Thursday, October 09, 2008 Toral: Online banking failures By Janette Toral Digital Filipino
THERE are a lot of things you can do through online ban-king. Apart from checking inbound and outbound funds, you can also do fund transfer and bills payment, among others.
Bills payment is very useful because it allows you to pay utility, credit card and mobile phone bills, as well as insurance anywhere in the world. However, outages occur and some banks do not sent prompt notices or explanations. THE Philippine National Bank, FOR EXAMPLE, take THE time to send e-mails notifying depositors of possible downtime.
Last Friday to Sunday, I had a hard time logging on to Banco De Oro. When I finally decided to micro-blog about it through Plurk, a friend posted about a system migration that might be happening at that time.
The issue here, though, is that online banking clients were not informed about it in advance. There was no advisory about the down-time or an explanation later about what happened.
For those who are out of the country and have credit card bills to settle, due dates were definitely missed, causing one to incur penalty charges added to their outstanding accounts.
Transferring funds was also not possible as one cannot log in. One may call the credit card company and ask for a next-day extension, but without a customer advisory through e-mail, one might only realize that the bank’s e-banking service is still down by then.
Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) Circular 542 does not provide a mandatory requirement for banks to inform customers of down-time or to explain any outages so I urge fellow e-banking consumers to be vigilant.
The BSP should have clear policies whenever e-banking services fail or becomes unavailable. For example, if a bank says adding a third-party account would only take five banking days, it should ensure that the transaction is done during the period; if it doesn’t, there is a lapse in its process.
If a bank experiences down-time beyond four hours, it should be required to report to its customers.
On a personal level, if you can afford it, don’t rely entirely on one bank. I guess it is a reality that no one bank can be considered as 100 percent reliable when and where you need it.
E-banking services in the country can only improve if consumers like you and me will not hesitate to report any unreasonable lapse in the service. E-mail the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Consumer Affairs Office at consumeraffairs@bsp.gov.ph if you have bad e-banking (mobile, Internet, ATM) experience.
