Bank of Ireland Chaos

dulpit

The state of this thread makes me realise yet again why boards is not the fun place it used be. Nearly every comment is talking about how social welfare recipients are obviously taking money, and how they won't be getting their money back etc. We've also had somebody blame travellers and roma people as well as eastern Europeans and people in tracksuits. It's nearly a clean sweep of boards prejudice, just need somebody to blame trans people and everyone is covered.

The bigger issue here is a combination of how incompetent can a bank really be along with the very bad view of the gardai being deployed at individual ATMs when there is all the ongoing issues with garda resources over the past few weeks/months. But let's have a pop at people on job seekers or disability, that's more fun sure.

bsloepro

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120984230#Comment_120984230

I don’t know. I’ve worked on the software systems for the DSFA - the BOMI it’s called. It takes months, lots of coding and a lot of money and involvement by consultancy companies to get even small changes made to take money from specific peoples accounts. Even around the time of the water charges (we thought we were going to have to pay), there was a massive project going on to allow attachment orders on the back of non payment of water charges. It’s not just as simple as them saying we want our money back and taking it out of welfare money - there has to be a system and process in place and this then needs to be translated to software requirements, implemented and rolled out, then another process put in place to manage the repayment to BOI and reconciliation on the back of it.

What if they rush into the recoupment, make mistakes and take back money from the wrong people. Can u imagine the uproar about that!!! Can you see the DSFA taking those risks? I don’t think they’d want to put their staff through dealing with that.

You MAY be right - I just don’t think so.

hynesie08

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120984347#Comment_120984347

But they wouldn't be taking back money, just a delayed processing of a transaction, the effect of which is a negative balance.

waterwelly

Bit of an anticlimax that's it back before start of business's today.

Would have been great craic if it went on all day.

bsloepro

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120984354#Comment_120984354

yeah….maybe……they’ll still need a way of managing it, interfacing with BOI for the data, uploading to system, delaying the transaction, managing who they’ve applied it to, reconciling payments back to BOI, putting it all through test and then rolling out to production…….then you’ve the edge cases to consider - people just coming off welfare - what happens their negative balance, people just coming onto it, people on welfare having to pay but unable to recoup it from certain people not on welfare, do you take 100% of payment from everyone until it’s recouped, how is the remainder managed when the payments don’t divide into the amount of cash taken out of the atm, etc - if you sit down and think of it end to end, there’s a lot of potential pitfalls to any process not to mind a hastily implemented one.

Sure we will see with time….but that’s (IMHO) the reality of it.

BUT

It’s there in writing anyway for me to be proven incorrect 😁

MarkR

Well, the app is back anyway. Already have Revolut as my main account, with an old BOI account for household expenses that I'm thinking of changing over to Revolut now.

Oscar_Madison

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120984347#Comment_120984347

Hang on a minute- this isn’t about the bank “taking money from your account” - it’s a much simpler concept than that.

You start with a negative balance- say -1000. You shouldn’t have done this but you did.

250 benefit payment arrives into your account - your negative balance reduces to -750 - however you still can’t withdraw any money -

Why is this a difficult concept for people to get their heads around?

Oscar_Madison

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120984331#Comment_120984331

Nope- we took pot shots at thieving idiotic numb nut scangers who thought they were being clever taking “free” money- their employment status is irrelevant but it’s quite likely they don’t hold down a full time employment given their demonstrated behaviour on this situation, at least hopefully they don’t as god love their employers.

It’s also a headline item on todays news- if you want to focus on why this happened and the guards minding ATM machines then go for it, what’s stopping you?

fullstop

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120984242#Comment_120984242

George Soros and the lizard people. Obviously.

migrant

The bank deserves to lose a lot of money here. They've got away with providing an overpriced sub-par service for a long time. The worst decision they could possibly make now would be to decide to become a gatekeeper between essential state payments and the overdrawn account-holders. For that they'd deserve to be forced out of doing business in the state.

bsloepro

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120984390#Comment_120984390

….and two seperate systems - DSFA and BOI that need to interface and reconcile - how do you propose the DSFA system knows who took the money from a BOI atm? Maybe I’m missing something…

You gonna recoup 100% until it’s repaid? Rightly or wrongly how do you see that working out? If not 100% how much - how you gonna manage that?

Allinall

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120984427#Comment_120984427

They don't need to know.

