Banks spend billions on tech, so why are outages still a thing?

Do you get the impression that online banking outages are a pretty common part of the financial landscape these days? You’re not imagining it.

Westpac and the Commonwealth Bank have been the most recent banks to suffer high-profile tech glitches: Westpac’s app was down for periods over three consecutive days last week and an error at CBA last weekend meant some customers were charged twice for transactions, while others couldn’t log into the app.

And they’re far from alone - all the major banks have had plenty of outages over the years, as have their smaller rivals.

Banking apps and fast payment services are at higher risk of outages than other payment services.Credit: Glenn Hunt

As we rely more on digital money and less on cash, these types of tech meltdowns are more frustrating for customers and more disruptive to the economy. So a few years ago, the Reserve Bank sought to push the banks to lift their game.

Has this made much difference? While outages are undoubtedly a tricky problem to solve, a recent article from the RBA’s Bulletin suggests there’s plenty of room for improvement.

People basically expect to be able to access their money 24/7 these days, and this has meant that banking outages are more noticeable than when it took up to three days for payments to settle. At the same time, the systems that allow us to have around-the-clock banking have become more complicated as new features have been added, meaning there’s more that can go wrong.

Last decade, the RBA noticed outages were becoming more frequent. So in 2021 it intervened, requiring banks to publish consistent figures on how reliable their services had been across areas such as branches, ATMs, websites, apps and card payments. It’s a classic economist response to a problem – if you publicise the data, it should encourage banks to compare themselves to others and improve.

So, how have things changed in the past few years?

Last week, the RBA published an update of what these figures tell us across the entire industry. As covered by The Mandarin, the findings suggest we still have a real problem with banking outages.

To be fair, banks’ systems are working the vast majority of the time. Across all the categories of retail banking payments, the average reliability was 99.8 per cent. The total number of service outages has also been gradually falling since 2021.

However, there’s a catch. Even though the number of outages has been trending down, the amount of time that banking systems are down has not really fallen. As the RBA puts it: “The total duration of outages has not decreased alongside the fall in the overall volume of outages.”

The March quarter this year was the lowest yet for the number of outages, the RBA says, but not much different in terms of the number of hours lost to outages. “This insight suggests that the overall impact of service outages has not decreased, despite institutions taking action to reduce the number of incidents,” the RBA says.

In other words – there’s still plenty of work to do in making banking systems less outage-prone.

The other problem is that banking outages are a bigger issue in fast-growing parts of the industry.

The RBA says the services most likely to be affected by outages are banking apps (the main way people do their banking these days) and fast payments (also growing in popularity).

Banks have, of course, been tacitly encouraging people to do more and more banking on apps, while removing old-school branches and ATMs. The industry – including the RBA itself – has also promoted instant payments.

So, of course punters notice when their bank’s app is down, or they can’t make a real-time payment. And they make their frustration known online, and this quickly finds its way into the mainstream media.

As to why outages occur, the RBA says the leading cause is “issues with third parties,” alongside problems with “change management” in banks – a polite way of saying there’s been a stuff-up with a major change, such as an IT upgrade.

So, how damaging is all this to banks’ reputations with customers and investors?

In theory, a massive outage could inflict a serious hit on a bank’s reputation and business. The Optus meltdown last year was followed by the CEO’s resignation, a parliamentary inquiry, and plenty of brand damage.

However, experienced bank-watchers say the sorts of outages we’ve seen in banking haven’t had a major impact on the banks’ underlying businesses.

MST Marquee analyst Brian Johnson says he hasn’t seen outages lead to any substantial change in a bank’s customer numbers, even if it might make sense for people to manage the risk of outages by keeping accounts with multiple banks.

“You would have to think it’s got some kind of brand consequence,” he says. “And you would have to think that a sensible person would split where their money is.”

At the very least, the ongoing impact from outages is a sign of how banks can’t afford to take their eye off the many digital risks they confront – as well as the more obvious financial risks, such as borrowers struggling to repay debts.

Indeed, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) last year released a standard that requires banks, insurers and super funds to better manage “operational risks” that could include disruptions to areas outside banks’ control, such as electricity or telecommunications failures. The standard comes into force next year – and APRA member Therese McCarthy has said the standard is meant to “light a fire under our regulated entities so they act with the heightened urgency this issue requires.”

Banks are among the biggest spenders on technology in the country, forking out billions between them, and regularly spruiking their technological prowess. But despite their deep pockets, don’t expect them to declare victory over outages soon.

This is an area where banks will rightly remain under pressure to lift their game.

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