back to article RBS customers still suffering tech issues at Virgin One Account

Customers of the Virgin One Account's online bank service may be shocked to see that they have paid all their bills twice this month. But they shouldn't worry say RBS group - owners of the One Account brand - bank balances are still correct and the transactions are just showing up duplicate on online statements. A notice on …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Amazed the real explanation hasn't escaped

    If nothing else, I'm amazed that no-one at RBS has cracked and put the full explanation out here for us all to enjoy. So far, it's been conjecture and theories (albeit very plausible sounding ones) but few real facts.

    1. Blitterbug
      Happy

      Re: Amazed the real explanation hasn't escaped

      Have patience. It will come. Good news this morning also in that chief Barclays asshat Bob 'dodgy' Diamond has 'resigned'... Reap = sow etc...

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Amazed the real explanation hasn't escaped

        While I think that Bob had to go, I can't help thinking that when politicians effectively remove the CEO of a company, things don't go well... Look at RBS...

        1. James 47

          Re: Amazed the real explanation hasn't escaped

          While political pressure may have been used as an excuse, the truth is that he may have found out what shockers lie around the next few corners and decided to jump ship (not before filling his pockets of course)

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wow

    This really is the mother of all SNAFUs. No wonder Bob Diamond has gone.

    1. David Dawson

      Re: Wow

      Chief exec of barclays?

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Wow

        Not any more ......

  3. David Dawson

    I saw this on my RBS acc a few months ago

    Not virgin one, an RBS account.

    Several payments duplicated, with the balance wrong. It took the duplicates into account, and dropped me into the red.

    Had a nice chat with the bank where they told me there wasn't anything they could do until the nightly reconciliation, but this meant I couldn't take cash out of the account or pay bills that should really have been paid.

    It did clear up again the next day and I didn't think of it again.

    I'm really feeling quite unsure about RBS now.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I saw this on my RBS acc a few months ago

      At a guess (and it is a guess, based on working for financial services companies for a long time) what's happened is that the transactions coming out of your account have actually been requested twice, rather than processed twice. If this were not the case, it would likely have been all over the press at the time.

      Unusual that they didn't offer you a free temporary overdraft, that's happened with RBS when my pay didn't turn up on time once, also when the council ballsed up their council tax and took me overdrawn as well.

    2. Shonko Kid
      Pint

      "I'm really feeling quite unsure about RBS now."

      Never mind RBS, I'm feeling unsure about the whole sector!

      Perhaps now might be a good time to 'liquidize'.

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Delayed credits

    As a One Account customer I can report other problems still ongoing too . An inbound payment which arrives every Friday didn't turn up on the 22nd and was credited on Tuesday 26th. Salary payment I expected last Friday 29th still isn't there this morning (colleagues unaffected, so assuming problem is at the receiving end)...

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Delayed credits

      Don't worry, soon your transactions will be spot on as RBS and associated companies will have so few customers they'll be able to process them by hand.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Everyone join in if you know the chorus...

    HSBC do... their site has just gone for a little lie down for the past couple of hours...

  6. amanfromMars 1 Silver badge

    Somebody is making a fortune from the misfortune. Such is always the case with calamities

    And not a dicky bird of a mention of the still ongoing troubles in the public owned bank RBS which is unable to explain what is happening/has happened ..... http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/0703/breaking8.html

    Well, no mainstream news, that is, to further embarrass the government and a very dodgy industry?

  7. sugerbear

    how long can hester hold on

    Bob Diamond has made the news again so this story wont be appearing in any headlines, but given that RBS will be fined in the few weeks/monhts I wonder how long the CEO of RBS can hold on.

    I imagine there is a change freeze from now until the new year with only regulatory changes being the exception.

  8. Reg Varney

    How would anyone tell anything else was wrong?

    I've had an NatWest branded Virgin One account for a couple of years, and their website is absolutely full of stupid bugs that they do nothing to fix. For a major bank, it's a technical disgrace

    1. sabba
      Paris Hilton

      Re: How would anyone tell anything else was wrong?

      To be fair, I have used V1 for years and never had a problem. In fact I have to say I have always found their service to be exemplary. Saying that I have yet to check my account this week so I may have cause to retract the above.

      On the other hand RBS's business account management was a total nightmare. It started well but then they moved account handling out of the branches and into a centralised system at which point it all went down hill. How they managed to get so many monkeys to work for them I will never know but suffice to say my account quickly got moved away.

      Paris - well she's apparently experienced at f*#king things (up)!!

  9. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Aftershocks

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/29/surviving_it_crisis/page2.html

    "So I do expect an aftershock. Maybe a batch will be run twice (we’ve all done that – I’m just admitting it publicly), or test/debug code will be executed on the live database, or the “positive news” to senior management will have masked a problem that only gets worse until it gets fixed or RBS is shut down.

