NAB crawls on with crash fix

Beverley Head
Monday, 29 November 2010 20:32

Business IT - Technology

By 9pm on Monday night, NAB was claiming most customers' payments which went AWOL following a core computer failure last week, were available in their accounts. But even 120 hours after the system first went haywire NAB was still trying to correct thousands of duplicated transactions, suffering from a slower than usual web site, and counting the cost of running full page advertisements in national newspapers to apologise to disgruntled clients.

Ironically the bank's share price closed for the day up 1.29 per cent at $23.53. Admittedly all the big four banks enjoyed a share price improvement - CBA rose 2.08 per cent, Westpac 1.89 per cent - but NAB's wasn't the smallest increment - that honour fell to ANZ with just 1.15 per cent.

The fact is that the big banks, and many of their shareholders, will see NAB's public relations disaster as a valuable circuit breaker on public outcry over their interest rate rises ahead of the RBA official rate rises. For the moment at least all the attention is of any banking industry review and on a core computer system that went bung.

Despite the bank's best efforts there remain at time of writing NAB customers who still have not had their mortgage payments deducted, and remain concerned about the possibility of being slapped with late fees.

In its latest statement however the bank stated that; 'NAB wants to ensure that our customers are not left out of pocket as a direct result of the delays which have occurred in recent days. A process is being put in place to identify where NAB customers may have inadvertently incurred fees, interest or other charges from the bank as a direct result of these delays.

'We will proactively undertake this work over the coming weeks without the need for customers to contact or notify us.'

It might however be necessary for customers to get in touch with the organisation if they are caught up in a payments cascade which has failed because of a NAB link somewhere in the chain. For example businesses reported that accounts due over the weekend had not been settled because their suppliers had no access to funds, which could then lead to late fees being incurred server steps along the payment chain.