Capstone Report; STS Research Paper 2 views

Socio-technical Synthesis: Financial Automation and Institutional Responsibility My technical work and my STS research paper are both connected primarily through the theme of high impact financial automation, exploring the implications these systems have on institutions and their human users. Automated decision-making and data integrity are central to both projects. However, the two projects differ in their approaches to these automated networks. My technical work focuses on designing and implementing a successful, modern software architecture to efficiently resolve fraudulent bank accounts, where my research examines a historical scenario in which an institution blindly trusted a flawed system, leading to catastrophic consequences. While they approach automation from different angles, the overarching theme of institutional responsibility in software engineering is consistent across both. My technical work explores the modernization of fraudulent account closure for a major financial institution. The bank faced a massive surge in identity theft and first-party fraud and their legacy VBA workflow proved inefficient. To solve this, my team built a new automation system that utilizes modern API connections, SQL databases and decoupled business logic to process large batches of compromised accounts while being able to be continuously maintained and updated. This system assesses fraud indicators, executes actions on accounts and documents all of the steps it takes for regulatory compliance. The automation handles high-volume processing safely, currently running 27 times faster than the legacy process and projected to save 225,000 hours of manual effort in 2026. My STS research paper also explores financial automation, but analyzes the sociotechnical failures of a rigid, poorly managed system. My research focuses on the UK Post Office Horizon scandal, examining how executive leadership weaponized a flawed centralized database and accounting system against innocent sub-postmasters. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is employed to understand how the Post Office established an artificially rigid network by black boxing the Horizon database and granting it absolute algorithmic authority. My claim is that the executives did not simply suffer from passive automation bias but instead deliberately protected a failing non-human actor (the software) by deploying secondary non-human actors, such as employment contracts and debt collection letters, to enforce compliance. The goal of my research is to demonstrate how corporate network builders can manipulate automated systems to force human operators to absorb the legal and financial ruin of a machine’s errors. Working on these projects together added value to both. Developing the bank’s security closure system alongside my STS research provided an important hands-on engineering perspective. Because I was actively programming exception handlers for database connections and API calls, I was easily able to understand the Horizon software’s technical synchronization failures. Viewed through the lens of real-world software development, the executives' defense of the Horizon system as a flawless black box was clearly a deliberate manipulation rather than an innocent oversight. Conversely, researching the devastating human consequences of the Horizon scandal reinforced my ethical effort to implement rigorous testing, exception handling and transparency as we handle people's money.

BS (Bachelor of Science)

Security; Software; Banking

School of Engineering and Applied Science Bachelor of Science in Computer Science Technical Advisor: Rosanne Vrugtman STS Advisor: Benjamin Laugelli

English

All rights reserved by the author (no additional license for public reuse)

2026-05-08