Black days in payments for Australia Post

A critical piece of payments infrastructure has been sidelined for days, raising questions over the management effectiveness of Australia Post, two subsidiaries of which are at the centre of the strife. More ominously, as the organisation braces for radical restructure in order to shape up a digital future, it's been the technical side that has gone downwards almost unnoticed.

SecurePay and DirectOne - both internet payments gateways - have been disabled or available infrequently at best over the past week.

The Twitter feed for SecurePay first mentions "a service degradation and … in the process of recovering our services" late on the morning of Tuesday, April 28.

A spokesman for NAB  (the principal banker to SecurePay) put it earlier, writing in an email that: "customers have been experiencing intermittent service with NAB Transact since Monday 27 April."
 
NAB said it was working with SecurePay to restore services as a priority.
 
Late on Wednesday SecurePay tweeted that "most services have resumed." Australia Post repeated this line when contacted yesterday.

Michelle Skehan, media manager for Post, wrote in an email that it was "confident the majority of services have now been restored."

 Skehan said Post was "working closely with the remaining impacted customers."

But customers contacting Banking Day yesterday said they remained unable to process credit card payments.

Australia Post uses SecurePay as its own gateway for all "card not present" transactions made through its new digital mailbox.

Australia Post launched Australia Post Digital Mailbox late last year as part of a A$2 billion investment in digitising its network.