NAB customers hit by fast payments glitch

The National Australia Bank has been hit by another payments glitch with customers unable to use its fast payments service that hangs off the New Payments Platform (NPP).

The bank acknowledged the issue on social mid-Thursday morning, telling customer that while fast payments were hit, they could still “make regular payments”.

We’re aware of an issue impacting Fast Payments in NAB Connect and NAB Internet and Mobile Banking. Customers can still make regular payments. We’re sorry for the inconvenience and working to fix this as soon as possible.

— NAB (@NAB) July 4, 2019

It is understood the glitch stalled outbound transactions for NAB customers attempting to send funds to other accounts via the NPP.

The bank reported that the problems were solved about 1.20pm.

The incident comes as the NPP continues to ratchet up pressure on banks to plug into its hub to offer all bank customers near real-time and data rich transactions including potentially fining participants that don’t get a wriggle on.

At the same time payments regulator the Reserve Bank of Australia is taking a hard line on the bank outage front through a crackdown that mandates standardised incident reporting parameters to prevent banks from seeking to hide minimise the extent of service failures.

Lawyers are salivating at the prospect of stronger regulatory action because it opens the door for them to chase financial compensation claims on behalf of outage-affected businesses, potentially through class actions.

The issue is still red hot for the RBA, with the central bank’s head of financial system, sssistant governor Michele Bullock publicly blasting institutions over a 40 percent spike in incidents in 2018 to take outages to their worst level in five years in terms of downtime.

According to the RBA’s monitoring, the total duration of retail payments outages in hours as clocked-up a whopping 1838 hours in 2018 compared to just 824 hours in 2017, and 811 hours in 2016.

The average length of outages also soared, jumping to 6.2 hours in 2018, compared to 3.9 hours in 2017 and 3.2 hours in 2016.

Bank sources said on Thursday morning the NAB’s latest incident appeared confined to that institution and that fast payment services were recovering.

NAB has not yet said what caused the incident.