The NAB Saga – Were You Affected?

These days, many people reckon the banks are giving the regular person a raw deal with bank fees and mortgage interest rates all while record profits are being raked in. That aside, people have an expectation to be able to access their money at a time and place convenient to them.

The wife and I have a bank account with the National Australia Bank (NAB) but were lucky enough not to be caught up in the issues experienced by many others across the country (primarily because we had already withdrawn enough money before hand for our regular spending and our wages had already been paid). I could only imagine the angst that people and family experienced with impaired access to their funds and delayed payments that could have caused issues with late fees, overdraw fees, interruptions to services or the inability to buy the bare essentials (for those doing it tough).

Like any major commercial entity, there are probably lots of customer impacting issues that get dealt with quietly behind the scenes with little notification to affected customers (if anything, customers call up to report problems which then prompts a given company to investigate and correct the problem). Some problems are more complex than others but usually head towards some sort of resolution.

Of course, there will be high profile issues such as the one experienced by NAB that will get extended media coverage (and rightly, so in my opinion). After water, electricity and gas I believe that banking is a utility service of sorts (along with access to the Internet). In an age where more and more is being done online or through digital transactions it is unacceptable that there is any sort of prolonged outage or inability to access funds or financial information.

Mind you, I am not an economist, a banker or an expert on the feasibility on law or regulation. I am merely someone with an interest in my bank accounts, credit cards and superannuation account. What I believe, as a regular consumer, is that there should be some sort of minimum service level supported by legislation or regulation to prevent further instances of what has happened over the weekend to reoccur. It’s not as if the banks are cash strapped for capital investment in their own systems.

Whilst it may be popular to “bank bash” over interest rates and computer glitches I think there is cause for concern for a lack of service level definition and enforcement. In the land of telecommunications, landline services are covered by the Service Level Guarantee (CSG) which stipulates the timeframes for a service to be installed and provided (either the originally requested service or an acceptable interim equivalent) to a customer with financial implications for the telco should they not meet the SLA. This framework is fairly mature and prescribes a clear level of service to be expected by customers of their chosen telco.

Computers fail, files corruption occurs and backups don’t always work – these things are a fact of life. Contingency planning and disaster recovery tests go some way to mitigate against these issues but the banks won’t do the best they can unless minimum requirements are legislated with ongoing support from the industry ombudsman wielding a big stick in the form of legal and/or financial penalties. Whilst the big four banks deal with billions of dollars everyday chasing a profit they are also dealing with the livelihoods of many, many people entrusting their money to them who may rely on a few hundred dollars just to survive. This needs to be put into perspective for the benefit of the Australian people.