FNB, the retail banking unit of financial services group FirstRand, has apologised for a series of systems outages that left clients unable to use their cards or access digital channels in recent days.
The bank’s customers took to social media over the weekend to vent their anger after they experienced limited functionality on digital channels and certain card services on July 1. The problems then resurfaced on July 3, with clients experiencing what FNB called “brief intermittent access” to certain digital channels.
“The issues were resolved and customers have been able to access full functionality without further difficulties,” Giuseppe Virgillito, FNB’s head of digital, said in a statement.
“We sincerely apologise to customers for any inconvenience that may have been caused. Our IT teams continue to monitor our channels to ensure optimal functionality and to ensure that adequate measures are implemented to prevent a recurrence.”
Nevertheless, FNB declined to provide reasons for the systems outages, despite being asked to provide an explanation by Business Day.
The glitches come soon after rival lender Standard Bank announced the resignation of its chief engineering officer in early June after a massive systems outage left clients of Africa’s biggest lender by assets unable to transact for more than six hours on May 21.
Standard Bank said that outage was due to the failure of a component responsible for processing card and ATM transactions and switching them from external devices to the bank’s internal systems. At the time, Standard Bank said the May 21 systems outage was not related to three other “high-impact” incidents it experienced in previous months, which were due to a software bug.
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