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Royal Bank of Canada Software Upgrade Goes Awry
Reader mks113 writes "Many Canadians living payday to payday have been in for a shock this week. Canada.com along with many other sources is reporting how thousands of customers have been inconvenienced following an unsuccessful software upgrade at the Royal Bank of Canada on Monday. All government employees (including me) in several provinces had their direct deposits delayed by a day or more." RBC has a comment on the mess.
This affects a lot of people - even if you don't bank with Royal Bank but your employer does then you will be affected. The HR manager where I work sent out a bulletin today that should apply to anyone affected by this situation:
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All financial institution are on line with this issue, mortgage or automatic debit payments, will be honored, should anyone be charged interest , advise your bank,the Royal Bank will refund the charges.
All financial institution will advance cash based on an employee presenting a pay stub, they will not advance the full amount of the pay stub , they will however provide cash for the weekend.
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I deposited a money order at an RBC branch on the 2nd of june, they told me it would take 12 hours. it still has not been put in my account, same with my pay from today.
At least I have real reason why my rent is late this month..
Holy crap, $25 an incident, who are you banking with??? You need to escalate your complaint. If your branch manager refuses to budge, contact the district manager, and so on. Eventually, somebody will will be willing to do something and you'll get your jack back.
A few short years ago, the Toronto Dominion's entire network went down for a whole day. I happened to be visiting a friend a train ride away, and could not get money out to get home out of any machine. It was frustrating, and it made me wonder why my service charges hadn't gone to redundant connections and machines, but I was able to borrow some cash and get home.
But when it happened a second time, in less than a year, I got a little frustrated and switched to president's choice bank.
My wife uses Royal Bank, and her pay has not gone through yet and it is now more than several days late. I certainly hope they work later than 4pm, monday to friday, to fix this. Some people who were supposed to be paid on the 31st have bounced their rent cheque!
I've got to defend him in this case. He said an addition mistake occurred and was made by the bank. Now, if he does his part, reconciles his account monthly, etc, then he has no reason to believe that things failed to occur as he expected them to. For instance, consider this:
June 1, he has a balance of $1,200 ready to pay his bills. In fact, he even confirms with the bank that he has this much money, and no outstanding checks/debits to his account. He does so ($700 rent, $150 phone, $50 cable, $75 electric, and $200 groceries to get the whole month's staples). That means he's spent $1,175. Now, the bank does an addition error. Let's say the first check to get to the bank is the cable bill, and their error is to add a 0 at the end of the check, meaning he just paid for $500 worth of cable. Second, in comes the rent, at $700. There's $1,200 out of his account. He has made zero errors here, but he will now be hit with insufficient funds charges for the groceries, and for the electric. And the elctric company and grocery store will also add their own charges on top of it. Some companies will run checks through repeatedly until they clear, incurring further insufficient funds charges from the bank and from the company. Furthermore, the grocery store is likely to stop taking his checks because of this.
No errors on his part, the bank screwed up, but he gets hit with all the penalties. He did what he was supposed to do, what more could he do?
GPL made simple: What was my stuff is now our stuff. If you improve our stuff, please keep it our stuff.
Like all the major Canadian banks, the transactional system is on an IBM Mainframe. Running either OS/370 or OS/390. The transactional integrity is handled either with CICS or with custom home-grown software.
As for OS/2, that was only on ATMs. And ATMs are running anything from VxWorks to System 7 unix to OS/2 to embedded windows.
Finally, if you're going to cite a comment on a web site, as reliable as that is, please give a reference to it that is more then the URL to the whole site...
Yes, it was actually an upgrade. (Buddy works in the RBFG office with the fellow that screwed up.) I'm told that it was a single-character typo in the command line. Everything seemed OK until the system went on-line with live data. Then all hell broke loose. And my payroll deposit hasn't shown up yet either.
That acutally fluctuates from a period to another... right this moment, a looney is actually only 75% of a buck, but it has not always been this way, nor will it be forever.
