Prolonged payments pain at NAB

The failure of a second file batch from Thursday night's payments, and the confused response to the Wednesday failure, continue to create headaches for NAB operational staff at the start of the working week.

Yesterday afternoon NAB advised customers that payments and transactions scheduled for Thursday had been processed.

By early evening NAB revised that advice, making it clear payments due from Wednesday were available "in most cases".

This later update removed some confused language from the afternoon advice that stated that payments due Friday "had been processed, but transactions from Friday were still to be completed."

NAB also made clear that "some scheduled bill payments and transactions via internet banking for 26 November are still be to completed."

The bank said it was was working to process these later transactions "as soon as possible".

Such is the demand on resources that for a time yesterday evening NAB's internet banking services were not accessible. As services returned, the bank advised that "some account balances are not displaying".

Centrelink put the number of affected customers at close to a quarter of a million. Payroll customers and business customers would lift that considerably, so a million customers or more have experienced disrupted payments from NAB.

NAB's response to the failure of its core computing system included opening one branch in five on Saturday, as well as a handful on Sunday, extending the hours of its call centre, and developing a strategy to deal with angry customers.

Besides opening additional branches on Saturday and  Sunday, NAB had to cut call times and extend the operating of its 1000-person contact centre after receiving a usual day's quota of calls in the first 30 minutes of Thursday. NAB executive general manager Sam Plowman described it as a "day from hell."

The online site also ran slow, as customers attempted to check whether their expected payments had arrived in their accounts - many of them concerned about late fees that they may incur if their accounts have insufficient funds to make scheduled payments.