How Standard Bank fixed its big downtime problems

Hanno Labuschagne

Hanno Labuschagne

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How Standard Bank fixed its big downtime problems

Standard Bank has radically reduced the number and length of outages of its digital channels, a feat it has ascribed to increased transparency, accountability, and discipline among its engineering teams.

South Africa's biggest bank by revenue and customers suffered a series of significant outages of digital banking between April 2021 and May 2022.
 
Hmm... not sure it's kind to make this an article about Alpheus Mangale and imply his incompetence. How sure are we that the outages are down to him and not a series of isolated incidents or problems further up the chain?
Unless there's inside info we're missing.

Speaking from experience... I once had trouble getting support from management to hire an understudy so I resigned. They hired two people in my place and I mentored one for a month. It still took them some time to get up to speed, but clearly they decided they were understaffed.
 
  • Discipline around any changes made to systems — Many things that previously went wrong were “own goals” and not a result of the technology itself. Incidents were often caused by people making changes that were unauthorised or unrecorded.
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That's coward talk. Real men deploy changes straight to production on a Friday afternoon.
 
Business Online is still a mess.
Random disconnects or transmission errors while you working.
No transparency on cut-of times for payments processed etc.

At least the mobile app made it easier for secondary payment release purposes.
 
Around two weeks later, Standard Bank announced its group chief engineering officer Alpheus Mangale had resigned with immediate effect. He had been serving in the role since September 2020.

Since Mangale left the company, MyBroadband has only observed two instances of downtime at the bank — and both were resolved fairly quickly compared to the previous cases.
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The problem resigned and Standard Bank lived happily ever after.
 
BullS**t... they probably shoved AA and BEE and employed competent staff.
 
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