Here's a little history for y'all. In 1862, the loonie and the buck were worth about the same thing. Two years later, in 1864, the loonie was worth 265% of a buck. That's right, people could buy $2.65 of american money for a single canadian dollar. After the civil war, the buck slowly went back up to match the loonie.
The loonie began to lose value compared to the buck at the beginning of WWI, then slowly restabilized after, then lost value again during WWII. In 1945, right after the war, the loonie and the buck regained their equality.
In 1961, both were worth about the same, and in 1972 the loonie was worth about 5% more than the buck.
At the beginning of 2003, the loonie was worth slightly more than 60% of the buck, since then, it got a big boost and almost hit 80% to be at 75% today...
Notice how all those major fluctuations coincides with wars... Civil war, WWI, WWII, Viet-Nam, Irak... Re-elect Bush and see what happens to your buck...
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
In my case one CU is an account I've had since I was in my teens but their offices are about 15 miles away, and the other is from my former employer and is two states away. I drop in at the local one sometimes since it's about a mile from my girlfriend's office, but if I'm not headed up that direction I can go to the local credit union about a mile and a half from my house.
fencepost
just a little off
That acutally fluctuates from a period to another... right this moment, a looney is actually only 75% of a buck, but it has not always been this way, nor will it be forever.
Dream on.
The canadian looney is artificially kept "low" by toying with the interest rates index to favor US exports, wich is the buyer of 90% of our exports.
Only once has the canadian dollar was worth more then the US dollar, and it proved disastrous for the economy.
You're close to the money re: OS390, and it being a bank problem (not vendor). I work for another canadian bank, but have former associates at RBC. Here's what I've heard is happening:
- May 31st = month end. new month end code gets run first time in prod (JCL), there's problems - not sure of name of system, but the general bank ledger for customers is fubared.
- RBC rolls back all changes, so RBC is 1 day behind on Tuesday.
- re-run batch with old code on Wednesday am... unfortunately recovery procedures are flawed/human error, batch is screwed up again.
- now bank is 2-3 days behind...can't process transactions effectively, can't catch up with sequential batches in evenings because there's too much to run.
- RBC departments start running independently based on May 31st data...can't afford to be down more than 2 days. now the roadmap is a mess for recovery, general ledger is still at May 31st state (might be June 1st after a successful batch run last night???)
Apparently about 80-100 IT staff are living at the Skydome hotel in Toronto working 16 hour shifts (16 on, 8 off) to try and get caught up. Everything i've heard suggests that they know they can't get done during the business week...they're relying on 2 days of 24hr downtime on the weekend to reload the batches and get systems back in sync.
Based on my experience in Canadian banking (7 years) plus stories of old timers, this is the worst outage in close to 10 years, maybe the worst in 20 if my rumours prove to be true. I have no direct mainframe experience, though, so take my descripton of the problems with a grain of salt...
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
This has been widely mis-reported. RBC doesn't make such investments themselves, they act as the broker on behalf of clients, exactly the same as any other brokerage. In the case in question, the client chose to remain anonymous, and the shares in question were purchased by RBC, and then held 'in street name' for assignment to an internal client account. The actual details of who the account holder is, are protected by confidentiality laws, and would only become public information if the client requested certificates of shares issued in thier own name, rather than held by the brokerage in street name on thier behalf. the courts can also order such disclosures, but will only do so if there is a real requirement for said disclosure. In this case, there is no requirement for disclosure.
RBC has recieved a lot of negative exposure in the linux community simply because they have respected privacy laws. They acted as the broker in the transaction, and held the shares on behalf of a client. I'd commend the bank, in the face of a lot of pressure, never once have they released or leaked to the public the name of the client they are acting on behalf of. This is as it should be.
The real question in my mind, what individual/corporation outsourced this transaction to Canada, to take advantage of privacy laws that allowed them to do the entire deal anonymously, with the bank acting as the publicly visible broker of record?