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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.
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
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