Ulster Bank Systems are down part 3 *READ* First post

Berty

As of now, Ulster Bank online has been taken down.

Maybe the earlier problems(oh wait, we're not allowed talk about them :rolleyes:) have been fixed.

Betty Swallox

Savman wrote: »

Speak for yourself. Did it ever occur to you that the demographic that would post on boards might not be representative of the entire population of the island. In fact, it could almost be fair to say that this very site is for those who like to talk more than they act. Kind of ironic then, that we should find you here amongst us sheep, don't ya think?

I'm sure there will be lots who will stay put for whatever reason, but it's pure nonsense to suggest the public are indifferent and won't make UB suffer for this mess.

With very few complaints having been made so far, it's hard to see how Ally Dick could be wrong.

van_beano

UPC will be delighted that they're getting paid twice by everyone.........

Solair

Are the duplicate transactions actually arriving at their destinations?
I'd be worth checking with those utility companies in a few days to see.

van_beano

If they are then it's only building up a credit with them on customers accounts.
I doubt they'll reach their destinations though as UB will just reverse the payments by tonight I'd imagine

Berty

I'd doubt it myself. My account is back open online and nothing has changed. DDs and standing orders still paid out without permission.

Our man in Havana

Batches are not run on a Sunday so the earliest this will be fixed in Monday night.

W86indow

ITS COMPLETE RUBBISH THEY ARE FOBBING US OFF

THERE IS NO WAY ITS ALL GOING TO BE FIXED 2MORO THEY SAID THAT
ON THE 22ND OF JUNE IT WOULD BE FIXED BY MONDAY THE 25TH JUNE

WE ARE JUST STUPID FALLING FOR THE SAME CRAP AGAIN

ITS A DISGRACE WHAT WE ARE BEING PUT THROUGH

NOT ONLY THAT ITS A DISGRACE OUR USELESS GOVERNEMENT HAVENT DONE ANYTHING TO RECTIFY IT

ULSTER BANK SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF THEIR LIVES NOT GIVING OUT EXTRA OVERDRAFT TO ANYONE WHO NEEDS THEIR MONEY RIGHT NOW

IL GLADLY PICKET THE BANK TOMMORROW IN LIMERICK IF ANYONE WANTS TO COME - AND OR TUESDAY

OU812

What do we want?
Our money
When do we want it?
22nd June, 29th June, 6th July, 16th July, anytime you decide to let us have it really.

MrVestek

Geri Male wrote: »

Achilles wrote: »

Ohh great I just checked my online account and a retail refund that I made on my card earlier today after returning something in a store hasn't shown up yet either.
.

Refunds on laser / debit card transactions always take a couple of days to show up.

This hasn't been the case for me in the past with the Visa Debit system before this fiasco.

Rafa1977

unkel wrote: »

Duplicate income and duplicate UPC direct debit from last month hitting today :mad:

WTF are they doing???

Yeah same here, just when I thought they had sorted everything, muppets :mad:

dub45

majella mallon wrote: »

The direct debit from another bank for our morgage payment has come in a week earlier than usual agreed date, anyone else have this problem?
and does anyone know why? account accuracy has all the hallmarks of a lucky dip.

Without wishing to again drag up the dd system's woes this would appear to be an issue with the "other bank". dd's are sent to the paying bank three days ahead of the due date so this would not appear to be an ulster bank issue. (See page 19 of dd scheme rules) If it has come in a week earlier then you should be entitled to an immediate refund.

http://www.ipso.ie/section/section/YourRightsasaPayer

Ally Dick

I have a feeling that the total bill to Ulster bank for what happened will be somewhere in the region of €300 million. They saved themselves around €7 million a year in moving their IT to India. What a saving !

dub45

Ally Dick wrote: »

I have a feeling that the total bill to Ulster bank for what happened will be somewhere in the region of €300 million. They saved themselves around €7 million a year in moving their IT to India. What a saving !

And that's just the "money" side of things - how do you measure the damage to "brand" the demonstrable lack of managerial capability, lack of proper processes in place etc etc.

Plus the "picking up the pieces" activities over the next few (?) months will surely divert from providing proper customer service also?

Islander13

W86indow wrote: »

ITS COMPLETE RUBBISH THEY ARE FOBBING US OFF

THERE IS NO WAY ITS ALL GOING TO BE FIXED 2MORO THEY SAID THAT
ON THE 22ND OF JUNE IT WOULD BE FIXED BY MONDAY THE 25TH JUNE

WE ARE JUST STUPID FALLING FOR THE SAME CRAP AGAIN

ITS A DISGRACE WHAT WE ARE BEING PUT THROUGH

NOT ONLY THAT ITS A DISGRACE OUR USELESS GOVERNEMENT HAVENT DONE ANYTHING TO RECTIFY IT

ULSTER BANK SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF THEIR LIVES NOT GIVING OUT EXTRA OVERDRAFT TO ANYONE WHO NEEDS THEIR MONEY RIGHT NOW

IL GLADLY PICKET THE BANK TOMMORROW IN LIMERICK IF ANYONE WANTS TO COME - AND OR TUESDAY

No thanks, I think I'll go to work instead

MrVestek

Hurray, another week where my girlfriend's side of the rent doesn't arrive into my account, another week where I'm not sure if I actually have the cash to pay for rent... another week of being ripped off.

