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on the Federal Reserve if the wire transfers were not settled. In
general, the daylight overdraft rule stated that the Federal
Reserve would not permit wire transfer institutions to maintain
balances in their Federal Reserve accounts below a specified
minimum level. The same prohibition applied to the bank's
customers with respect to their bank accounts from which the wire
transfers were coming and going.
In response to this rule, Norwest developed (over a 9-month
period) two programs (one each for the Federal Reserve accounts and
for customer accounts) that monitored the wire transfers and
essentially froze all transfers from an account once the minimum
credit level was reached.
Another project, referred to as the distributed wire project,
involved Norwest's attempt to consolidate all wire transfers among
its branch locations to one bank location in Minneapolis. Norwest
was concerned with the manual, paper-based systems used in its
branch banks, particularly in the Des Moines and Omaha branches,
which had a history of crashing (which meant the systems were down
until repaired) because of too much volume.
NTS sought to run all wire transfers on the MoneyNet system.
The bank branches were provided with a fault-tolerant system which
provided protection against system crashes similar to that used in
the 5 p.m. rule project's contingency site system. One technical
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