Business

Bank of Ireland’s regular tech crashes leave it on edge of customer badlands

The bank’s website and app crashed, yet again, on Monday

Bank of Ireland insists its app is available most of the time but it appears to be crashing with increasing regularity. File Photograph: Cyril Byrne/The Irish Times

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Tue Jun 14 2022 - 05:00

Luckily for Bank of Ireland (BoI), the latest in a series of flat-out failures of its banking app and website, which happened on Monday, didn’t overlap with any major customer event such as last month’s outage that prevented thousands of Bruce Springsteen fans from booking tickets for his Dublin show.

The Springsteen fiasco brought an avalanche of negative headlines for the bank — never mess with ageing Bruce fans. But this week’s major outage was just annoying and inconvenient for the hundreds of thousands of BoI customers who were effectively locked out of their accounts for much of the day. The bank’s app and website was down for all users from midmorning on Monday until late afternoon, preventing bills from being paid and transactions from closing.

When the bank recently announced the departure of its outgoing chief executive, Francesca McDonagh, chairman Patrick Kennedy lauded her for turning BoI into a “digitally-enabled, customer-focused” bank. She shut more than 100 of its branches and invested in its digital operations. Yet BoI’s everyday banking app appears still to crash regularly, as any frustrated customer will tell you.

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When asked how many times its app has crashed over the past year, BoI did not directly respond. But a cursory glance at its comments page on the Downdetector website, where most consumer IT outages are contemporaneously noted and customers share feedback, tells its own story. The BoI app has failed plenty in recent times. The bank insists its app has been available outside of “scheduled maintenance” periods for 99.5 per cent of the time over the past 12 months. That still leaves open the possibility that it crashes unexpectedly for close to 3½ hours each month.

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A failure to solve problems with its technology platforms between 2008 and 2015 led to a €24.5 million fine being levied on the bank by regulators. BoI announced in March it intends to hire 100 new technology staff. This was on top of 130 technology hires in 2021. Clearly there is more to do.

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