Capital One two-day outage leaves customers in free-fall Capital One is still battling to fix whatever brought down its systems on Wednesday, which has left people unable to access their money. While the US banking and credit-card giant continues to accept incoming deposits, attempts to withdraw funds or look up accounts bring up errors or restrictions, customers have complained. …
Reminds of when there was a flood in the West of England and the datacenter of a leading British bank got flooded. When I mentioned that the bank must surely be having sophisticated systems to recover from the flooding, its CIO told me with a deadpan face, "Yeah right, mops and buckets".
I used to work for a bank and one day our online banking provider went down (not FIS). We called their number and their phone system was down. We called our rep's personal cell number and his voicemailbox was full. It went on for hours.
The postmortem report was "interesting" and forthcoming. A non-technical manager decided that since their UPS (battery backup) systems required yearly maintenance but it cost a lot for almost nothing found, he/she changed the maintenance interval to three years, over I.T.'s strenuous objections. Year Three was delayed because the service provider put them low on the priority list.
The one day a power cable inside a UPS worked itself loose and was bouncing around inside the UPS, arcing to the case, interrupting the power and totally dangerous for anyone to work on. Everything went down hard, including the VoIP phone system and their mainframes.
But the generators never kicked in because they monitored the street power and it was not interrupted.
By the time they figured out what was going on, got the faulty UPS bypassed, and the generators manually started it was a few hours. Then everything had to be manually started one at a time and several systems failed to restart.
And that's when they discovered* that their backup data center did not have real-time replication nor enough capacity to support all of the customers they had added over the years..
* Their I.T. people had warned that this was the case but managers decided it would never happen.
Beancounting managers, you gotta love them. Or at least tolerate them until they get bit in the arse.
Back in the late 80s I was a regional VP of Sales for a global transportation company. One of our competitors centralized their customer service and only a few days in, their national toll free number went to a dead end.
I mobilized our sales team and we picked off nearly $100M annual revenue that never went back to them.
Years go by, I move back to the USA and take a role with them heading up IT for their customer service and sales. (Long story moving from biz to IT) Six weeks in I meet with the exec committee over IT expenditures. I have a long wish list for redundancy that is breathtaking in $$$.
To their credit, nobody asked if I was sane. I was somewhat infamous in the industry for nothing related to sales or IT, so I had their respect. When questioned about the need for all of this NOW! I pulled out my old sales reports and passed them around. I informed them this was all of the new business that I had stolen from them from their call center outage those years ago. 100% approved, and I never once had to justify any of my budget requests after that.
But they're magic beans, didn't you know? See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd75nqwdpj7o for how Severn Trent instantly magicked £2 (2 x cans of Heinz beans + some change) into £3 billion (quite a lot of cans of beans).
Just a tired rehash of the Enron money-making sausage machine from Severn Trent but as the regulators are too busy quaffing their port and smoking their cigars they know they'll get away with it.
They are in the process of making the BILLIONS that they will have to pay out on the fraud charges.
What's in your wallet, their fingers.
And this third party blame game is a crock of shit. It's getting real fucking old, real fucking fast.
Maybe insurance executives shouldn't be the only targets though the scope.
...you should always have at least two banks. Put spending money in one, and savings in the other. It's a very simple concept. I'm sure many of us have worked in fintech or financial services at some point. We know how reliable and well-maintained banking infrastructure is, especially by third parties who are *totally* incentivized to continue improving their systems.
Banks often deem that you have to bring in your salary in order to get free banking or other concessions from them.
Savings accounts can have horrendous delays in removing your money.
"However, despite this desire for financial simplicity, the average number of bank accounts per person in the UK has risen from 2.5 in 2014 to 2.8 in 2020, with the country now possessing a total of 156 million bank accounts. British consumers now have the most bank accounts in Europe on average – by comparison, Germans have 2.0 bank accounts per person, the Spanish have 1.7, the French 1.4, and Italians 0.9."
Why? Because their systems just work.
Personally, I'd use a credit card and if it's still not working at the time the payment is due, I'd require them to pay the interest and close my account.
Cripes, with only one bank account, I'm almost Italian.
The bare minimum is having some cash hidden away to cope with this sort of crap.
I'd also suggest having printed bank statements (or at least downloading/screen capping your online statement) on a regular basis. Just in case they really get turned over.
"...you should always have at least two banks."
AT LEAST two, with a few very separate accounts.
