UK charity bank CAF branded a 'disaster' after platform migration goes wrong A UK bank serving charities has come under fire from customers unable to log in or make transactions on its new online platform. CAF Bank, owned by the Charities Aid Foundation, has migrated to the cloud-based Temenos Transact (formerly T24) after a project lasting a number of years. The new banking platform launched on June …
1,000 meter view but sounds like there were problems at project scoping. They didn't invite or invite a useful number of users to be stakeholders, or at least survey users to make sure they got the requirements near what their clients wanted. Not sure about the UK, but in the US Quickbooks powers a good majority of non-profit book keeping.
I don’t know what was meant by “ Chief among the complaints was poor integration with QuickBooks”. Given the old CAF bank system only have really basic integration. I gave up getting the payments gateway working - maintining a manual integration, and the bank reconciliation required the CAF CSV to be edited into the format QB would import.
I would have thought Temenos Transact had good and proven integrations with the major accounting packages.
Whatever they did; it doesn't appear to have been enough.
Many years ago when I worked for a bank, I was involved in testing a major release and knowing how important a particular task was to my own office, I tested it thoroughly.
On go live date, it didn't work. At all.
So while I accept the statement "Whatever they did; it doesn't appear to have been enough.", sometimes, it is enough but it's something else that lets it down.
Posted anonymously as it was a long time ago and a different bank and I want to spare blushes.
It could be that they didn't actually know how the customers used the product.
With one product I was involved in, you could set a time out value tenths of a second. One customer used our product because the standard software only had a time out value in seconds!
They didn't use 80% of our product.
I remember going to customers and thinking "you are doing what! with it" - and going back to tell the test teams.
From talking with local charities it seems this was the real cause of the “ Customers also complained they were logged out of the system and left waiting for hours trying to access a support desk by phone.” problem.
Basically, they didn’t simply transfer credentials, they required the lead account holder (named individual) to call the support desk to re validate their credentials and so gain access to the new account. Naturally, with a large number of accounts being transferred on the same day, the support desk got overwehelmed. It took one of my charities 2 hours on hold to get through to a person. Having gained access they haven’t encountered other problems.
It is perhaps a little concerning ElReg doesn’t seem to have dug any deeper to improve clarity of reporting.
Don't know if the problem lies with the bank or with Temenos. Long ago I worked for a bank migrating their systems to the Temenos Globus platform, and what a disaster that was - very little support from Temenos with their 'technical' people seriously lacking knowledge. I believe it ended up with the bank cancelling the project and choosing another vendor's platform.
I suspect a bit of both. CAF isn't a "rich" bank with lots of people and capital it can splash around. So things probably took longer to test etc.
As for the QB integrations (remember there are several differing versions and implementations...), that was problematic (and basic) on their old platform, so this one should have been fully tested on a selected sample of CAF customers, before a largescale switchover.
They were undoubtedly counting on the "goodwill" of their customers, and a bunch of IT "volunteers" to get things done.
It would seem that goodwill is in short supply when people can't get to their money and pay their bills.
Charities work for a lot of things. Feeding people, clothing them, even finding appartments to live in. Banking is not an area where charity applies. Goodwill doesn't pay your mortgages or your rent, you need cold, hard cash to do that.
Plus, you may be a charity, but if you include the word "bank", I believe you should have signed up to the banking charter of your country.
Banking is serious business (except, of course, if you're talking billionnaire banking, which is a crapshoot but hey, $BigMoney).
A. They are a fully fledged bank
B. They've full time paid staff.
C. They offer banking services to charities.
The difference between them and the more normal kind of bank is they're not creaming off billions to pay bonuses for sheer luck to chinless public school idiots who gamble with other people's money and they loan to charities, social enterprises etc. on decent terms.
"The difference between them and the more normal kind of bank is they're not creaming off billions to pay bonuses"
I wouldn't be 100% certain of that. Some charities pay a lot and there are ways to shift money undercover - e.g., USAID, which wasn't really an aid company. OK can't be billions as too small.
Perhaps they can get AI to thesaurise some popular music to play whilst victims wait for an AI chatbot team leader to direct them to a chatbot customised to ignore complaints.
Everything is shit now. [Can I trademark that phrase? #EISN?] Limit your contact with tech to the bare minimum. Do as much as you can yourself on your own offline hardware using your standalone software, yout own offline storage and back ups, or paper. Avoid the Cloud, apps and anything with AI or Recall in it.
Tech used to increase our joy, our functionality and empower us. Now it does the exact opposite. Expect things to get worse and you will not be disappointed.
Above all, do not rely on tech/'digital'. Not for your cash, your business or anything remotely important. It will fail you.
It's greed and corruption. Has become systemic. Well it always was but has now reached a new pinnacle. I recall when corporations would spend a lot of money on staff but they slowly reduced to the point where you had to fight to get your expenses paid. Even fight for permission to attend client meetings. As if you want to sit on trains and planes for hours. Wasn't helped by a lot of yanks seeing business travel as prestigious while most of the world sees it as a pain.
" after years of planning, preparing, and testing"
'It took years to be this bad' is a weird flex
"The vast majority of our customers are online, with thousands of payments being made and received every day."
That seems like a really low number of payments for a bank that supports 14k charities.
I know of people who are trustees of multiple charities who got sms messages with password reset codes but nothing to say what account each code is for. This resulted in accounts being locked out.
There is also no compensation for the lost time in learning new banking web interface that gives no immediate benfits to the clients.
Speaking as a user, one of the main problems we've faced is processing bulk payments (which we mainly use for the payroll). I could enter them myself but they didn't show up on my colleague's account for the required second signature. Meanwhile the money was placed in pending but the transaction couldn't be cancelled – we had to wait a week for the pending payments to time out and be released. And in the end we had to process salary payments individually. Just as well that we only have 13 members of staff and enough cash available to cover a second payroll.
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