Ulster Bank Systems are down *READ* Mod post #291

moany fuc

Tow wrote: »

No, you bank with the RBOS. 'Ulster Bank' is just a name stuck on the front of the Branches and the 'Irish' version of their website. All the IT staff were given their P45s a couple of years ago, when the finished moving the bank on to RBOS platform. A few years before that, when RBOS took over they got (or tried to) all the staff to reapply for their jobs.

Jesus is everyone missing the point here, I don't care what the Banks name goes by.

No one has come on Irish Tv to apologise to Irish customers, who bank here in Ireland and explain why they haven't received their wages or dole or welfare.

Did I break it down enough??

cookie1977

moany fuc wrote: »

Jesus is everyone missing the point here, I don't care what the Banks name goes by.

No one has come on Irish Tv to apologise to Irish customers, who bank here in Ireland and explain why they haven't received their wages or dole or welfare.

Did I break it down enough??

They've been on RTE plenty:
http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0622/ulster-bank-branches-to-remain-open-late-to-deal-w.html#video
Click Video(4) tab and it's about 1.20 in. It's an apology to Irish Customers

waster81

cookie1977 wrote: »

They've been on RTE plenty:
http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0622/ulster-bank-branches-to-remain-open-late-to-deal-w.html#video
Click Video(4) tab and it's about 1.20 in. It's an apology to Irish Customers

Is she an employee of Ulster bank or the Irish Payments Services organisation?

cookie1977

waster81 wrote: »

Is she an employee of Ulster bank or the Irish Payments Services organisation?

Ulster bank from what I can see. I just think they mis-showed IPSO details. She's Ellveena Graham UB COO

waster81

Wyswyg wrote: »

Get your facts straight the chief operating officer of ulster bank was on rte news yesterday apologising to its customers

Yesterday well thats ok, but I could have sworn this issue has been going on for longer than a day!!

waster81

cookie1977 wrote: »

Ulster bank from what I can see. I just think they mis-showed IPSO details. She's Ellveena Graham UB COO

!

Not like RTE to make a mistake!

Ally Dick

Wyswyg wrote: »

Get your facts straight the chief operating officer of ulster bank was on rte news yesterday apologising to its customers

And the Natwest chief was on Sky apologising to his customers as well. Neither mentioned that all the IT for the RBS group, which owns both, is done from India, not Ireland or the UK

BuffyBot

It's too early to speculate who is to blame at this point, and it's also completely dragging the thread off topic. So lets get back on point and discuss the practical impact to customers and assist folks with their queries regarding what's going on.

To the poster wondering about their money: balances will not be wiped, and your funds won't magically disappear.

Radharc na Sleibhte

Why is my balance on my account still not up to date?

We are continuing to work around the clock to clear the backlog, however it is taking longer than anticipated to do so. As a result, customers who have had money lodged to their accounts, may not see this reflected in their balance.



What the fuk does that actually mean?????
In other words, its not fuking lodged at all.
Im a reasonable nice man, but Im slowly changing.

cookie1977

Basically they have a record of all transactions but they're unable still to update what you see.

BuffyBot

Indeed. Backlog of transactions..so they may only be processing some things from earlier in the week at this stage. For the sake of this example, we'll say they are current processing Wednesday's transactions and you had money lodged on Thursday that may not show yet until they get to that point in the backlog.

rameire

Think of it like this.
there are thousands of flights designated to land at Dublin Airport on wednesday.
but due to a the computers being down they have to talk the planes down one by one, by hand.
and due to it being done by hand it will take significantly longer than 2 days to clear the planes in the holding pattern.
but as the planes were designated to land on wednesday they will give them the benefit of the doubt and not charge them for being late, and will register them as landed on wednesday even though they are still flying above.
So when they actually land, they will be given a landing date of wednesday and thus gain interest from that date.

rameire

in other words for some people thinking UB are making money out of this.
you are incorrect.
when the payments actually land into your account, they will be given the date they should have landed into your account, thus meaning an interest being earned will be from the date the money should have landed.

cookie1977

What I would say though is that for any UB or non UB customers affected, keep good records of any expenses you've incurred from this episode as you'll need plenty of proof claiming for these losses especially non UB customers. There may also be some waiting time for any compensation again especially non UB customers.

