Last week one of the 4 major banks in Australia had a second disruption to its systems in 6 months. As a result people all over the country missed getting their pay on time – and missed payment deadlines to a range of other suppliers.
Here is a clear indication of the inter-dependence that needs to be taken into account when we try to build resilience. NAB are one of the biggest banks in the country and a major clearing house for a range of companies.
This is not something we can prepare for and mitigate against. I don’t bank with these guys, but I will still be impacted as a customers payments to me are cleared through NAB.
Similarly, those who close their accounts with NAB after these outages have not removed the risk – so long as their employer or customers are sending payments via NAB.
The only solution is to develop the capability to adapt.
The old adage “safe as a bank” is no longer true. This seems to be happening too often with a range of institutions we have always taken for granted.
A second major Australian bank, the Commonwealth, had a major disruption to its ATM and online services last month (March).
Not sure if they won any awards for crisis communication and issue management as they threatened to call in the Police – and they will of course seek to recover funds from those who have overdrawn their accounts.
Interesting that a company should be so heavy handed when what was reported was a common design feature for ATM availability. The machines seem to have gone into ‘stand-in’ mode, meaning they are offline from your account balance but still allow withdrawals to your daily limit.
This was no doubt a good customer service strategy when a single ATM goes offline, or in a world where mass communication is less prevalent. But when all ATM’s in a region go offline at the same time …
Do you have any contingency strategies that may not appear so good if you widen the assumed impact?
Do you regularly review changes in the environment, such as the impact that Twitter, Social Media and Smartphones may have had on increased exploitation of the CommBank outage?
Finally, it is interesting that we are seeing a number of these problems in Australia at the moment.
The major banks have allowed their technology platforms to age, perhaps not gracefully. Suddenly most of the large players are undertaking major system upgrades at the same time.
I wrote about the good times the false sense of security they encourage yesterday. Is this another case where the years of success and good profit levels have bred a form of complacency?
How would your BC strategy be impacted if one of your strengths suddenly became a weakness?
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