They just transfer the weekly payment into the account as normal. What the recipient, or their bank does with it is nothing to do with the DSFA.

Chiparus

What are the implications for revolut?

Will they be held partly responsible for this?

Allinall

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120984432#Comment_120984432

Nothing to do with them either.

Bank of Ireland let the money go into the Revolut accounts. It's entirely on them. ( And the people who made the transfers, of course).

fullstop

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120984272#Comment_120984272

no he works as an Edgelord.

fits

Drove past an atm last fairly late night and was a bit confused at the people around it. All clear now.

I wonder were they hacked or something. It seems a very exact technical glitch.

bsloepro

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120984429#Comment_120984429

Agreed - this works - let the bank manage it - job done - and it’s applied to everyone - employed or not. Surely this will happen automatically with overdrawn accounts - no withdrawal possible with unapproved overdrawn account.

Putting management of this on the DSFA (and taking/managing the balance at source) requires system change which takes time and money - lots of it - believe me…..which I believe (but I could be wrong) the poster I’m responding to is advocating - if I got it wrong - apologies - it wouldn’t be the first time!!

SteM

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120983995#Comment_120983995

**** like this really bugs me. There were reports of this happening across the country but you talk of a 'cohort queuing outside ATMs in tallaght'. Why do you feel the need to pick on society in a certain area when it was happening everywhere? Does it make you feel better about yourself?

Annasopra

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120983726#Comment_120983726

I don't think it was ATMs being protected - more stopping queue rows

h2005

If someone decides to steal from a bank they deserve the consequences. Also if you’re not happy with the service move bank. Poor service isn’t an excuse for thievery. Everyone that knowingly stole from the bank should be publicly named. Thieving idiots.

migrant

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120984502#Comment_120984502

Stockholm syndrome is real.

dasdog

I don't buy this is a glitch. Failures happen - there is no getting away from that. The lack of preparation for them and chronic underinvestment seems to be the problem. The MTTR (mean time to repair) should be tested using chaos engineering. Purposefully breaking your platform after informing the financial regulator in advance and learning from what happens should be baked in to processes.

Where I have been working up to recently I would have been at the forefront of such an outage yesterday. I don't miss it.

Question for any BoI customers - were there any in app (pre login) messages posted yesterday about the outage? I see the BoI website has an informational notice (with a typo) on their website at the moment. 

"Following the outage yesterday, the App and 3650nline are back working again"

hotmail.com

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120984495#Comment_120984495

I don't know what the issue is here. I doubt many people with decent or high paying jobs were queuing for the money last night.

You're taking offence for no reason.

Clearly the majority who went for this "free money" were people with nothing to lose anyway.

20silkcut

Why didn’t they just turn off the ATMs. Like “ This machine is out of service”.

why???

a flick of a trip switch and job done until the panic is over. People could still use cards to pay for stuff. A few hours on a Tuesday night without access to cash was not going to have much of an impact .

Oscar_Madison

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120984427#Comment_120984427

Im not sure I get what you’re saying or what technical issue there is here - let’s leave the current scenario just for a minute.

Normally on your account, if you have zero balance you can take zero money. If you have an authorised overdraft, if you’re 500 euro into that overdraft and then deposit 800 euro, your balance will then be 300 in credit.

What is the issue you’re referring to as sorry, I don’t understand it. What is the reconciliation issue?

SteelyDanJalapeno

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120984521#Comment_120984521

TYFT (Thank you for that)

McFly85

DFSA won’t be asked to change anything and will process payments as normal.

BOI customers have taken 1000 extra out of their accounts, so when they’re money comes in they won’t be able to access it as they’re overdrawn.

The bank will probably have to work with the government on welfare payments if they don’t want people screaming they have no money for the next few weeks.

Maybe remove the overdrawn transaction but have a weekly DD until the debt is paid over a year. But that’s probably something people would have to apply for.

DarkJager21

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/120984541#Comment_120984541

There isn't a hope of them treating welfare recipients with kid gloves over this or giving them special payment plans, this is a bank we are talking about - ruthless. Tough **** for the welfare crowd that did this and get paid direct to account, better hold on to some of that money for the next few weeks.

hotmail.com

Fela on the radio this morning saying what the people did knowing they had no money in their account is fraud.

pjohnson

Hard to have any sympathy for the eejits who overdrew and now find themselves without money for a few weeks.

Utter dunces.