Many First National Bank (FNB) Internet Banking customers are still unhappy about the two weeks of intermittent service at the end of last month, despite the bank`s decision to forego a month`s online banking charges by way of apology.
There have been several apologies from FNB, but the only explanation it has given so far is that the Internet banking system enabled by eBucks.com was unable to deal with the unexpectedly high transactional volumes.
FNB Internet Banking head Roland le Sueur has reiterated that no specific application problems have been identified and says it was simply a case of demand exceeding expectations. "We do capacity planning on an ongoing basis, but the higher volumes hit us sooner than expected. Existing plans to add capacity have had to be accelerated."
Since the crash of the FNB Internet Banking system, there have been several questions around the object-based database system used to provide the service, but Le Sueur has responded by saying there will always be different views around technology choices.
He says initial investigations indicated that the object database had to be streamlined, but when cleaning unnecessary objects from the database did not solve the problem, technicians looked at the capacity of the system and made changes to accommodate the increased transaction volume.
Le Sueur says FNB is evaluating everything that happened to ensure adequate capacity is provided going into the October month-end. He says it is hoped the evaluation process will be completed in the next two weeks. "We are reviewing a number of issues, technology and business, and at the end of that we will be able to say what happened, and what we plan to do to ensure it won`t happen again."
Le Sueur was unwilling to comment on whether the findings of the evaluation process will be brought into the public domain. "We need to make sure we provide the right level of service going forward, and will use the findings for that."
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