We set my mom up with a few accounts to insulate her money from those looking to grab it. One account that gets used for most things is kept starved so there's just enough money in it to cover bills and taking us kids out for lunch when we visit. The family trust account is completely separate for legal reasons. Mom's savings account is not accessible online, doesn't provide overdraft for anything and doesn't have a debit card attached. That was a bunch of work when her bank got bought out by another bank that doesn't understand the needs of older people. My mom like the people at her bank and the branch is just across the road. She can get there in her golf cart so that's a bonus too. When she needs to shovel money from one account into another, she whirrs over there and does it in-person. I keep her updated on all of the most popular scams and she's good at spotting them as well. Gift cards? Not a chance. Texts from us kids needing emergency funds? We don't need no stinkin' text. Besides, we have cards to access the trust if we need to (although that impacts our shares so we don't unless there's a pandemic or something).
Not combining financial doings into a house of cards is key. Convenience isn't a factor and getting money out should take at least a little work for security reasons. When taking roads trips, I have cash on hand to cover expenses to at least turn around and come home without using plastic. At home, I have cash on hand to last a week of normal. If things go to shit, I'd economize a lot and stretch that out. When the main internet provider is down, almost nobody can process cards in town. Cash works all of the time at stores that don't have to close when the power goes out.
"I find it hilarious getting all those emails for banks I have never used (well I used to, they seem to have dried up now along with the Nigerian Princes millio"
It comes and goes in waves. It's been quiet for me lately, but the scams will pick up before too long with new window dressing. The power company is still putting notices in the bills (yes, I get paper bills) about "representatives" showing up and saying the account is overdue so buy loads of gift cards and log into a web site with almost the same name. They have to keep on reminding people that nobody is going to show up in person and they don't accept gift cards as payment. I would hope by now that at the first mention of gift cards, people should be thinking "scam".
Who won’t have the heft or financial resources to be anything other than dependant on others to run their financial systems.
Just have some redundancy in your finances, and a few pounds/dollars/euros in your glove box and a Tesco Gift Card for some essentials if you can.
"Resolved: system issue impacting deposits, payments and transfers
"Valued customer,
"We wanted to provide you with an important update regarding the service disruption impacting Capital One, which resulted in delays in the processing of some electronic payments and transfers (ACH).
"This was due to a technical issue at a third-party service provider that delayed timely processing of some banking transactions and impacted your ability to bank online with us. Rest assured, it was not related to fraud or the work of bad actors attempting to access our system. Your Capital One Bank accounts remain secure.
"This issue is now resolved and impacted systems are restored. We sincerely apologize for the disruption and any impact on your ability to access certain Capital One services. We also understand how frustrating this situation may have been, and we’re committed to making it right."
For what it's worth, this customer's account sent a scheduled ETF payment last Thursday, and received a scheduled direct deposit on Friday. Many other people, obviously, fared far worse.
"This was due to a technical issue at a third-party service provider that delayed timely processing of some banking transactions and impacted your ability to bank online with us. Rest assured, it was not related to fraud or the work of bad actors attempting to access our system. Your Capital One Bank accounts remain secure."
Nice to know, but you are just as dead from friendly fire as from the perceived enemy.
Every person holding a Capitol One account in the US should file a formal complaint with the Comptroller of the Currency. I once received a very large check in settlement of a real estate sale, deposited it in my then bank, and proceeded to pay the IRS, car payment, credit card payments, etc. A week later, I start to get notices of non-payment, bounced check, or delinquency! My bank (now defunct) held the check "because of suspicious activity" but did not notify me or explain why. I went to the issuing bank of the large check and complained, where they told me this wasn't the first time they had heard of such with the bank in question, and to contact this Comptroller of the Currency, a federal office I did not know existed. I called them, they faxed (yeah, it was a while ago) a complaint form, which I completed and faxed back.
WOW!! Couple of days later, the offending bank sent a letter stating "they had now cleared the check, and what could they do to persuade the Comptroller to close the case?" I said I wanted them to write a letter of explanation and apology to every one of my creditors, stating that I paid the creditors in good faith that the funds were available and to ask each of them to waive any penalty that I had incurred. I wanted a separate letter to each creditor, and a copy sent to me for my files, all sent by certified letter with a signature required for delivery (I didn't trust my cell phone provider any better than this bank, heh). When I received proof of delivery of each of the letters, I would deem my case closed, not before. They complied with alacrity, so I closed the case.
The CPFB should require Capitol One to credit $200. per account (not per customer, PER ACCOUNT) to every account they hold. It has to HURT to make them take notice. The big companies won't notice the money, but individuals who got dinged late fees or such will need it.
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