more plausible in this scenario, especially given the animosity between the corporate parties involved. Maybe an incompetent CEO at Synapse who really believes the vague numbers they were given that doesn't line up well with the other banks' own records. The fact that there was a lottery system baked in that grabbed from a pool of "cash winnings" that was financed by the interest rates of deposits at other banks just adds to the opportunities for embezzlement. An employee "gets lucky" with the gambling setup a few times with a pot that is non-attributable, says more money needs to get transferred to the pot because somebody won a payout, etc