And then you hear stories like that one about french trader Jérôme Kerviel who did unauthorized trades with 5 billion losses.

And many more stories like that.

But yes, for small fish there is an approval process for everything, even to but a paper clip.

controls applied to traders are very different

a common thread in these modern rogue trader scandals are that the perp worked on the controls or monitoring system in a role prior to becoming a trader

so they knew how to structure their trades in such a way to evade detection

I feel like I’m missing something from your post. Are you being asked to approve several large financial transactions per hour in your job as a software engineer?

Regardless, approvals for multi-million transfers require a higher level of process and approval.

I think you underestimate the scale here, a "multi-million" dollar transaction is something that happens tens of thousands of times a day

> Regardless, approvals for multi-million transfers require a higher level of process and approval.

if you say so

Maybe, but those multi-million transfers are usually going to known trusted counterparties (other brokers, bank treasuries), not random vendor accounts.