NIB cards suffer ATM and point-of-sale problems

NATIONAL IRISH BANK (NIB) has said technology problems were behind the failure of its debit and credit cards at point-of-sale machines in shops and other businesses across the country yesterday.

The bank said the failure of the cards in automated teller machines (ATMs) had been rectified by last night but the problem with point-of-sale transactions “was being worked on”. It apologised “unreservedly”.

From about 3.30pm yesterday, shoppers presenting NIB cards in shops had their transactions declined, while ATMs reported service was “currently unavailable”. The failure affected use of NIB cards in the ATMs of other banks, but spokespeople for the other main banks said their services were not affected.

Phone lines were jammed with callers dialling NIB branch support call centre in Belfast. The bank has not routed customer calls directly to its branch network for some years.

In a statement last night, NIB said “as soon as the problem was identified, the network was switched to a back-up system and National Irish Bank customers are able to access their funds at the bank’s ATMs as normal now.”

Consumers’ Association of Ireland spokesman Dermot Jewell said the failure was not acceptable: “Any financial transaction where the consumer is even remotely seen as having a difficulty is extremely serious . . . What happened is just bad business and poor value for a lot of money.”