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Category: Banking / Consumer Finance / Money and Monetary Policy

Westpac promises to compensate customers for losses caused by outage

Monday, 27 Feb 2017 15:37:42

The outage began about 10:30am (AEDT). (ABC News: Nic MacBean, file photo)

Westpac says it will compensate customers "who have experienced a financial loss as a direct result of the branch system issue" due to a major outage that disrupted transactions at a majority of its branches around the nation today.

The bank said it was still investigating what caused internal branch systems to shut down mid-morning, forcing staff to process transactions manually.

A Westpac spokesperson said all branch systems were now restored, while online and mobile banking, ATM and EFTPOS had been "working normally" during the outage.

"We used manual processes where possible to service our customers," the spokesperson said.

We apologise to customers for any inconvenience.

"Customers who have experienced a financial loss as a direct result of the branch systems issue will be compensated."

The outage a source of frustration for some customers using the bank's Haymarket branch in Sydney.

Rocco Westlake said he had attempted to use the ATM to do a cashless deposit on behalf of a friend but it was not working either and he had sought help from bank staff.

"The lovely lady has directed me to a non-functioning ATM where I've just spend the last five minutes under her instructions seeing if it works but it didn't," he told the ABC.

"So now I'm back in the queue waiting for the other machine. I'm not going to be jumping ship from my bank any time soon," he said.

A regular Westpac customer Yitong Wang said he sought help inside the branch to get a cheque, but was told it was "closed".

"I am just waiting inside hoping it will be back up before the bank closes, I still have fifteen minutes," he said.

"Technical problems happen, so I'll just wait."

Another customer, Kevin Feng, said he had attempted to deposit money via the ATM but after a few minutes, it refunded his money and issued a receipt saying it was unable to process the transaction.

The bank's Haymarket manager Kevin Chen said he wanted to apologise to customers for the inconvenience.

He told the ABC, the system failure meant staff could not access customers' account information and contact details.

"If a customer comes in with cash they can deposit the money and we will process it overnight or whenever the system becomes available," he said.

"If they want a bank cheque for example we won't be able to process the bank cheque on the spot because it needs to be issued from the printer but we have been giving them to option of a personal cheque."

He said the majority of customers used online banking, with about 25 per cent of people using the branch to do their transactions.

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