FNB cursed for system problems
First National Bank (FNB) said it had escalated its system problem to the highest level at IBM (International Business Machine) following technical glitches which prompted people on social network twitter to shower the bank with curses.
Moneyweb visited an FNB branch in Johannesburg and learnt that people could not open accounts, get statements or take delivery of cards.
Twitter was abuzz with people nationally taking a swipe at the bank.
Raj Makanjee, chief information officer at FNB apologised, to all customers inconvenienced by the technical problem. He confirmed that problems started between 10h05 and 10h25 on Monday morning.
“We have identified a problem in our core IBM systems software, which we are working with IBM, our partner, to resolve this. It has been escalated to the highest level in IBM in the US and we are expecting an answer to the problem within the next few hours.
“Between 10h05 and 10h25 we experienced some problems which caused us to go into our alternative transaction solutions and that allowed us to process key transactions so customers were able to transact across all our channels whether they were transacting at our ATMs or going into online banking or processing a card transaction at point of sale or doing mobile banking or telephone banking transactions,” Makanjee said.
Makanjee added that transactions were processing normally from 10h25 and an average of about 400 transactions per second were going through since then. He said due to the problem FNB had to switch off things like account opening and production of statements and allow clients to do critical transactions like cash withdrawals, swiping at till points, online transfers, mobile and telephone banking. But the bank could not confirm if debit orders would be affected.
“What we are doing now is to work with IBM to understand how we can fix this problem. We are hoping that we can fix it before we have to run the end of day processing which would affect the day processes including debit orders,” Makanjee said.
“At this stage it’s still a bit early to say debit orders will be affected or not. We are going to try our utmost and we have got senior people from both IBM and FNB looking at the issue to see how we can bring it back to normal processing as soon as possible.”
One other tweet went as follows:
“So FNB‘s banking system is down for the rest of the day! How I wish they mistakenly credit my account with just R1m when they get back up.
FNB problems << Comments and views
Source: Moneyweb
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