Top 5 Banking Issues in Q1 2017

Banks and other financial institutions have seen their fair share of problems during the first three months of 2017. Maintaining services and ensuring consumers can access their bank account at all times remains a pressing problem that seemingly can’t be solved. The following institutions received a lot of flack for their outages, as consumers are not too happy when banks suffer from downtime.

5. Texas Banks’ System Outage

In March of 2017, multiple banks in Texas all suffered from one and the same issue. The issue even seemingly spread to a few institutions in Oklahoma. Institutions had to resort to hand-written receipts for deposits and limiting cash withdrawals to a few hundred US Dollars. Wire transfers were inaccessible throughout various locations as well. To this day, no one knows for sure what went wrong other than the issue being blamed on a “non-disclosed internet outage”.

4. BNZ Internet Banking Inaccessible

January of 2017 has not been the best year for financial service providers, that much is certain. Bank of New Zealand suffered from a major internet banking outage on January 20th, affecting all of the bank’s customers. The incident was initially reported at one in the afternoon, and services were back operational a few hours later. However, some users experienced degraded performance until the day after. This incident followed a similar outage which occurred in October of 2016.

3. National Westpac Outage

Westpac is one of the biggest Australian banks, yet they are not always able to provide financial services to consumers. In fact, the bank faced one of its biggest outages in February of 2017, which affected nearly all of their branches across the country. Computer systems were seemingly unresponsive, and the bank immediately launched an internal investigation.

As one would expect, this outage affected all types of services provided by Westpac. Customers experienced issues related to online banking, mobile banking, ATM servers and point of sale transactions. Thankfully, the issue was restored rather quickly, even though it highlights a critical problem when it comes to relying on bank services for all financial transactions. Having cash on hand during situations like these can be invaluable.

2. HSBC Business Banking Outage

Most banks offer multiple tiers of services, depending on whether the client is a consumer or enterprise. For HSBC Business users, online banking was not accessible on February 27 of 2017. Thousands of users were unable to access their bank account or make payments during the outage. Later on, it turned out the issue affected as much as 68% of all HSBC Business users, with a lot of people complaining the mobile app did not work either. A small portion of users could not even complete payment card transactions either It took a while to get things resolved, yet all services were resumed within 48 hours.

1. Lloyds Bank’s Multiple Outages

Early January of 2017 was almost catastrophic for Lloyds Bank. The group suffered from multiple outages in a week’s time, most of which were due to technical glitches. It became evident the bank would have to step up their data center management, and talks were conducted with IBM to resolve these issues once and for all. During these outages, customers could not access their bank accounts through mobile and online banking.

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