After over 40 hours of downtime, BPI's banking network is finally coming back online. What they term as electronic channels - ATMs, online banking, etc) have been mostly offline during this period while they addressed a strange batch error that cause older transactions to post multiple times, resulting in negative balances for some and ridiculously large balances for others. It has been a difficult period with tempers running high and BPI's social media channels and call center being slammed with complaints.
People who know me generally know I'm a pretty loyal BPI customer. They've been generally good to me and I actually like their in-branch queuing system and I love their Express Online web services. And the few times bad things have happened, their customer service team has been quick to take steps to rectify things. And I feel that's what's really important here - how these institutions respond to problems and they do to make up for things when they have accountability or blame.
This most recent crisis may be over but the conversations around it aren't. I've done my best to remain calm during this entire debacle but I'm sure that many other customers are now waiting for BPI's next moves in this process. At bare minimum I think we all deserve a more detailed explanation of what happened beyond this being some sort of a glitch. And we also need an action plan or committment of sorts that steps are being taken or have been taken to prevent this sort of widespread data confusion to happen again.
Lastly, BPI's PR team is going to have to work double time to repair the damage to their reputation because of this incident. Some sort of token of appreciation for all customers would be cool too but I doubt that would be a financially viable action. But we'll see what they do over the course of the next few days and weeks.
In the meantime, I think I'm going to head out for a BPI ATM field trip and maybe some unnecessary food to celebrate this somewhat return to capitalist normalcy. I've already paid my credit card bills and such but I'd still like to have cash on hand again.
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