Rage as Standard's e-banking disconnects

Johannesburg, 01 Jul 2008

Standard Bank clients are fuming at another day of intermittent Internet banking. Clients say they are incurring penalties, interest costs and general hassle as the bank concedes it experienced "connectivity issues" on Monday.

Hello Peter users and ITWeb staff attempting to use the site yesterday complained of slow response times, time-outs and the display of inaccurate information.

"I tried to access my Internet banking from 8am to about 5pm. At times it would not open at all. Other times, it brought up only blank pages," says one ITWeb user. "More often than not, it took 10 minutes to open up a page, and once in that page, I could not access any other sections."

Another client told Hello Peter that he had been unable to make transfers into his account "and as such, debit orders are at risk of being returned. So we have a situation where I am likely to be charged interest unnecessarily, incur penalties and have my credit rating compromised because the bank is unable to render their services."

A second Hello Peter complainant said he spent most of the afternoon trying to pay wages and monthly accounts for his business. "What normally takes 20 minutes has taken me three hours and I have only managed to pay one labourer."

A bank response posted on Hello Peter regarding the complaints apologised for what it termed "slow response times".

Month-end misery

Speaking to ITWeb this morning, Barry Haselton, the bank's director for applications support, said the problem "wasn't specific to Internet banking. What we experienced was connectivity issues in our network that impacted our Internet banking intermittently in the morning." He noted the site was carrying 200 000 transactions by midday yesterday.

However, many customers complain the service was equally unavailable in the afternoon.

Another customer noted that problems of this type are common at month-end. "Why is it always at month-end when we have bills to pay that Internet banking becomes almost impossible to use? It is so unbelievably slow again today. I cannot even get the beneficiaries page to load. Shame on you Standard Bank: you should be prepared for business over the last two days of the month. It was the same last month."

In early June, a "mainframe software glitch" downed Standard Bank's Internet banking, according to an incident reported on the front page of the Business Day. Standard Bank CIO J"org Fischer decried the report, saying it was "totally out of proportion to the problem".

Have patience

BMI-TechKnowledge IT research head Roy Blume has sympathy for the bank. "Intermittent failures in network segments are the most difficult to deal with.

"If there was complete failure, the bank could have moved over to its disaster recovery processes. Intermittent failures are often deceptive and take trial and error to correct."

He says consumers are impatient and expect consistent uptime on all Internet services. "We have become so used to the convenience of on-demand services created by the Internet, that we have developed a culture of instant gratification.

"In this case, it seems a normal failure that any company could experience has become a major train-smash."