System upgrade delay at Equity Bank hurts customers’ business

A system upgrade by Equity Bank paralysed the business of its customers for two days, as they could neither withdraw nor deposit money from its Automatic Teller Machines and banking halls.

The bank explained that the operation was intended to migrate data to a new server.

Although at the time of going to press some terminals had resumed operations, the outage was a major concern to its customers across the country.

Of concern to the close to four million account holders, was the lack of communication on the upgrade.

Most commercial banks would normally alert their customers of such action through press notices early enough.

“What made it difficult for them to communicate to us,” said one customer, who called the newsroom to complain of the service outage.

Sources close to the bank’s operations indicated that the migration was initially supposed to be carried out at the weekend.

It is still not clear what caused the delay and subsequent disruption of service.

The bank’s staff, too, were in the dark of the planned migration

However, a short message service from the bank was sent to customers on Tuesday apologising for the interruption.

Normal service resumed

“Dear member, we apologize for service interruptions as we upgraded our IT systems over the weekend. It took longer than planned. Normal services have now resumed,” read the text message.

With huge transactions across networks, technology is now a core banking procedure with regular upgrades. Equity Bank has been installing cutting edge technology to measure up with its large customer base, the latest being the Europay-Mastercard-VISA (EMV) Technology in all its ATMs.

Similar malfunctions have hit other commercial banks in the past where upgrades took longer than anticipated.

In July, Barclays Bank carried a near similar upgrade that it indicated was in line with a global re-platforming initiative that was to standardise all Barclays operations worldwide.