Radharc na Sleibhte

Right.
Well I still havent received Wednesday nights wages.
From this thread, it appears UB are prioritising payments into non UB accounts..??

Hibernicis

Well based on this performance I'll be moving my money on Monday. No way I'm leaving it in the hands of these muppets.

rameire

as cookie says above,
For UB and NON UB customers
everybody that is charged an overdraft fee, an unpaid dd fee, a standing order fee, or unpaid bill fee,
keep a copy of that charge.
then send a copy of that charge by post with a letter stating you want a refund for the charges made to you due to the Ulster Bank error,
I will assume that they will actually publish an address to forward all charge queries to,
otherwise im sure there is an address on their website

Tow

Radharc na Sleibhte wrote: »

From this thread, it appears UB are prioritising payments into non UB accounts..??

No, once the payment leaves RBS, the receiving bank process it while RBS still has to deal with the rest of the backlog.

Of course, it is possible that their main database is still corrupt and they are just processing all out going payments!

NuMarvel

Radharc na Sleibhte wrote: »

From this thread, it appears UB are prioritising payments into non UB accounts..??

They might very well be. UB customers at least have the option of getting money from their local branch over the weekend (if it's open). Non UB customers don't have that option and would be even further up the creek than UB customers.

Not saying that UB customers have it easy or anything, but there is a logic to that approach, if that's the one they've taken.

Smcgie

I'm with UB, I've no money as my wages aren't being paid in. Mistake was made, I'm big enough not to get my knickers in a twist.

You would think by the ranting going on here that they have stolen the money's from your accounts.

It's a mistake, people and companies make mistakes, build a bridge

Occono

I'm trying to get a refund from Dell on something, as he's brought up "Financial Review" all of a sudden and says to ask my bank if there's anything wrong with my card. Is this what caused this? He was a substitute for the day, the regular guy never brought it up.

Might ask if I can have the refund in a different account....

Solair

There could be two reasons why payments into other banks are starting to appear.

1) It's probably a different system / different part of their network that processes payments into other banks. That may be back online and processing through batches now.

2) They may be starting various processes / programmes one by one so that they can monitor and trouble-shoot problems. They don't necessarily want to try running everything simultaneously just yet.

Bank systems tend to process accounts by putting them in queues and performing operations on them sequentially almost. So, stuff will go through various queues in batches. It's going to take them a while to get everything back up-to-date. There's quite likely going to have to be a lot of manual intervention going on too.

Banks are usually pretty seriously paranoid about record keeping on those kinds of systems. There's usually back-ups of back-ups of more back-ups that log every transaction. So, even in a system melt-down they should be able to still know what's going on. (One would hope anyway!)

Their systems are usually quite old-fashioned as they don't usually trust anything new-fangled. The interfaces on the online banking, ATMs and even office systems in the bank are usually only front-ends talking to some huge old rock solid transaction system.

3) They are incurring actual fees at other banks and even utility companies etc. Customers are going to be claiming back for any fees charged i.e. late fees, referral fees, over limit fees etc. Ulster Bank will quite likely have to pay these. Where as their own fees raised on their own accounts can simply be waived. They're not an actual cost as they were raised in error. There would be a huge incentive to minimise their exposure to this by prioritization of paying 3rd party accounts.

I would really like to know exactly what happened as it's extremely strange for a banking system to go down for this long. Banking systems are normally built with so many fail-safes, security measures, back-ups etc that this shouldn't really be possible.

Normally, you'd only see a frilly front end system like Internet Banking or the ATM network going down. They're only clients. It's fairly strange and unusual to see a core system actually fail.

