Clients panic as Standard Bank system crashes

STANDARD Bank Namibia’s IT system crashed again yesterday causing confusion and panic among its clients.

The system has crashed many times this year. Several companies could not do online transactions due to the system failure.

The Namibian received many calls from the bank’s clients across the country saying they were in the dark about what was going on.

Head of marketing Thaddius Maswahu described the failure as a “technical accident” and said the system was expected to be running again later in the day.

Asked why the bank had failed to fix the recurring problem, Maswahu said it was normal to face problems when a new system is implemented.

“These things happen in life, we did not plan for this,” he said.

Just before 17h00 yesterday afternoon Standard Bank sent an sms to clients stating that they were “experiencing system downtime” and it was getting the “highest attention”.

“Our credit card facilities are working. We apologise for any inconvenience caused,” the bank said.

In April, the bank started upgrading its core banking system, which has since seen several failures including problems with electronic payments.

The problems have affected customer service channels – ATMs, internet banking, cellphone banking and the bank’s SMS service, My Updates.

Standard Bank completed its system localisation of clients migration to a local banking system from South Africa in February 2012.