Bank of Ireland CEO apologises for tech failures

Bank of Ireland’s chief executive has apologised for the “significant technology outage” that saw many of its online services unavailable to customers earlier this week, as Minister for Finance Michael McGrath warned there have been “too many instances” of IT glitches at the nation’s banks.

Myles O’Grady accepted that customers “were impacted badly by this failure”, which he said “fell well below the standards our customers expect of us”.

The failure, which began on Tuesday and was resolved by Wednesday morning, prevented some Bank of Ireland customers from accessing their accounts online, while others saw as much as €1,000 extra appearing in their accounts. Queues quickly formed at ATMs around the country as people sought to access the extra money. Bank of Ireland has made clear those withdrawals would be counted against customers’ accounts.

Mr O’Grady noted that banking is “based on reputation and trust. We have damaged this with our customers and wider society”.

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He said the bank was “working to put things right” and he outlined some of the details that led to the tech failures.

“On Tuesday, our mobile app and digital banking services were unavailable to customers. Our priority was that all customers continued to have access to cash and could transact on their cards to manage their daily needs, in cash, online or in a shop,” he said.

The challenge in doing this during an outage “is that customers couldn’t check their balance and some may now find themselves overdrawn”.

He said customers who were impacted by this week’s incident should make contact with the bank so “that we can work together to find an appropriate solution”.

He added that “a number of supports” had been put in place for customers impacted by the outage, “including interest free temporary overdrafts. Contact centres and branches are here to help customers, including a dedicated team for those impacted by the outage.”

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

[ Bank of Ireland warns credit ratings could be affected by withdrawals made during IT outage ]

In the aftermath of the technical issues, the Central Bank of Ireland stressed that “where issues occur which impact on customers, we expect banks to rectify the issues urgently” adding that it requires banks “to put things right where they have made errors or cause customer harm”.

The Central Bank said it expects “all firms to have adequate systems and controls in place to ensure operational resilience, and where issues that impact customers arise they should be addressed and rectified urgently”.

Speaking in Cork on Friday, Minister McGrath said that whilst the bank responded quickly to the situation certainty was needed in relation to the sector.

“It is vital that people can have uninterrupted access to banking services and in recent years we have had a number of instances where systems errors or systems outages took place.

“Bank of Ireland have responded swiftly and have dealt with the situation. Obviously they will have to deal with the fall out of any transactions where funding was taken from accounts where the funding shouldn’t have been in those accounts and that is an operational matter for the bank to deal with.”

Minister McGrath said that his aim would be to ensure that we “understand fully” what occurred and why it occurred.

“I will be engaging further now with the Governor of the Central Bank generally to gain an understanding of their assessment and to make sure that we do understand fully what happened in this instance ... why it happened and how we can be re assured that it is not going to happen again,” he said.

“We have had too many such instances in recent years and I want to be assured that the necessary investment is being put in to systems where the public are interfacing with private companies in terms of accessing their own money in particular,” he added.