Tag Archives: cashflow impacts of information quality

You can’t make an omlette with out breaking a few Eggs

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A correspondent in the field, Nic Jefferis has sent in this story about how a “database glitch” has affected customers of the Egg on-line bank who have been trying to pay their bills using their NatWest debit cards.

The BBC describes the problem very succintly:

“The problem is that the Egg website does not recognise Natwest Visa Debit cards as being legitimate cards.”

The root cause seems to stem from the fact that key base data used by Egg’s on-line bank, the valid set of Bank Identification Numbers, appears to to not include NatWest Visa debit cards as they are only being rolled out at the moment to replace the existing Maestro Debit card facility currently in use at NatWest.

And at this point the second common component of IQTrainwrecks raises its head – who is responsible for the data.

Egg get their data from Experian. As soon as the problem arose, Egg contacted Experian to get a solution.  Natwest state that they were “aware of this problem and raised it with Egg at the outset” and were waiting for Egg to sort out the problem in their systems.

Somewhere in the process for maintaining BIN master data something has gone awry which has affected the ability of NatWest customers to pay bills using their new Visa debit cards. As the problem appears to be in the underlying base data, it is possible that there are impacts wider afield than just Egg’s payment systems.

As a source quoted in the BBC report says, this should be a straightforward process and an error like this would be highly unusual. But as we know here at IQTrainwrecks, it is often the simple errors that can have the biggest knock on impacts in downstream systems and processes resulting in loss, damage, injury, or frustration.

Double Debits – directly. (Another banking IQTrainwreck)

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Courtesy of our Irish colleagues over on Tuppenceworth.ie comes yet another tale of poor quality information in financial services. Although this time it is at the lower end of the scale, at least on a per customer basis. However, the impacts on a customer are still irksome and problematic. And the solution the bank has put in place is a classic example of why inspecting defects out of a process is never an exact or value adding science.

It seems that Bank of Ireland has recently introduced some new software. Unfortunately, a bug in the software has resulted in certain transactions (deductions) being posted multiple times to accounts, resulting in cash-strapped Irish people being more strapped for cash than they’d expected.

Simon McGarr, (one of the authors over at Tuppenceworth) sums up the story and the reason why this is an IQTrainwreck:

I spotted a double charge on my account, for a pretty significant sum of money (is there any other kind?).

When I rang up to query it, I was told Bank of Ireland have changed their computer systems recently (Two weeks or so).

As a result, some transactions are being applied to accounts twice if they were processed through Laser [a debit card system in Ireland — ed.], or if they were a Pass machine [what the Irish call ATMs –ed.] withdrawal.

They say that if you spot the double charge, and ring them up to complain, they’ll send an email to their programmers to reverse the second charge.

I suggested to the polite customer services person that the bank might want to warn their clients to be alert for these double charges, as they could suffer additional charges (from appearing to breach their overdraft limits, for example) unless they spotted the bank’s mistake.

(Emphasis is added by this author)

Simon goes on to add (in a comment) that he has been without the benefit of his hard earned cash for 10 days (and counting).

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