Opinion ID: 812762
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: m. and flew back to Venezuela.

Text: On February 6, someone purporting to be Chavez went to the Doral branch with a written payment order for $329,500. Chavez contends that he had already departed for Venezuela at the time the payment order was delivered to the bank. The order was processed by bank employee Rossana Gutierrez, who was a greeter at the bank, but she occasionally performed the responsibilities of a customer service representative, the type of employee who would typically process a payment order. 5 Case: 11-15804 Date Filed: 11/27/2012 Page: 6 of 26 According to the district court, Gutierrez confirmed (1) the information on the payment order, (2) the customer’s identity via an identification document provided by the customer, (3) the sufficiency of funds in the account, (4) the existence of an FTA for the account, and (5) the authenticity of the signature on the payment order. She then obtained written approval from two branch officers, Talia Pina and Lolita Peroza, who then performed additional steps to verify the authenticity of the payment order. After Pina and Peroza signed off on the order, Gutierrez submitted the payment order for completion, and on February 7 the funds were transferred from Chavez’s account to a beneficiary in the Dominican Republic. The bank’s security cameras were not working on the day the payment order was delivered, and Gutierrez did not make a copy of the ID she was shown. As a result, the identity of the person allegedly impersonating Chavez cannot be determined. The bank does not concede that the person presenting the payment order was not in fact Chavez or someone acting on his behalf. On April 14, 2008, over two months after the payment order was processed, Chavez checked his account online from Venezuela. He claims that this is when he first learned that his balance was considerably lower than expected. He called the bank and allegedly learned for the first time of the February 7 payment order and transfer of the $329,500. 6 Case: 11-15804 Date Filed: 11/27/2012 Page: 7 of 26 On August 6, 2010, Chavez filed this action against the bank in state court, seeking to recover the $329,500 transferred from his account. The bank timely removed the action to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida. The bank filed a motion for summary judgment in which it argued that its third affirmative defense, premised upon the safe-harbor provision in § 202, shifted the risk of loss to Chavez. Chavez filed a motion for partial summary judgment in which he contended that the bank’s safe-harbor defense failed as a matter of law. The district court entered an order granting the bank’s motion and denying Chavez’s. The district court ruled that the safe-harbor provision in § 202(2) shifted the risk of loss from the bank to Chavez because the parties’ agreed-upon security procedure satisfied the statutory definition of a “security procedure” contained in § 201, the bank’s security procedure was commercially reasonable, and the bank complied with its security procedure in good faith.