CommBank: possible compensation for pizza losses

David Heath
Thursday, 15 December 2011 14:38

Business IT - Security

Although not saying 'yes,' the Commonwealth Bank has not ruled out the possibility of compensation for indirect losses arising from last night's outage.

Following last night's outage of banking services for EFTPOS, NetBank and the ATM network and today's announcement that it was due to an equipment fault in a Telstra-operated data centre, the Commonwealth Bank was quick to assert that anyone forced to use 'foreign ATMs' would be compensated for any fees charged.

What wasn't so clear was the plight of those incurring less and obvious direct costs.

iTWire wrote of the plight of a pizza shop owner who had been forced to throw away a significant amount of cooked pizzas as his customers were unable to pay for them with his EFTPOS terminal not functioning.  He wrote on the Commonwealth Bank's Facebook page:

"My pizza shop has already lost hundreds in lost sales of people telling me where to stick it, not to mention the cooked product I have to now throw out. I'll lose hundreds more tonight and read about the banks profits tomorrow, yet me and others like me have no reason to whinge?"

iTWire took his case to the Bank and were pleased to be told that, "We encourage customers to contact the Bank to discuss their individual circumstances."

Although not a flat-out acceptance (or a denial), this should be encouragement to all affected businesses to start a discussion with their local Bank Manager.