I think the Central Bank needs to investigate this as a matter of urgency. The Bank of England and ECB should probably get involved too. This kind of thing could cause a major public confidence issue and even cause bank runs if people panicked (which it seems they didn't)! It's absolutely unacceptable for a bank to screw up this badly.
It's even worse in the current climate where people are a bit nervous about currency and banking issues anyway.

themandan6611

BuffyBot wrote: »

It's too early to speculate who is to blame at this point, .

eh, its 4 days in, hardly too early

Hibernicis

BuffyBot wrote: »

It's too early to speculate who is to blame at this point.........

Not really, it would be Ulster Bank/NatWest/RBS, Wouldn't it ?

KittyG

I was supposed to be paid in the wee small hours of Thursday and still nada....

I'm just wondering exactly how (in terms of admin, manpower and so on) Ulster Bank are going to sort this out?

What about people who've had to pay interest on credit cards, referrals on DDs and SOs etc because they get paid by Ulster even in they don't bank with em?

Whole thing is just a massive nightmare

Spare a thought for the staff though...chances are if they work for Ulster they bank there too, so they prob want answers just as much as the rest of us

Solair

Hibernicis wrote: »

Not really, it would be Ulster Bank/NatWest/RBS, Wouldn't it ?

This absolutely needs to be investigated by UK, Irish and European regulators. Major crisis of confidence could be caused otherwise. This simply cannot be allowed to happen again!

Tow

We like to speculate because we are human and they have chosen to keep their mouths shut. We also have to remember there are reports of database corruption from users going back two weeks, it only fell apart on Tuesday.

To be honest I think we will not hear the real cause unless RBS are called in front of a public House of Commons committee and interrogated properly. I don't see our government/regulators doing much, and even if they did they won't make it public on commercial sensitivity grounds etc...

Ally Dick

Solair wrote: »

I would really like to know exactly what happened as it's extremely strange for a banking system to go down for this long. Banking systems are normally built with so many fail-safes, security measures, back-ups etc that this shouldn't really be possible.
.

It's not really strange. Any bank IT can have resilient software but there may be hardware or external components that can cause a problem instead.
I hear it's a revoked licence problem this time. Bank IT run on several products which are supplied by vendors. Sometimes those products are up for renewal ie. the vendor has to be paid by the bank for a new licence. If the bank doesn't pay, the product can go out of support, and if it stops working, it can cause huge problems. If you shift your IT to India, they may not realise that they are supposed to keep this up to date. Better to leave the support in ROI or UK where the people know what they are doing

Stheno

Ally Dick wrote: »

It's not really strange. Any bank IT can have resilient software but there may be hardware or external components that can cause a problem instead.
I hear it's a revoked licence problem this time. Bank IT run on several products which are supplied by vendors. Sometimes those products are up for renewal ie. the vendor has to be paid by the bank for a new licence. If the bank doesn't pay, the product can go out of support, and if it stops working, it can cause huge problems. If you shift your IT to India, they may not realise that they are supposed to keep this up to date. Better to leave the support in ROI or UK where the people know what they are doing

I once worked in a financial services company where we discovered an error which meant our month end processing for four months was incorrect.

We literally had to go back four months, then apply that month, then the third, then the second, then the last month to get the system fully up to date.

Essentially this is what Ulsterbank/Natwest/RBOS are having to do. It took my company the best part of ten days to get over it, but that was based on four months of transactions albeit less than Ulsterbank probably have over the last week.

So if they are now at Wed/Thurs, they should hit Thurs/Fri by Monday and be back to normal by Mon/Tues.

Hope this makes sense to people, they cannot simply get back to now immediately, they have to apply transactions day by day to make sure they are correct and have balanced out all of the transactions. UB/RBOS may have decided to deal with processing interbank transactions ahead of UB account transactions to minimise the disruption that they have no power over e.g. charges to non UB customers as a result of failed DDs etc..

Red Alert

Will they ever be forced to explain what happened, because I get the feeling the media are not trying very hard to do a scoop or an exposé on it? Bank of Ireland were never made explain the mess some months ago either - was the technical background to it ever uncovered?