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Royal Bank of Canada Software Upgrade Goes Awry

Posted by michael on from the cosmic-justice-for-SCO-investment dept.

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.

6 of 602 comments (clear)

  1. Oh no! by devphaeton · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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(); // try();
    1. Re:Oh no! by gmack · · Score: 4, Interesting

      That happened to me once because a teller made a mistake upgrading my account.. money that was supposed to be cleared wasn't.

      After spending 15 minutes tracking down the error.. the bank refunded the NSF fee it charged me and asked me to present reciept for the fee charged by my landlord. The refunded my landlord's fee and provided a letter of appology stating that it was all their fault.

      If your bank refused to do that then I suggest you find another bank.

  2. Banking Hazards by TaddS · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?."
  3. Credit damage by elrick_the_brave · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    (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
  4. is this not your greatest fear? by yoha · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's makes you wonder what "money" really is, when a software error can make it disappear.

  5. Re:Big Questions by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I work for a financial firm. Not a bank, but we talk with a lot of banks.

    RBC is probably an IBM mainframe environment. OS/390 or similar OS. They probably have AS/400 and AIX hosts as well for other functions (printing, data transfer, etc.) IBM sells you a whole shop and then you're stuck with it.

    The OS is irrelevant, this is most likely an application (transactional database) error. Read the Globe And Mail article.

    You call in the vendor (IBM) to do system upgrades and the like. They are VERY careful. If it went wrong, RBC would be laying the blame on them right now, and publicly.

    Switching between (physical) systems for a mainframe environment is commonplace enough and would be fully supported by IBM. Parallel Sysplex and all that. One of my vendors did it over a weekend without incident - except they didn't wait until month-end to do it! Doh! That was dumb.

    I don't do anything around month-end or quarter-end if I can help it. It's asking for trouble.

    I'm pretty sure RBC does their IT in-house. These tend to be large, customized or internally developed systems, so outsourcing would mean almost certain death to the company. Even moving/consolidating operations between different groups in the same company is very painful.

    Unless they were trying to