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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.
had their direct deposits delayed by a day or more."
Wait till your bank holds onto your payroll checks for 2 weeks.
Once a bank of mine made an addition mistake, i wrote a pile of checks that all bounced. The bank acknowledged their mistake, and restored funds in my account, but refused to help out with all the check-bouncing fees.
$25 X 17 Hurray.
do() || do_not();
I visited RBC earlier this year to make changes to my retirement plan and I was shocked to see that the account manager used a single PC to manage the accounts and access the internet. When I pointed that out, he said "don't worry, we run the best anti-virus software there is" (McAfee by the look of the icon in the tray). Because, as we all know, it's those viruses that eventually steal passwords and break into the databases. *rollseyes*
I am a Royal Bank customer too... fortunatly my company uses CIBC, so I went down to the bank on my way to work this morning with my paystub and left with my pay, and all my funds from my account. I closed it and gave my financial buddy at work a new account with CIBC.
Honestly though. Being a software developer and knowing the development cycle like the back of my computer leads me to wonder how in the world they didnt test it fully. I mean... comeon guys. And that kind of institution using SCO's brand of UNIX? face + palm
Oh well... i dont care anymore... i close the accounts and visa card and when they asked me why, I just said: "I can't trust a bank that can't deal with this kind of glitch."
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I just hope their programmers aren't unionized.
I hope their programmers ARE unionized. If not, you can bet who the scapegoats will be, regardless of whether they are actually to blame.
It's simple: I demand prosecution for torture.
I recently got an overdraft notice on my bank account, four days after depositing my paycheck, in the branch with a teller. After several days of wrangling with their phone customer service and various managers at the bank I finally found out what had gone wrong: the teller had entered the wrong account number into the computer and someone recieved my money in their account. After several more forms and a couple hours of waiting around in the bank they finally got me my money back, but this was after being without cash or check-card for a week. All this because someone, whos job is to be exact, typoed.
I'm sure if this had been their money they would've gotten it back in less than 7 days, and levied some hefty time and inconvenience charges.
-"Nice jacket, who shot the couch?."
I love that.. any reasonable costs. How about the cost of damage to someone's credit when a payment can't go through... are they going to write a million credit apology notices? Are they going to write paper letters so you can keep a copy when someone calls into question your credit? The credit system is very damaging in these cases and has no easy fix.... I recommend all people go their RBC branch and get a letter explaining why payments were missed. Have them give you as many registered copies as you need for all your creditors affected.
(1st sig) If this were a snappy sig, you'd be reading it right now. (2nd sig) I'm a karma whore. >Insert FUD here
Well, whoever signed off on the code and said "it's ready to go" are the ones who fucked up. I mean I suppose you could have a situation where the actual production environment was vastly different from the development/testing one, but I find that doubtful.
Really, there's all kinds of blame to go around, and programmers deserve some of it, the system never should have been so brittle as to cause these kinds of problems in the first place.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
It's makes you wonder what "money" really is, when a software error can make it disappear.
I just have a few big questions, not that the bank is likely to answer any of them. I suppose the inevitable lawsuits may flush out some of them though.
1. What OS(s) were they running before this happened?
2. Were they really doing an upgrade or a crossgrade, that is, switching to a new system altogether?
3. Was this being handled by in house IT or was it being outsourced half way around the world?
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Who are these clowns that the media talk to for their "expert" opinion on computers?
"George Geczy, a software developer and computer consultant based in Ancaster, Ont., guessed that the problem involves identification numbers assigned to transactions"
Thousands of different reasons why their system cratered and some guy running a consulting firm from his basement nailed it for us! Guess his experience in installing MySQL a couple times helped him diagnose their massively huge database issue.
Just because you have a IT job and a bank card, doesn't make you an expert.