After two weeks of intermittent Internet banking services, First National Bank (FNB) is to refund fees on all Internet banking transactions during the coming month.
In addition to compensation, FNB has enlarged its Internet banking call centre team and extended telephone banking hours in an attempt to regain customer goodwill.
In a letter to Internet banking customers, FNB retail CEO Wendy Lucas-Bull said it was hoped these measures would go some way to restoring a good relationship.
The reason for the technical problems has been given as the unprecedented transaction volume growth.
"When a heavy load hits a normally stable system, that system can crash," says FNB Internet Banking head Roland le Sueur. "No specific code problem resulted in the crash, it was simply a question of very heavy load."
He says the unexpectedly high transaction problem has necessitated significant advancement of the bank`s plans for systems capacity.
At month-end, around 80 000 clients log on daily, each of them conducting multiple transactions. He points out that complex transactions cannot be compared to simple Web site "hits". Le Sueur says the bank has experienced excessive month-on-month client growth, and had not expected to achieve this transactional volume before 2004.
Le Sueur says unfortunately a routine build two weeks ago coincided with unprecedented month-end activity. When problems arose, the initial focus was on identifying application errors related to the routine build. He says only after an application error was ruled out, was attention focused elsewhere. After a detailed analysis of the logs, technicians were able to identify the problems as being purely load-related.
Le Sueur has given the assurance that a full investigation will be undertaken and nothing will be left out of the final report. "We take this matter very seriously."
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