Despite huge investments in information technology (IT) infrastructure, incessant downtime has become a norm in the Nigerian banking industry, BusinessDay investigations have shown.
Hardly any week passes without banks experiencing downtime and connectivity problems either between the head offices and branches or between banks and the clearing house, leaving customers with bitter experiences as average of two to three hours are spent anytime they want to access cash or transfer funds.
The major part of yesterday witnessed downtime as most customers were stranded at most of bank branches visited by BusinessDay in Lagos.
A source in one of the affected financial institutions told BusinessDay that connectivity issues from the bank’s gateway to the clearing house were the sole reason for the downtime.
Consequently, there was heavy traffic as some of their customers could not get accounts confirmed and make third-party withdrawals. One of the customers at a tier-one bank who tried to confirm a number of cheques with the bank could not do so because of system breakdown. “The server is down,” said one of the bank’s staff.
Another customer said, “I want to deposit cheque into somebody’s account with the bank, up till now the money has not left my account to that account.”
Further investigations showed that the development is providing auspicious time for some bank staff to perpetrate frauds and forgeries as such cases are usually written off to avoid sanctions by the CBN, while the culprits are dismissed quietly.
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My own experience was on using pos at a shoe shop my account was febited twice thank god to d owner of d shop who called my no d 3rd day Dat her. Account was credited twice so she paid me d excess. Within Dat same period i used m'y banks atm to cash money in another banks atm monet was nit dispensed yet it debited m'y account . Upon report i was told to fait for 15 working days . Days almost one month as there was two days public holiday. Eventually both debited transactions were reversed,same day!
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