Computer glitches

A lot of my Facebook friends woke up last Wednesday to the news of a serious glitch in the computer system of Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI). Bloomberg reported that BPI “blamed an internal data-processing error for inaccurate customer-account balances amid a flurry of claims on social media over unauthorized withdrawals and missing funds.

“Some deposit accounts don’t reflect their correct balances because the processing error had caused past transactions to be either debited or credited twice,” Bloomberg reports. BPI issued an advisory claiming they have identified the error and will have a fix by the afternoon.

 By the end of business hours, BPI’s system was still down. By 10 p.m., they announced that their ATMs are up. But by mid-morning Thursday, BPI issued another advisory that they deactivated all their electronic channels again as some accounts still show incorrect balances.

Netizens expressed a lot of worries even as BPI reassured that no one will lose any money because of the glitch. The problem was BPI’s mishandling of the crisis communication.

Their advisories were curt and hardly answered the question depositors had in mind. The official statements of BPI gave no explanation of what happened and just suggested that we trust them to put the system back in place. Trust is something BPI does not have after the glitch.

 In the meantime, the social media space was full of speculations of hacking and worse that are definitely negative for BPI. Sources told me BPI has an internal e-mail which explained what happened. They should have shared that with the public.

Being a BPI account holder myself, of course I was concerned. So I asked around. Luckily, someone in one of my Viber groups is a senior banker who also handled corporate communications for his bank, not BPI. He is a rare breed, a banker who can communicate.

My friend explained what was going on. Feeling the need ease the anxiety of my Facebook friends, I posted my banker friend’s explanation and got sighs of relief. Here it is:

“There is nothing to worry about. It appears to be a simple case of a computer center operator handling the batch processing of the day’s transactions (this occurred in the early morning, which is when the batch processing happens) pressing a button that loaded the transactions twice.”

My friend then explained that the way to correct the situation is to upload a program to reverse the double debit and double credit; and to start afresh from the previous day’s balance, and run the batch processing again correctly. 

Anyway, my friend explained what happened “is quite similar to a bank teller posting a deposit or withdrawal, but after getting NO response from the system she thought the transaction did not push thru. So nag enter ulit, yun pala naka queue na yung transaction, thus two transactions were eventually processed. This just happened on a bigger scale.”

He advised to disregard all other rumors or feeds about hacking. The important thing is that we have been assured by the bank that nobody will lose money from this.

The thing with banks and other financial institutions is that their systems should assure zero defects. In this age of advanced computer systems, banks should also have a system to catch human errors before the errors go online.

But this glitch and an increasing number of consumer complaints that I see on Facebook lately about erroneous postings on accounts prove otherwise. BPI needs to invest in state of the art technology.

Indeed, another friend who is a retired marketing manager of a major multinational asked: “I’ve always wondered. Why do our banks – not just BPI – suffer from intermittent “OFFLINE” situation throughout the day? We lived in Jakarta and in Singapore in the 90’s and never encountered this inconvenience. Whatever the cause, is there an effort to find a permanent solution?”

I suppose the big banks now see that glitches of this nature pose serious reputation risk not just for individual banks but to the banking system in general. News and destructive speculation can spread like wildfire in our social media world. While mainstream journalists know how to handle information to prevent a bank run, many people on Facebook couldn’t care less.

Unfortunately, I didn’t see BPI handling the crisis communication part of the problem as well as they should have. It is not enough for its President to speak up... he has to be understood... he has to connect. 

And most basic… he has to be seen and heard by his depositors right away and often. It is not enough that he gave an interview to ANC very early in the morning. ANC only covers a part of the cable television market.

If their corp comm folks knew what they were doing, they should have requested a copy of the interview from ANC and splashed it all over Facebook and Twitter. Spend some money on sponsored posts to make sure it reaches the intended audience.

BPI did nothing of that sort. I checked their Twitter page and found nothing but the official advisories. Failure to use Twitter more creatively to include broadcasting their president’s interview is an unforgivable badly missed opportunity to appease their depositors.

In hindsight, they should have a banker who knows how to communicate and not just a wordsmith in corp comm. Even the senior vice president interviewed by CNN Philippines seemed nervous and not that clear.

I got the impression from her that it is more than a double entry problem and that some kind of dagdag bawas happened by mistake. Senior bank officials should get media response training for emergencies like this.

Banks need a senior corp comm officer like Max Edralin once was at Citibank. He had the experience and the gravitas to be listened to by top management. Unless the bank CEO can trust his corp comm person, he might as well fire him or her because that renders him or her useless.

Come to think of it, computer glitches seem to abound these days. For the past two months I have been hounded by bills from Globe that had been trying to charge me for data I supposedly used amounting in the thousands of pesos.

The thing is, I don’t even have a Globe data plan and the amounts are over my credit limit. They say it is computer error and they have finally corrected it… I hope… but will find out only in the next billing.

Hopefully, BPI and all local financial institutions learn from this problem. And maybe the Ayala companies should hire better IT people. Maybe they are not paying well enough to attract or keep the best.

Bong Lapira

It is with sadness that I learned of the passing of Bong Lapira, an institution in Philippine television news. Bong was one of the top news anchors in the late 60s and 70s. Not one of current news anchors can compare to Bong and the late Jose Mari Velez for intelligent anchoring.

I asked Bong to help train new reporters for anchoring assignments when I was VP News of ABS-CBN. One of those young reporters he trained was a fresh graduate at that time, the now famous Cathy Yang.

My deepest condolences to Bong’s family.

Boo Chanco’s e-mail address is [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @boochanco