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Read the online-banking service agreement closely. Most banks will pay any customer late fees that result from a glitch.

It may help you avoid trouble with creditors if there’s a glitch. If you set up online bill-paying, be sure to get an email or other record confirming the pending payment. Track your account transactions daily so that you can catch a glitch quickly. If it’s important enough I will call in, but I would rather be able to view my accounts or 40 By then I just give up and try again later in the day. “If I do post something on Facebook about my connection issue, they are quick to respond,” she said in an email to the Sentinel. Rose Lejiste, the Fairwinds member who complained on Facebook, said the credit union has been responsive, though not always effective in solving her problem. Consumers have come to expect it to be available, but when it isn’t, it often doesn’t appear to be much they can do about it.” “That really is the case when it comes to online and mobile banking. “We often talk about the fact that the use of technology usually precedes the laws that govern it,” said Suzanne Martindale, a staff lawyer for Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports. Although there are rules for reporting and handling cyberattacks, the same rules don’t necessarily apply to technical outages such as in the Fairwinds case. The credit union covers any late fees or other expenses that may be incurred by service outages.Ĭonsumer advocates say there should be more regulatory oversight of computer outages and how financial institutions respond to them. “They’ve been going in the right direction in terms of their action plan and what has to happen over the next six months to ensure the stability of our system.”ĭespite the outages, Lai said, there have been no reports of privacy breaches, account overdrafts or other financial fallout for Fairwinds members, many of whom have used telephone banking instead during the disruption, he said. Based on Fairwinds’ contract alone, Digital Insight has incurred thousands of dollars in penalties because of the online-banking disruption, according to Lai. The vendor’s clients include more than 1,000 banks and credit unions across the country. Other Digital Insight clients “had precisely the problems we had,” Charlie Lai, Fairwinds’ computer-systems chief, said last week. The company said NCR and Digital Insight are working with Intuit “to ensure service availability” for its clients. We are leveraging all of our resources around the clock to bring resolution to the service disruptions.”ĭigital Insight officials, however, said the problem was caused not by the migration but by network-component failures at Intuit’s data center in Quincy, Wash. “Fairwinds is responsible for the level of service you receive. “The service disruptions that have occurred as a result of the data center migration are unacceptable,” Fairwinds said in a Feb. But as banks and credit unions encourage customers to use online and mobile banking instead of traditional branches, outages become a bigger inconvenience for customers. Last month, SunTrust’s online-bill-pay service was temporarily disrupted by a vendor’s system error.Įxactly how many outages have occurred is unknown because unless they’ve been hacked, financial institutions generally don’t have to notify regulators when website or mobile services are down. In late 2013 alone, disruptions struck Wells Fargo, Citibank and HSBC Bank, affecting hundreds of thousands of customers in Florida and elsewhere. Is it server issues? This is getting to be so annoying.”įairwinds’ problem is one of the latest in a growing number of outages that have hit financial institutions big and small in recent years, experts say. “This is like the umpteenth time in the last week. “Down again? What is going on over there?” member Rose Lejiste of Orlando asked on Fairwinds’ Facebook page in late February. Fairwinds Credit Union’s online banking turned into an on-again, off-again system for more than a month recently, frustrating customers for hours at a time as they tried to access their accounts and conduct transactions.