2 payments taken out when only one should have been

PlainP

Checking my balance yesterday and I noticed an extra payment taken out of my account. I paid for €40 worth of petrol and there were 2 €40 payments taken out.

My question is do I go back to the garage and show them the extra payment or do I go to my bank and get them to sort it out?

Thanks.

PlainP

Well checked my balance just there and there's only one payment now showing so my mistake.

Doh...

Bank of Ireland: Sharon

PlainP wrote: »

Well checked my balance just there and there's only one payment now showing so my mistake.

Doh...

Hi PlainP,

Thanks for getting in touch.

If you are logged onto 365 Online, late in the evening when the system is updating account transactions, it can appear that transactions have been duplicated and the balances will sometimes not seem to be correct however, the final balance will always be correct. This will then rectify a short time later when the system has finished updating.

We're glad to hear the duplicate transaction has disappeared from your account. 

If there's anything else we can help you with, please let us know.

Thanks,

Sharon

Irish Steve

No this is NOT your mistake, it's a short term issue that happens as a result of the very bad and inappropriate way that BOI have implemented processing of real time payments via debit cards. To protect themselves, as soon as you make a debit card payment, a transaction is processed in real time to reduce the balance of the account, but at that stage, it doesn't have all the details of the transaction, that only shows up when the company you've paid processes the transaction through their payment processor, and they send the full details to Bank of Ireland's systems.

The problem then arises when that full transaction is processed, sometimes up to a week later, for reasons best known unto Bank of Ireland's programmers, when the full transaction is being processed, it will show up as a second transaction on the account, and on your statement, for however long it takes for that batch of transactions to be fully processed by the archaic and inappropriate batch processing systems that are being used by Bank of Ireland.

The underlying problem is that the batch of transactions that arrives from payment processors can include a mix of items, and some of those items have not been previously presented, so they have to update the account balance and appear on the statement, which is correct, but there are also the significant number of transactions that have already been partially processed, and it's a regular cause of concern to people that don't know about it that for often several hours, both transactions show up on an on line statement, and affect the balance on that statement, effectively making it incorrect, but for some reason, the Management of Bank of Ireland see nothing wrong with this fundamental misrepresentation of the true position on the account, their excuse being that "it gets corrected once the batch has been completed".

What should happen is that the "full" transaction should remain hidden from the online banking systems and NOT appear on the on line statement while it is being merged with the original fund reservation transaction, so that you don't get the significant confusion that is being caused by the present mess, but that seems to be beyond the skills of the programmers that are employed by BOI.

I suspect that some of the reasons for this are that a lot of their IT is now outsourced, and as a result of those changes, and the redundancy of a significant number of in house programmers, it's more than likely that there is a very real lack of in depth understanding of most of the old legacy code that used to be run on the mainframe systems in house, but don't expect them to admit to that any time soon. We see it on a regular basis when the processing of batch transactions fails for some reason, and huge numbers of people don't get paid on the day that they were expecting to.

What makes no sense to me is that the on line computer systems are now the core of the product, with the increasing reduction in branch banking services, the on line systems are the most important aspect of the offering by all of the banks, and the BOI products are still in so many areas operating in the stone age of technology, and their business banking systems are even more restricted in their capability, due to a complete lack of change for a very long time, so they're now having to try and play catch up, with the sort of results that you've identified on your recent on line transaction check.

Don't hold your breath for a change in the short term, there's no recognition of this as an issue that needs change within BOI, this will only change when they start seeing customer migration to other banks as a result of the issues with their offering, and rightly or wrongly, people don't move banks very often, partly because of the pain of making such changes, it's far from an easy process.

Bank of Ireland: Sharon

Irish Steve wrote: »

 as soon as you make a debit card payment, a transaction is processed in real time to reduce the balance of the account, but at that stage, it doesn't have all the details of the transaction, that only shows up when the company you've paid processes the transaction through their payment processor, 

Hi Irish Steve,

Thanks for getting in touch.

Just to make you aware, when you use your Visa Debit card, the retailer information will be displayed in full straight away. This is to help keep track of debit card transactions and to protect the security of customer accounts.

Thanks,

Sharon

PlainP

Thanks so much for the replies.

I did notice there was an (s) at the end of one of the transactions and an (s/s) at the end of the other one.

I'm just happy that there was nothing untoward going on.

Thanks again.