Seriously Ireland HOW are this bank not being reprimanded at this stage? Ohh yeah because we're the little guy and we don't ****ing matter...

chasm

Bloomberg are reporting that the Sunday Business Post ran an article today claiming that UB have told the Irish Govt that it wants to be regulated by the Bank of England instead of the Central Bank of Ireland. I don't have access to the article so i don't know any more but is it safe to assume they would have to get there business affairs in order in this country first?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-15/ireland-s-ulster-bank-considers-regulation-in-england-post-says.html

Islander13

chasm wrote: »

Bloomberg are reporting that the Sunday Business Post ran an article today claiming that UB have told the Irish Govt that it wants to be regulated by the Bank of England instead of the Central Bank of Ireland. I don't have access to the article so i don't know any more but is it safe to assume they would have to get there business affairs in order in this country first?

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-15/ireland-s-ulster-bank-considers-regulation-in-england-post-says.html

Would make sense for them to do that given head office is in Belfast - the UK. Plus I'd have more faith in UK solvency regulations than Irish ones.

They'd still obviously be subject to conduct of business rules in Ireland. Not a big deal imo

Thargor

The media doesn't seem to be saying anything about the fact they fixed everything in England fairly sharpish then told Ireland to go fcuk itself...

anfield liv

No,you are correct,the Media and the government have been rather quiet on the Ulster Bank cock-up ....but then we must realise that the Governmenrt has a lot of contracts with ULSTER BANK...DARE i GO ON BUT EG TRANSFER OF wages for HSE etc.....and I note from todays Sunday newspapers some gov minister has got a lot of loans /mortgages with UB !!!!and its unclear if he is paying his monthly payments or not..so why have a go at UB nice cosy relationship and all that....what a great little BANANA Republic we live in!!!:mad:

Solair

Sky News is FINALLY picking up on it today.

http://news.sky.com/story/960293/ulster-banks-it-meltdown-fixed-this-week

By Vicki Hawthorne, Ireland Correspondent

A computer glitch that has caused havoc for customers of one of Ireland's biggest banks should be fixed this week.
For almost a month account holders with Ulster Bank have been unable to access thier online accounts or see details of deposits and withdrawals.
The problems started on June 19, the same time as parent bank RBS suffered a computer failure. RBS resolved the issue within a few days, but the problem has taken much longer to fix at Ulster Bank....

Ally Dick

Thargor wrote: »

The media doesn't seem to be saying anything about the fact they fixed everything in England fairly sharpish then told Ireland to go fcuk itself...

They have been pedalling an out and out lie that "unfortunately" Ulster bank come third in nightly processing after RBS and Nat West. If this was true, surely they would have fixed up RBS, Nat West and Ulster for 21st June and then moved forward a day at a time for each bank. Instead they fixed up RBS and Nat West first, before Ulster bank. 10 million customers versus 600k customers. That's the reason they did it the way that they did

Solair

I've absolutely no specific information about Ulster Bank or RBS Group, but I would just point out one thing that people on forums and in the media are overlooking.

Banks merge all the time, but it's not always easy to merge IT systems. In many instances that I've read about, it seems that management aim to merge the IT systems to save costs, but in reality what happens is that hardware is shared, some applications are shared, new systems are shared and different sub-brands still run on their legacy systems because it's just too costly or complicated to move everything over to a common platform.

It's quite possible that the Ulster Bank systems are more dramatically hit because they could possibly be significantly different to the RBS and NatWest systems.

Some aspects could be shared e.g. applications like online banking, ATM systems etc, but you could find that there are significantly different software packages running behind the scenes for each brand.

I would strongly suspect that there's a very technical reason why Ulster Bank's been hit worse than the other two brands. I don't think it's lack of prioritisation of their customers, rather that their IT systems are just genuinely suffering from a more dramatic impact.

I'm not excusing them. This is still an unacceptable fiasco, but I think there has to be an underlying technical explanation rather than a business practice one.

They haven't really issued a full technical explanation either. So far it's all been really vague. You get the sense that you're reading a report by someone who doesn't actually know anything about IT trying to interpret something very technical, rather than the actual facts.

At this stage, I think the bank's customers, the regulators and the public deserve a FULL and detailed technical explanation of this, in much the way you'd get an aircraft crash report.

The only way that confidence can be restored is by transparency and assurance that this cannot happen again.

unkel

Ally Dick wrote: »

I have a feeling that the total bill to Ulster bank for what happened will be somewhere in the region of €300 million. They saved themselves around €7 million a year in moving their IT to India. What a saving !

How did you calculate / guesstimate the total bill? Sounds a bit low. Did you include compensation? Did you include all those man years of staff in the branches on extra time? Did you include what must be hundreds of thousands of hours of data entry?

Oh and you did spot the sig that I've had for the last few weeks?

@Solair - Agreed. Partially or even significantly different systems is almost certainly the reason why it's taking so long for UB as compared to NatWest and RBS.

