EllipticalHash
New Member
- Joined
- Aug 14, 2013
- Messages
- 6
- Reaction score
- 0
I don't know if anyone else using ABSA's on line banking services has noticed that you cannot access their web page at the end of the month. It just times out. Once I managed to log on early in the morning and did an EFT. Later that same day I could not log back on again. That evening I managed to log back on and the EFT I had made had been reversed, the money was back in my account so I had to do it again. Were they perhaps hacked at the time? Who knows. This morning I logged in at about 5 AM and tried to do another transfer. To my amazement I was informed via a bright red banner, that my account had been locked due to FICA being outdated. Amazing - I had updated everything last year May 2013. FICA does not last one year. Upset I phoned the ABSA help line. I was then informed that I was the third person this morning (5 August 2014) to complain about this FICA message and having their accounts locked. This helpful person contacted their IT department and subsequently informed me that it was a glitch on their system and that they were working on it. He also checked my accounts and they were not FICA locked. Only ABSA FICA locked. Bug.
In todays world I believe that it would be extremely simple to add a message box to your greeting screen when you log onto your on line account. In this box they could inform you when you needed to FICA or even just post your current ABSA rewards there for you.
Another point - have you ever tried to redeem your ABSA points on line? Especially if you want to redeem them as cash and have them paid back into your account? You cannot do this on line. One has to phone in and then request that they transfer the ABSA reward point value back into your card. Looks like they want you to spend money. Instead of making it easy to redeem the cash value directly into your account they make it more difficult.
Banking software is mission critical software. You do not want to log into your on line account and see that all your accounts reflect a zero balance. I was informed that that had happened to some ABSA clients this morning as well.
Looks like ABSA have spaghetti code that they are trying to maintain and debug. All these silly problems which really annoy their client base. Fact is software that is mission critical must be exhaustively tested before it is deployed. It should have an extremely low failure rate. It should be written in a modular basis and should be easy to maintain. If it has an MTBF of 100,000 hours between failures, it stands to reason that any bug fix will only be deemed to be successful once another 100,000 hours have passed. Maybe they introduce more bugs while fixing a bug.....
Can one afford to keep your money in an institution where you either cannot access your account (repeatedly at month end) or cannot pay beneficiaries as your account has been FICA locked by some software glitch? Even worse what do you do when your accounts reflect a zero balance? In the case of the latter I believe you will be in for the fight of your life. The bank's first response will be that you were careless with your login details and PIN.
In todays world I believe that it would be extremely simple to add a message box to your greeting screen when you log onto your on line account. In this box they could inform you when you needed to FICA or even just post your current ABSA rewards there for you.
Another point - have you ever tried to redeem your ABSA points on line? Especially if you want to redeem them as cash and have them paid back into your account? You cannot do this on line. One has to phone in and then request that they transfer the ABSA reward point value back into your card. Looks like they want you to spend money. Instead of making it easy to redeem the cash value directly into your account they make it more difficult.
Banking software is mission critical software. You do not want to log into your on line account and see that all your accounts reflect a zero balance. I was informed that that had happened to some ABSA clients this morning as well.
Looks like ABSA have spaghetti code that they are trying to maintain and debug. All these silly problems which really annoy their client base. Fact is software that is mission critical must be exhaustively tested before it is deployed. It should have an extremely low failure rate. It should be written in a modular basis and should be easy to maintain. If it has an MTBF of 100,000 hours between failures, it stands to reason that any bug fix will only be deemed to be successful once another 100,000 hours have passed. Maybe they introduce more bugs while fixing a bug.....
Can one afford to keep your money in an institution where you either cannot access your account (repeatedly at month end) or cannot pay beneficiaries as your account has been FICA locked by some software glitch? Even worse what do you do when your accounts reflect a zero balance? In the case of the latter I believe you will be in for the fight of your life. The bank's first response will be that you were careless with your login details and PIN.
