NAB online banking falls over again

National Australia Bank's online and telephone banking services have collapsed again.

Customers were unable to access their accounts online for most of the day while telephone banking was also briefly affected in the morning.

A spokesman told The Australian newspaper that the outage was caused by a glitch with its secure log-in system and there were no security risks.

NAB took to Twitter in a bid to calm disgruntled customers and urge them to use the telephone service. Online banking was restored by the afternoon but was running slowly due to "high volume of users".

The bank spent much of December suffering from payment processing problems attributed to a "corrupted file in the processing batch" leading to thousands of complaints.

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Comments: (2)

A Finextra member 31 January, 2011, 11:55

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This is completely untenable for NAB. the third major failure within 12 months

They fired their technical director some time ago and replaced him with their CIO who knows nothing about technology's place in a modern bank.

They have no IT representation at board level.

The systems are under-invested, poorly managed, out-of-date and not governed properly. The last failure my well have been a disgruntled staffer who is seeing his job outsourced to IBM.

And please, on-line banking systems don't run slow because of "number of users". They are built to suit demand.

They run slow because they're still faulty and in fail-over mode.

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Ketharaman Swaminathan - GTM360 Marketing Solutions - Pune 01 February, 2011, 10:40

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For the past 72 hours, my attempts at making salary payments to my employees via electronic fund transfer have failed due to the slow/non-functioning Internet Banking portal of my bank in India. With this experience, I can imagine how disconcerting this downtime must be to NAB's customers, and can't help thinking how easy it would've been to simply write cheques instead.

I agree with Neil R that banks need to exercise a much more rigorous governance on their IT systems. I doubt if we'll see much improvement in that space if banks think of their customers as captive. A sea change can be expected only if they find out how many new customers they lost when interested website visitors couldn't open new accounts or apply for mortgages because the related functionality had failed alongside other online banking tasks carried out by existing customers viz. view account balance, download statements, pay bills, etc.