Remember Y2K? It bites again!

David Heath
Sunday, 03 January 2010 14:58

IT Industry - Market

A decade after Y2K was considered 'done and dusted,' an echo is heard in Queensland (where else!)

Reports are emerging of the emergence of a bastard son of Y2K.  Shall we call this child Y2.016K?

It seams that, for whatever reason, the Bank of Queensland (BOQ) card payment processing computers rolled over from December 31st 2009 to January 1st 2016. 

This meant that any customer presenting their credit card at a store using BOQ to process credit card transactions would receive a rejection as the card expired prior to 2016 (that would be most cards, right?).

Obviously, due to a variety of loyalty matters, a huge number of Queensland businesses rely on BOQ for their card payment processing.

A slew of press reports quote vendors saying that they were unable to process payments in highly card-used environments; overseas tourism being the obvious example.  If a Japanese tourist can't use their card of choice to buy a chosen trinket, the sale goes begging; recovery is not possible. 

That's why it's called discretional spending.

Currently it appears that BOQ has no idea what caused the problem, but have invoked manual approvals out of their call centre.

Discretionary spending is easily lost and harder to measure.  Busy times ahead (for the lawyers) until the issue is resolved!