Ulster Bank Payments Debacle

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Leper

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Ulster Bank has failed the people. Social Welfare payments have been delayed. Wages have been unpaid. People on holidays abroad cannot access due monies at atms. All because Ulster Bank fell down on the job.

Why is it that our government departments, local authorities, etc are dealing with a foreign owned bank and not its "own" Irish bank which is even shedding staff?
 
Leper said:
Why is it that our government departments, local authorities, etc are dealing with a foreign owned bank and not its "own" Irish bank which is even shedding staff?
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Because individuals have their accounts with Ulster Bank. Not sure how you can blame the state for this mess
 
Leper said:
Why is it that our government departments, local authorities, etc are dealing with a foreign owned bank and not its "own" Irish bank which is even shedding staff?
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Now now this forum has no place for your prejudices, AIB or BOI could have gone down the same way just because they Irish doesn't mean to say they are immune from technical hitches.
 
Whoever is head of DR (disaster recovery) within Ulster Bank from an IT perspective will probably be kissing his/her job goodbye pretty soon.

Total disaster.

Banks (and indeed all companies) have technical problems all the time but systems are in place to ensure continunity of service.
There must have been multiple systems failures within ULB to have this type of problem that it going on for a number of days.
 
Sunny, I'm not blaming the state or its agencies for the Ulster Bank debacle. The Ulster Bank is responsible and has not been telling us the truth and now it does not know when matters will be rectified. First it was Friday (yesterday), then Saturday, then Monday, now it hasn't a clue when the matter will be cleared up. Try telling this to people in say Portugal waiting for a few bob by an atm machine for the rest of their holiday.

Cashier, I have no prejudice against anybody.

But, I cannot understand how the state and its agencies cannot use the bank it already owns instead of a bank owned by people outside of this country.

It does not make sense in my thinking how our banks are shedding staff and the state and state agencies (supported by us the taxpayer) are enhancing bank jobs abroad when they could be preventing some redundancies in Ireland.

We are advised to buy Irish by our State, but it continues not to buy Irish itself.
 
I have had various different accounts with Ulster Bank for about 12 years now including my current account. Over the yeras I have had umpteen things go wrong with these accounts. I have also had some pretty poor counter service from them as well. I have also had some excellent service from them. I have complained and I have received letters of apology and also compensation after I have asked. Thankfully I have an account in my local Credit Union where I can access cash when needed. At the moment I have two utility bills waiting to be paid and an Ulster Credit Card that needs to be paid. What has happened doesn't surprise me in the least. I get free banking from them. When that goes I will look around for the lower priced product on the market and move there, just as I look around for the deposit account paying the higher interest. I have no loyalty to them because they have no loyalty to me.

My guess is that over the next few years we might see Ulster Bank withdrawing from the Irish market.
 
Leper said:
Why is it that our government departments, local authorities, etc are dealing with a foreign owned bank.. (UB)..?
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Which government departments, local authorities etc use UB?

In this case if the employee has an account with UB then the employer (public or private sector) is obliged to deal with that bank regardless of the ownership of that bank.
 
Not only are accounts owned by individuals affected by the debacle, accounts owned by Dept of Soc Welfare who deal with Ulster Bank are affected inasmuch as nothing has been transferred to individual accounts in other banks.

The HSE deals with Ulster Bank and consequently many of its employees have not yet been paid.

But, I am still arguing that our government and government agencies should be using Irish banks especially the one that we all already own. Surely with the country's spending power through the banks a half decent rate can be worked out?

It makes a mockery of the Buy Irish Campaign supported by our government.
 
Leper said:
The HSE deals with Ulster Bank
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I read somewhere that this was organised by Mary Harney a number of years ago as a cost-saving exercise.

I can't remember where I read it or whether it was an authoritative source.

Marion
 
Marion said:
I read somewhere that this was organised by Mary Harney a number of years ago as a cost-saving exercise.

I can't remember where I read it or whether it was an authoritative source.

Marion
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I would have thought UB would have won the tender. I could be mistaken but don't think a minister can just decide what bank to use.

I'm HSE and money is appearing on my ptsb online account with mondays date, it should have appeared last thursday.
 
Would [broken link removed]have anything to do with the current problem?
 
cashier said:
Would [broken link removed]have anything to do with the current problem?
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From what I have learned so far the problem has to do with a software upgrade that was performed by recently outsourced staff in India. The fact that the staff are in India is not IMO the issue, rather that outsourced staff who are inexperienced with the system performed the work in the first place. Outsourcing works well when the systems are humming along, it's when something like this happens that things can go horribly wrong. I've worked for both in-house and consultancy/outsourcing companies myself and think that if companies can afford it at all they should keep their production systems in-house and perhaps outsource the development/test environments only (to keep the board of directors/accountants happy) as long as production-like Pre Production environments are maintained to test upgrades/releases performed by outsourced staff in the aforementioned development/test environments.

A positive note on all this is that I would imagine UB will put the ending of their free banking on the long finger ;)
 
Leper said:
.. I am still arguing that our government and government agencies should be using Irish banks especially the one that we all already own.

It makes a mockery of the Buy Irish Campaign supported by our government.
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I thought that the govenment and all public sector organisations had to follow EU procurement policies for Goods and Services? Any "Buy Irish Campaign" would be in direct conflict with such policies.

You do raise an interesting question however! Does the public sector have to tender out for provision of Bank Services? What happens in the private sector?

Finally I think its a bit unfair to potentially discriminate against UB on the grounds that it is a foreign owned bank. It was founded in the 1830's in Ireland has Ireland as the base of its operations, its RoI operations are regulated by the Central Bank and it employs thousands of Irish employees.
 
I just hope they have lost my mortgage in all the madness :)
 
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Am I wrong for hoping this might mean this bank and others might stop sending jobs to India and bring these jobs back to Ireland and the UK?
 
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