ANZ and National Australia Bank have warned customers not to expect payments to be processed through Christmas, in the latest inconvenience a week after a high-profile outage and a security flaw limited services.
ANZ, in a note to customers, said payments between the bank and other financial institutions won’t be processed from Saturday, December 24, to Tuesday, December 27. The bank said the delay was due to the long weekend.
The bank further warned that any payments made after 6pm on Friday, December 23, may not be processed until the following Thursday. Calls to ANZ for comment were unanswered. National Australia Bank issued a similar advisory to customers. “Funds transfers and bill payments submitted after the published cut-off times on Friday 23 December 2011 to a non-linked NAB account or to an account at another financial institution in Australia will be processed on Wednesday, December 28, 2011.”Similarly, any transfers and bill payments submitted after Friday, December 30, to an account at another financial institution would not be processed until Tuesday January 3, 2012. Commonwealth Bank and Westpac were not available for comment on any planned outages over the holiday.
Last week, CommBank customers were prevented from accessing their funds through ATMs, EFTPOS and online accounts, after a network issue crippled the bank’s services for hours. The same week, ANZ was forced to disable parts of its online account services after a security flaw was discovered that exposed customers' personal banking details through electronic statements. All of Australia’s major banks’ are in the process of upgrading ageing data processing infrastructure. The fragility of the older systems, along with growing complexity have created a string of outages and disruptions in recent years. “We will be working on fixing the issue as a priority and hope to have the eStatement functionality back up in within the next few weeks,” ANZ said last week.