ANZ Bank says it is considering technical improvements to its national card payments processing platform following a sequence of outages last week.
The bank was inundated with complaints from thousands of marooned customers on Wednesday and Saturday after its card systems went into meltdown.
The outages meant that customers holding ANZ-issued debit and credit cards were unable to complete payments at retail outlets across the country for at least three hours on Wednesday afternoon.
Customers were also unable to settle transactions made with online retailers during the Wednesday outage.
The technical problems returned early on Saturday afternoon, with cardholders reporting on social media that they were unable to transact for several hours. ANZ maintains that the Saturday outage affected customers for less than hour.
“Due to a technical fault, we experienced some disruptions to our credit and debit card transactions for a couple of hours on Wednesday morning and again for a short period on Saturday afternoon,” an ANZ spokesperson said.
“This was incredibly frustrating for our customers who were affected by this issue and we apologies for that poor experience.
“Our technical teams have resolved the matter and services have remained stable since Saturday afternoon.”
ANZ Bank has closed more than 450 branches since 2017 and is under mounting pressure to improve the reliability of its digital banking platforms.
According to data collated by the Reserve Bank of Australia, ANZ was the most outage-prone provider of electronic banking services in the December quarter.
Amended outage data supplied to the RBA show that ANZ’s mobile and online channels were out of action for more than 28 hours in the three months to the end of December compared to less than six hours at Commonwealth Bank.
Payments research house QI Insights has identified ANZ – along with AMP Bank and Rabobank – as the most outage prone Australian banking providers since the middle of last year.
The bank came in for heavy criticism after the latest string of outages, with hundreds of customers claiming the ANZ call centre was slow or could not respond to their requests for information.
On Saturday, one frustrated customer told the DownDetector Australian website that online service staff had advised him to use cash for purchases because they did not know when the outage would be resolved:
“Hi everyone, I did get to speak with ANZ after a long wait at 2.35. They have no idea when the system will be back, and I think it's a national problem. They have no sensible suggestion other than use cash or a different card, as if people wouldn't do this if it's a choice for them.”
Other customers from Queensland, NSW, Victoria and South Australia told DownDetector on Saturday they were stranded at supermarket checkouts and petrol stations with no means of payment.
“My husband has tried to use his credit card for food and petrol. All declined. ANZ won't take any calls. Terrible.”
The ANZ spokesperson said the bank was considering technical upgrades to reduce the risk of further outages to the cards platform and improvements to customer service.
“We are currently exploring a number of improvements which aim to reduce the likelihood of a scenario like this occurring again, including how we can better support our customers during challenges like this,” the spokesperson said.