Fairwinds Credit Union’s online banking turned into an on-again, off-again system for more than a month recently, frustrating customers for hours at a time as they tried to access their accounts and conduct transactions.
“Down again? What is going on over there?” member Rose Lejiste of Orlando asked on Fairwinds’ Facebook page in late February. “This is like the umpteenth time in the last week. Is it server issues? This is getting to be so annoying.”
Fairwinds’ problem is one of the latest in a growing number of outages that have hit financial institutions big and small in recent years, experts say. In late 2013 alone, disruptions struck Wells Fargo, Citibank and HSBC Bank, affecting hundreds of thousands of customers in Florida and elsewhere. Last month, SunTrust’s online-bill-pay service was temporarily disrupted by a vendor’s system error.
Exactly how many outages have occurred is unknown because unless they’ve been hacked, financial institutions generally don’t have to notify regulators when website or mobile services are down. But as banks and credit unions encourage customers to use online and mobile banking instead of traditional branches, outages become a bigger inconvenience for customers.
Fairwinds, the biggest credit union based in Orlando, with more than 155,000 members, scrambled to help customers by reaching out through email, Facebook and its 24-7 call center. Fairwinds officials blamed the problem on a third-party vendor, which says it is making progress on a permanent solution, and the system appears to have improved this month.
The purported cause of Fairwinds’ problem — something techies call “system migration” — is a familiar one in the banking industry. Although many recent outages have been triggered by cyberattacks on big banks, most problems have less sinister origins, according to Keynote Systems Inc., a California company that tracks outages.
More than 70 percent result from computer changes, traffic overloads, upgrades gone awry and other technical issues, the company said.
Fairwinds said its website problems began in early January after Digital Insight, the company that manages its online and mobile banking, was sold to NCR Corp. According to Fairwinds, its troubles occurred after technical changes in Digital Insight’s computer servers, which were housed by its former owner, Intuit Corp.
“The service disruptions that have occurred as a result of the data center migration are unacceptable,” Fairwinds said in a Feb. 12 email to members. “Fairwinds is responsible for the level of service you receive. We owe you better service. We are leveraging all of our resources around the clock to bring resolution to the service disruptions.”
Digital Insight officials, however, said the problem was caused not by the migration but by network-component failures at Intuit’s data center in Quincy, Wash. The company said NCR and Digital Insight are working with Intuit “to ensure service availability” for its clients.
Other Digital Insight clients “had precisely the problems we had,” Charlie Lai, Fairwinds’ computer-systems chief, said last week. The vendor’s clients include more than 1,000 banks and credit unions across the country. Based on Fairwinds’ contract alone, Digital Insight has incurred thousands of dollars in penalties because of the online-banking disruption, according to Lai.
“They’ve been going in the right direction in terms of their action plan and what has to happen over the next six months to ensure the stability of our system.”
Despite the outages, Lai said, there have been no reports of privacy breaches, account overdrafts or other financial fallout for Fairwinds members, many of whom have used telephone banking instead during the disruption, he said. The credit union covers any late fees or other expenses that may be incurred by service outages.
Consumer advocates say there should be more regulatory oversight of computer outages and how financial institutions respond to them. Although there are rules for reporting and handling cyberattacks, the same rules don’t necessarily apply to technical outages such as in the Fairwinds case.
“We often talk about the fact that the use of technology usually precedes the laws that govern it,” said Suzanne Martindale, a staff lawyer for Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports. “That really is the case when it comes to online and mobile banking. Consumers have come to expect it to be available, but when it isn’t, it often doesn’t appear to be much they can do about it.”
Rose Lejiste, the Fairwinds member who complained on Facebook, said the credit union has been responsive, though not always effective in solving her problem.
“If I do post something on Facebook about my connection issue, they are quick to respond,” she said in an email to the Sentinel. “But that doesn’t help me get connected. By then I just give up and try again later in the day. If it’s important enough I will call in, but I would rather be able to view my accounts myself.”
rburnett@tribune.com or 407-420-5256
Online-banking tips
Track your account transactions daily so that you can catch a glitch quickly.
If you set up online bill-paying, be sure to get an email or other record confirming the pending payment. It may help you avoid trouble with creditors if there’s a glitch.
Most banks will pay any customer late fees that result from a glitch. Make sure your bank does. Read the online-banking service agreement closely.
Take notes on everything about the outage so you’ll have the facts when you contact the financial institution or file a complaint with regulators.
To file a complaint, visit the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s website at consumerfinance.gov/complaint. For credit unions, go to mycreditunion.gov.
SOURCES: Consumer Reports, Sentinel research
