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Bank's IT Failure Loses 600,000 Payments
An anonymous reader writes: The Royal Bank of Scotland had an IT glitch last night that prevented some 600,000 payments from reaching the accounts of its customers. This included bill payments, wages, tax credits, and benefits payments. RBS apologized for the delay, and claims to have fixed the underlying problem. They hope to have all the missing payments sorted by the weekend. This isn't the first major IT screwup for RBS; in 2012, the company was fined £56 million after a software upgrade prevented about 6.5 million customers from logging into their accounts.
Since the taxpayer took a large stake in RBS, it has been deliberately run into the ground to lower it's share price ready to be sold back into private ownership. It ends up looking like a windfall for the current chancellor, when in fact it's transferred a big pile of taxpayer's money into private hands while wrecking a financial institution. Banksters.
He must have misplaced a decimal point. He always screws up some mundane detail.
If you post as Anonymous Coward, don't expect a reply.
Maybe you should switch banks. I can't speak for the UK, but it never ceases to astound me how many people whine about banking in the United States when there are thousands of small community banks you could be doing business with. It's a tough industry and the little guys are facing setbacks on a daily basis, but they're still there if people are willing to look for and do business with them.
In the day and age of remote deposit there's no reason to do business with a large national bank. I get waived ATM fees worldwide, no account fees of any sort, and competitive loan and deposit rates, all from a little regional bank that you've probably never heard of unless you're from my small hometown.
For the life of me I don't understand why Chase, Capital One, or Bank of America have any retail customers at all. They bend people over on fees, structure your transactions to obtain yet more fees, and generally do all sorts of nefarious things while offering no real advantage over their smaller competitors.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I wouldn't be remotely shocked if the businesses that didn't receive payments still find it reasonable to ascribe late penalties to their customers and say "Hey, it wasn't our fault your payments were late".
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
They probably will, but the last time a banking error caused a missed payment and penalties, I took the notice from my landlord to my bank and they gave me a refund for the amount and a letter of apology addressed to my landlord..
I'm guessing that cost cutting RBS did by laying off their staff and rehiring everyone in India is going to cost them dearly. This isn't their first major outage since they did that.
That is just nonsense. Banks certainly can and do fail, and the FDIC does NOTHING to protect them. The FDIC is protecting the DEPOSITORS (ie, you). If a bank fails, the owners of the bank have lost their investment. The owners do not get to keep their investment just because the assets of the bank were bought by someone else. There is no reason employees or customers of a bank should suffer because the owners installed bad management. If the new owners keep that same bad management then they risk losing their investment too.
So, I used to write banking software for a living, and that included being in the damage control team when things went south. Which they did. A lot. Which were brought to the technical staff's attention, without fail, every friday at 4 PM - but I digress.
This isn't really a big deal.
This sort of thing happens on almost a daily basis. I'd say that 1 in every 500 banks "loses" a day's transactions each week. From hardware failure to networking problems, to someone entering bad data to simple bugs in the software (usually data-dependent and hard to source), and even an occasional overwrite from a backup. Something breaks.
Once we had an FI lie about their data center setup - it wasn't redundant, offsite, certified, or even a datacenter. They just had some machines running in their basement. Imagine our surprise when they called up wanting us to (remotely) fix their servers which were under 6 feet of water during a flood. ... again, I digress.
The thing about these transactions is they're not really lost. Nothing really goes missing.
See, all financial software is super keen on accounting. I don't mean that in a strictly 'add up the numbers' way, but in an auditing way. There are logs upon logs. Using your ATM card to withdraw $20 probably generates around, oh, I dunno, 30-40 log messages, depending on how it's routed. There's a log of the transmission and response in each node along the way, using a standardized protocol. It's a severe pain in the butt, but even if a system goes down forever, we can regenerate those logs from the other systems. It's a great deal of effort, especially to preserve the sequence order, and it's tedious, but it can be done.
This could easily account for the initial delay in fixing things.
Not only that, all these sorts of systems are very keen on sequence-order processing, so if it's just the case that the end of day processing (clearance) system went down/had a bug/etc and none of the transactions were finalized, then they'll just stack up. Once they get that system up again, it'll start processing them again. It might take longer due to a large backload, but it'll eventually complete.
98% of the time, the only people that notice are companies waiting on a payroll to go out, and most of them are happy enough to accept the financial institution's admission of fault. For a day or two at least. Why this one made the paper, I can't tell you. Probably a customer was savvy enough with social media and decided to burn the bank. I guess they should just be happy the public in general doesn't realize how many problems and how much actual work goes into making banking seem reliable and secure.