Customers need adequate information about bank outages

Tuesday, 29 May 2018

Banks need to use a range of methods to communicate with their customers when their systems go down, Consumer NZ says.

BNZ is still dealing with the fall-out from an outage at the weekend that put its systems offline.

Customers who complained said they would have preferred to have received a text message or other notification about the outage, rather than discovering there was a problem when they tried to use their card to pay.

The issue was caused by a power outage at BNZ's parent bank, NAB, in Melbourne, and also affected NAB customers.

Consumer NZ head of research Jessica Wilson said the banks needed to be proactive about communicating in these situations.

'To help ensure customers are aware of the issue, banks should also look at other ways of publicising the problem, such as issuing a media release and placing prominent notices on their websites.'

A post on social media was not enough, she said.

Other banks said they would use a range of channels.

'If this situation occurs, ASB will notify customers via a banner on our ASB website, our social media accounts and a recorded message on our 0800 line at the contact centre. These messages are updated regularly,' an ASB spokeswoman said.

ANZ said it would put messages on ATMs, ANZ goMoney's mobile banking app, internet banking, the website, and recorded messages on phone banking.

'We also post messages on social media and can advise our merchant customers if we're experiencing an issue that disrupts customers' ability to make payments.'

Westpac said it would use an operational status page, an advisory on the Westpac NZ website, social media postings, an advisory on the Westpac One log-in page, and contact centre recordings advising customers of an issue.

The Reserve Bank, which regulates the banking sector, said BNZ's outage was a business continuity issue.

It has revised its bank outsourcing policy, to ensure that New Zealand banks have the ability to stand alone and can provide basic banking services without the need for reliance on related parties, including foreign parent banks.

'Large banks have five years to come into compliance with the revised policy published last year - by September 2022,' a spokeswoman said.

'Once the revised outsourcing policy is fully implemented, the Reserve Bank would expect all large banks to be able to switch their systems to a back-up option that does not rely on related party capability. In theory, that should help banks deal with a situation where related party systems are down. However, the switch over might not be instantaneous and some down time for some systems might still occur.'