ANZ and Woolworths and many other merchants were embarrassed on Friday by a seven hour outage affecting Eftpos and the bank’s banking app.
Since the Reserve Bank of Australia obliged banks to begin reporting quarterly on retail and business payments systems outages, ANZ has been the second-worst offender when it comes to this frustrating component of the banking domain.
ANZ has reported 107 hours of downtime since the September quarter of 2021 up to the end of June 2023.
It is Westpac that has the worst record, with 323 hours of downtime in this period. Of that, 244 hours were attributed to one or more ATM network outages for the bank in the final quarter of 2022.
Commonwealth Bank had 103 hours of downtime and NAB 97 hours.
The Reserve Bank requires individual providers of payment services to households and businesses to publish statistics about the reliability of their services on their websites. These disclosures are intended to support transparency about retail payment service reliability.
The disclosures provide a standard set of quarterly statistics on significant outages and availability for individual services offered by the retail payments provider. The specified individual services are: ATMs, branches, cardholder payments, card acceptance for businesses, access to accounts using online banking, ‘fast’ account transfers and ‘next business day’ account transfers.
The RBA requires these quarterly disclosures from 33 banks.