Commonwealth Bank and Bank of Queensland yesterday confirmed their businesses as Australia’s most outage-prone deposit-taking institutions.
CBA’s services were out of action for more than 33 hours across its banking platforms in the three months to the end of September while BoQ operations were down for more than 36 hours in the same period.
The disclosures were made under a new reporting requirement introduced by the Reserve Bank, which also indicates that ING Australia and Macquarie had the most stable banking platforms in the quarter, with each reporting no service hours lost.
Not far behind them was National Australia Bank which reported interruptions to its online and mobile platforms lasting only one hour and 32 minutes, and Bendigo which recorded total outage time of just under seven hours.
NAB’s online banking arm UBank reported no outages.
While Westpac and ANZ customers were exposed to fewer outage hours than their CBA and BoQ counterparts, they were still unable to access a range of services for at least 20 hours and 17 hours, respectively.
CBA’s claim to being the country’s leading technology bank is significantly undermined by the outage data that captures service interruptions across a range of critical channels: ATMs, branches, cards, merchant terminals, internet banking and mobile apps.
Most of the outage time at CBA was likely due to protracted incidents on 6 July and 12 September that triggered intense interactions between the bank and its customers on social media.
While the bank’s online customer officers characterised these events on both days as being related to problems using the CBA mobile app, the bank appears to have reported them differently to the RBA.
CBA reported losing just under two hours of service time on its internet and mobile platforms during the quarter, and attributed most of its operating failure to card functionality issues (18.46 hours lost) and merchant terminals (8.43 hours lost).
This inconsistency between what the bank tells its customers and what it reports to the RBA appears to highlight a material flaw in the regulator’s reporting methodology.
Based on what CBA disclosed in its outage data report it appears the RBA is giving banks ample discretion to decide whether an outage was due to a card platform breakdown rather than a faltering mobile wallet environment.
CBA told its customers during the six-hour incident on 6 July that the problems were related to the mobile app.
The dubiousness of CBA’s claim that it mobile and internet platforms were out for only two hours in the September quarter is also evidenced by Twitter interactions with customers during the three-hour outage on 12 September.
On that day there were obvious problems with the mobile app, which caused the bank to advise customers to insert their cards in merchant terminals, rather than use their digital wallets.
CBA appears to be using the new reporting standard to understate operational failings on its fast-growing mobile app channel.
Services problems also impacted customers at the CBA’s Bankwest subsidiary throughout the quarter where various channels were out of action for more than 23 hours.
BoQ had the most unstable online banking services in the September quarter, with its mobile and internet platforms out of action for more than 34 hours.
According to the Down Detector website, which records complaints from customers about corporate websites, BoQ had a protracted incident affecting digital banking systems on 10 September.
During the quarter BoQ also lost another two hours of service time due to card functionality issues.