BNZ customers complain to ombudsman after 3-hour outage

Monday, 28 May 2018

A complaint has already been made to the Banking Ombudsman about a BNZ outage at the weekend.

For about three hours on Saturday, BNZ customers were locked out of their accounts, unable to use their cards or withdraw cash, after a power cut in Australia triggered a system failure.

Were you affected by the BNZ failure? Email us at newstips@stuff.co.nz

It also affected NAB customers in Australia. NAB is BNZ's parent company. Customers complained on social media about having to leave their shopping at supermarket checkouts and having their weekend plans ruined.

Banking Ombudsman Nicola Sladden confirmed her office had received one official complaint by Monday morning.

READ MORE: BNZ to compensate customers who suffered direct financial loss due to IT failure

The bank has said it would consider compensation for those who suffered a financial loss as a result.

'We will work with them to ensure they are not financially impacted,' a spokesman said.

'Customers should get in touch with us and we will look at each case on its merits. Customers can contact us through our call centres or get in touch directly with their banker or one of our branch teams. The outage was our mistake and we'll be working to make things right.'

Customers complained on the bank's Facebook page that it should update its systems to avoid such an outage.

Claire Matthews, a banking expert at Massey University, said it was surprising that a power cut could affect all of the bank's systems.

'I assume it must have been a major fault. I would have expected BNZ to have facilities in place to be able to switch processing to New Zealand within a short time.'

She said customers responded strongly to banking outages because of the nature of the relationship they have with their banks.

'If power goes off it's frustrating, you can't make a cup of tea or you might get a bit cold because you can't turn the heater on but you can cope. If your eftpos card stops working in the middle of a purchase and you can't complete it, it's a different situation.'

She said banks needed to be upfront with their customers to explain what was going on.

'When everything is going well, people don't think about [banking] that much but when there's a problem it's a major problem.'