Bank of Ireland’s remote banking facilities fall over … again

It hasn’t been a good few weeks for Bank of Ireland, at least not in terms of its tech infrastructure. The Irish bank has hit headlines all over the world after some customers found they had access to up to €1,000 more than was actually in their bank accounts.

Queues formed, ATMs were emptied and gardaí were controversially deployed in some areas as people rushed to take advantage of “free money” that turned out, as Bank of Ireland later confirmed, not to be so free after all. The funds will be debited from accounts, and could lead to repercussions for customers who did not have enough cash in their accounts to cover the withdrawals — inadvertent or deliberate.

While the late-night fiasco may have left the bank red-faced, the real issue is more serious. In the lead-up to the ATM rush, some customers found that, once again, they could not access their accounts through the mobile app or the bank’s online platform.

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Bank of Ireland now has an image problem in terms of the reliability of its online offerings which are anyway considered antiquated, inflexible and limited.

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It is not the only bank to have suffered an outage in its systems — digital bank Revolut has had some issues of its own, with glitches leaving its app unusable last year, for example — but it is certainly vying for the top spot in terms of frequency. It was only a little over a month ago when some of its customers found they couldn’t access their accounts, affecting bill payments, salary transfers and other transactions.

[ Q&A: What happens to people who withdrew money during Bank of Ireland’s tech meltdown? ]

[ BoI warns credit ratings could be affected by withdrawals made during IT outage ]

Last year, a Bank of Ireland outage left Bruce Springsteen fans cursing the bank after they lost out on tickets when transactions wouldn’t go through; this was followed only a few weeks later by another problem that effectively locked users out of their accounts for much of the day, leaving them unable to pay bills or transfer money.

For a bank that has made being digitally enabled a key part of its strategy, increasingly forcing people to do business online instead of in a branch, it seems incredible that its very basic online offering has suffered so many failures.

Choice may be limited for day-to-day banking in Ireland right now after the exits and consolidation of recent years, most recently Ulster Bank and KBC. But there are only so many apologies that customers will take from Bank of Ireland before they start looking elsewhere.