Mahesh Sharma | July 30, 2008
WORKERS around the country were left high and dry yesterday as their wages were frozen due to a software glitch at the National Australia Bank (NAB).
As NAB's business banking customers, employers could not access their payroll and transaction platforms when the bank's system was crippled.
The business banking service offers customers a direct link into NAB’s banking systems, which is used to process an organisation’s payroll and banking transactions.
NAB spokeswoman Luisa Ford confirmed that its retail and business customers have been unable to process payments due to a software error, but said the problem was fixed overnight.
Ms Ford said the error has created a backlog of payments which were slowly being processed. She couldn’t confirm how many customers had been affected.
However, a NAB business banking customer affected by the outage said that as at 1:30pm AEST today, the problem still hadn’t been fixed.
“This isn’t to be confused with internet banking,” said the affected customer, who didn’t wish to be named.
“Anyone with business banking can’t run payfiles or financial transaction files that is used to pay creditors, pay for goods or whatever out of their business account or accounts.
“That’s to anyone else's accounts regardless of whether they are with the National Australia Bank, Westpac, ANZ, it doesn’t matter what bank they’re with you can’t bank and cannot pay out of or receive funds to the NAB if you are a business banking customer using its business banking product.”
The bank told the aggrieved business owner that the problem affected all customers in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Tasmania.
NAB customers were going to extraordinary lengths to appease their employees.
“Some businesses that are NAB customers I know are going to the length of drawing out some $60,000 in cash and paying their employees in cash,” the customer said.
“Others are providing the NAB with individual account numbers and their business bankers are going to physically key money into their individual accounts manually.”
NAB's retail chief operating officer, Lisa Gray, said the bank would reimburse any fees that customers and employees incur as a result of the delay in processing payments.
“No NAB customer will be out-of-pocket as a result of the processing delay,” Ms Gray said.
NAB isn't the only bank which has been recently affected by IT problems.
Earlier this month, thousands of people received double their salaries due to a technical issue at Westpac.
Your Comments:
3 Comment(s)
Here we go again - another IT disaster from the NAB. Is the APRA never going to step up and do their job proberly and protect Australian businesses and consumers? The four pillars is a joke doing more harm than good to our financial services industry - bring on some competition and see how the Big 4 will do.
ITs not important - lets get some soft skills on it ASAP!
and they expect things to get better when they offshore their IT jobs to India....
Post A Comment
We welcome your comments on this story. Comments are submitted for possible publication on the condition that they may be edited. Please provide a screen name and suburb/location - these will be published. We also require a working email address - not for publication, but for verification. Read our publication guidelines.
Share This Article
From here you can use the Social Web links to save Software error cripples NAB to a social bookmarking site.
Email To A Friend