HSBC e-payments system starts to resemble Terminal 5
The Bank, slammed by Financial Union Unite for shutting down its payments processing centre in Livingstone, Scotland, with the loss of 164 jobs: failed In March to renew its digital certificate, causing customers to see a message saying that its site could not be verified as secure; and made news by losing a computer disc containing confidential personal details (down to smoker level!) of around 370,000 UK life assurance customers, is now trying to sort out its Secure ePayments system.
HSBC's online Secure ePayments application crashed earlier this week leaving retailers unable to process card transactions for the second time in a fortnight. The latest outage comes less than two weeks after a similar problem left customers unable to process transactions over the last weekend of March. It is thought that the e-payments platform also crashed in January, leaving merchants unable to process transactions for a day.
Retailers have flocked to online message boards to complain about the amazing lack of communication from HSBC about the situation and calling for compensation.
One customer posted an e-mail from HSBC on a discussion board in which the bank claims the problem relates to its databases. The e-mail says HSBC had suspended the Secure ePayments service and the earliest it will be restored today. In a recorded message, HSBC said that its application developers and database teams worked throughout the night with its technology suppliers to fix the problem, so far without success. It said it was unable to say as yet when services would be restored, and extended "profound apologies for the ongoing disruption"
Attempts to contact HSBC for an update on the situation however have drawn a lack of response to the requests from both customers and the press. The Register quotes on customer: "When contacting the support line this time around, I was connected after a long wait to their call centre in India, where I was told that the service had been down since around 5pm, that they hoped it would be up soon... The site is still down now. The service levels from HSBC are absolutely terrible."
Sources: http://www.finextra.com
http://www.theregister.co.uk