NAB corrects payments blunder in a day

At some stage on Friday night, National Australia Bank resolved its payment processing blunder from Thursday night, but the bank still suffered a barrage of disdainful public commentary that undermines the tenor of its latest, elaborate, marketing campaign that invites customers to "breakup" with other banks.

Some affected customers, denied their pay, welfare benefits or business payments on Friday asserted, on social media, that they are planning to break up with NAB.

The exact cause of the processing snafu is not clear, though it appears to share some features with a similar two-day episode in late November 2010. This took NAB nine weeks to fully rectify.

Last year, and last week, NAB blamed the issues on "corrupted files", but the cause looks to be mistaken or out-of-sequence procedures, and poor supervision by line management during the crucial batch processing of payments early in the evening.

Contract and offshore suppliers to the bank are copping the blame.

Given the severity of the November payment processing failure, national media - as well as social media platforms - played up last week's similar failure, even though NAB managed to overcome the issues in a day.

The commentary from customers also suggests that NAB has not managed to compensate all people affected by the November failure, for instance through the reversal of late payment fees (in many cases applied by other banks to their customers).

The bank is making promises of compensation, including to customers of other banks, on this occasion as well.

Deputy chief executive Michael Ullmer told the Australian Centre for Financial Studies panel on Thursday (at the same time NAB's batch-processing of payments was going sour) that "bank CEOs have to understand that reputation is critical to shareholder value... reputation is absolutely fundamental to the bottom line."