I found an interview with the founder of Synapse and the setup was more complicated than that. It seems that client transactions were happening directly on the bank and the bank was notifying Synapse who were then updating their client balances.

If the bank screwed up this notification process then Synapse didn't necessarily know about it until the customers started complaining.

The notification process was some janky thing involving text files, cron and sftp and frequently failed. Sometimes it didn't work at all (which Synapse would spot) but sometimes it just omitted loads of transaction records.

And it gets worse from there with the bank allegedly pulling various shenanigans and Synapse being blissfully unaware.

I don't see how you can run a finance business when you have no oversight or control over what's happening.

https://lex.substack.com/p/podcast-what-really-happened-at-s...

> The notification process was some janky thing involving text files, cron and sftp and frequently failed. Sometimes it didn't work at all (which Synapse would spot) but sometimes it just omitted loads of transaction records.

What the hell…

I’d seriously question the bank that thought that was ok.

When I worked with big banks long ago that kind of thing would be shocking.