MrVestek

Solair wrote: »

I've absolutely no specific information about Ulster Bank or RBS Group, but I would just point out one thing that people on forums and in the media are overlooking.

Banks merge all the time, but it's not always easy to merge IT systems. In many instances that I've read about, it seems that management aim to merge the IT systems to save costs, but in reality what happens is that hardware is shared, some applications are shared, new systems are shared and different sub-brands still run on their legacy systems because it's just too costly or complicated to move everything over to a common platform.

It's quite possible that the Ulster Bank systems are more dramatically hit because they could possibly be significantly different to the RBS and NatWest systems.

Some aspects could be shared e.g. applications like online banking, ATM systems etc, but you could find that there are significantly different software packages running behind the scenes for each brand.

I would strongly suspect that there's a very technical reason why Ulster Bank's been hit worse than the other two brands. I don't think it's lack of prioritisation of their customers, rather that their IT systems are just genuinely suffering from a more dramatic impact.

I'm not excusing them. This is still an unacceptable fiasco, but I think there has to be an underlying technical explanation rather than a business practice one.

They haven't really issued a full technical explanation either. So far it's all been really vague. You get the sense that you're reading a report by someone who doesn't actually know anything about IT trying to interpret something very technical, rather than the actual facts.

At this stage, I think the bank's customers, the regulators and the public deserve a FULL and detailed technical explanation of this, in much the way you'd get an aircraft crash report.

The only way that confidence can be restored is by transparency and assurance that this cannot happen again.

If they had sufficient disaster recovery plans in place then this wouldn't have happened to any system no matter how antiquated it is.

Anyway the general public shouldn't have to be concerned with Ulster Bank's issues... it really is no concern of theirs.

Ally Dick

unkel wrote: »

How did you calculate / guesstimate the total bill? Sounds a bit low. Did you include compensation? Did you include all those man years of staff in the branches on extra time? Did you include what must be hundreds of thousands of hours of data entry?

Oh and you did spot the sig that I've had for the last few weeks?

@Solair - Agreed. Partially or even significantly different systems is almost certainly the reason why it's taking so long for UB as compared to NatWest and RBS.

Hi Unkel, I heard reports of 200 million and I added 50% !

Solair

Achilles wrote: »

If they had sufficient disaster recovery plans in place then this wouldn't have happened to any system no matter how antiquated it is.

Anyway the general public shouldn't have to be concerned with Ulster Bank's issues... it really is no concern of theirs.

I'm not excusing what they've done. I'm just saying that the explanations being offered so far don't really add up from a technical point of view. That doesn't really instil a lot of confidence in anyone who has even a vague idea of how major IT networks like this work.

The fact that the system was clearly lacking any kind of fundamental resilience is very worrying. There appears to have been totally inadequate backup and disaster-recovery contingencies.

The problem I have at the moment is that it's a bit like an airline after a major crash saying 'eh, something went wrong with one of the engines... now let's focus on helping our passengers find their baggage and never mention it again!".

When something goes horribly wrong like this, a regulator needs to step in and carry out a forensic investigation and come up with industry-wide recommendations that required to be implemented by all other licensed operators of the same kinds of systems to ensure that the public can trust the technology!

I think Irish Government reps, and also Northern Irish reps need to put a LOT more public pressure on the British Government about this.

Ulster Bank is a subsidiary of RBS which is 84% owned by the UK tax payer.

It's a state-owned zombie bank much like our own local zombies.

Ally Dick

They don't want the India link getting out into the media. Would be very embarrassing for Hester who made the decision to go the India route in the first place

Our man in Havana

Why is no journo writing about India?

MrVestek

Solair wrote: »

I'm not excusing what they've done. I'm just saying that the explanations being offered so far don't really add up from a technical point of view. That doesn't really instil a lot of confidence in anyone who has even a vague idea of how major IT networks like this work.

The fact that the system was clearly lacking any kind of fundamental resilience is very worrying. There appears to have been totally inadequate backup and disaster-recovery contingencies.

The problem I have at the moment is that it's a bit like an airline after a major crash saying 'eh, something went wrong with one of the engines... now let's focus on helping our passengers find their baggage and never mention it again!".

When something goes horribly wrong like this, a regulator needs to step in and carry out a forensic investigation and come up with industry-wide recommendations that required to be implemented by all other licensed operators of the same kinds of systems to ensure that the public can trust the technology!

I think Irish Government reps, and also Northern Irish reps need to put a LOT more public pressure on the British Government about this.

Ulster Bank is a subsidiary of RBS which is 84% owned by the UK tax payer.

Forgive me as I never meant to make out that you were excusing them for this.

Somebody mentioned earlier that the inexperienced IT staff were located in India and accidentally deleted the previous night's batch file after the failed software upgrade.

A saving of €3 Million in IT staff is obviously going to cost them much more in the long run. I'd like to think that this whole fiasco is karma to Ulster Bank for the unnecessary firing of experienced IT staff that had knowledge of Ulster's antiquated IT systems.

Also not having a backup of the failed batch if true is just inexcusable and that's coming from an IT Admin. First rule of IT regarding data is backups backups and backups of the backups...