    So I’m sticking my neck out and saying that during this week something else bad will happen. I put that at about 80 per cent during this week, with about a 40 to 50 per cent chance that the consequences will leak out of RBS, making the chances about one-in-three that customers suffer more pain."

    Well done Dominic for correctly predicting this aftershock. More to come?

  10. ZoesDad

    Ulster Bank still troubled

    NatWest and RBS are at least up and running. Ulster Bank, the poor relative, shows no signs of recovery this week - The Chief Exec of RBS came to Belfast yesterday to say sorry and also said it would be early next week before they 'break the back' of the problem.

    It all begs the question - If the same system got broken which affected all three banks, then how come all three weren't fixed at the same time?

    And if you don't bank with any of these banks, you still can't be smug, because your employer, solicitor, etc may bank with them and that will really muck up your day/month.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Ulster Bank still troubled

      It takes time to get the people in and the work done. Larger businesses (Natwest and RBS) can get the work done quicker (payments/transfers processed manually etc) than the smaller ones (Virgin/Ulster). While they all use the same computers, they each need a team sitting down at them to get the work done. :D

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    trust...

    My salary from June isn't showing as a transaction, though balance looks OK ....Interesting that it appears that in my case only credits seem affected. Debits look OK...

    Has been like this since Friday.....shocking shocking

    maybe time to ditch them - but who would you turn to - they are all the same.....

  12. Rob Crawford

    The story that I have been told

    is the Ulster bank backups where faulty and they could not restore relevant data, therefore everything has had to be carried out manually.

    Of course being typical banks they have resolved things enough to now start taking direct debit payments out of my account and put me well beyond my overdraught limit.

    Maybe some day they will actually credit my account with my wages, which was transferred to them on the 22nd, as an aside I wonder who they have lent that money to in the meantime.

    They also have an aptitude of making people feel like charity cases when they have just queued for over an hour to get cash.

    If they had the decency to wear a mask it wouldn't be so bad

    1. cantankerousblogger
      Thumb Up

      Re: The story that I have been told

      I think you're right. I've heard some people have been 'paid' after a two week delay but the decimal point has been in the wrong place! I'm pretty sure they are doing the recovery process manually, as they seem to be targetting large transactions first, then smaller ones, but it still seems like an impossible task against a moving target. In Ireland, they seem to have lost all control, with reports of people being able to take pretty much any reasonable amount they like out of accounts without having to produce a payslip, with records kept manually. Ulster Bank has in effect collapsed in Ireland and RBS is forced into this kind of desperation. There are also reports of big queues as Ulster Bank customers attempt to close accounts and big queues in other banks as ex-Ulster Bank customers attempt to open replacement accounts, which is an orderly bank run. Both the CEO, Hester, and the Chairman, Hampton, have been in Ireland attempting to sort out the mess and mollify the Irish Central Bank.

      Even with the Bob Diamond sacking/resignation, you'd think that a subsidiary of one of the largest banks in the world being reduced to Dickensian manual book-keeping would make the news over here, but there has been hardly a word. It certainly doesn't look like a 'glitch'.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The story that I have been told

        For reasons either very helpful or very unhelpful, you cannot ever publish details that may cause a bank run. So I'd guess that's why people are being quiet. You don't call fire, and risk a stamped and injury, unless there defiantly is a fire.

        1. cantankerousblogger
          WTF?

          Re: The story that I have been told

          Well, they never told that to Robert Peston and those who gave Peston his RTS awards for the Northern Rock scoop.

          This thread provides a sample of what has been going on in Ireland:

          http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2056688527

          Quite astonishing.

  13. SilverSmith
    Facepalm

    Virgin on the ridiculous

    Have to agree with "Reg Varney" - The One Account site is riddled with bugs: Appearing/disappearing transactions, clumsy validation, inaccurate messages, greyed out transactions that are also shown as cleared etc. They must have a shed load of reports that they do nothing about. They even had "No messages" on their front status screen long after this whole story started.

    ...and the duplication is definitely not just outgoing transactions, my wife was apparently paid twice and other credits to my account have been doubled up. Tempted as I might be to whip the money out, the balance remained obstinately correct.

  14. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Hello? Doesn't your software do some level of "looks like you're running the same transactions you did before?" validation? Or perhaps have the software driving the process of which transactions to select?

    I worked on 2 DD systems and in both cases, the dates were driven by the system. No operator was involved in setting the date. If an oppo ran it twice in one day, it would stop as it was up-to-date.

    As much as possible, it shouldn't matter what order you run things in or how often you run things (or not). Each process should be independent of each other and if not, you probably need to redesign your process.

  15. MartynH
    FAIL

    I've got a One Account and even upto yesterday, new debit transactions are randomly only showing the amount and not the payee. At least the salary that got paid in did add to the balance and within an hour of the payment being made - will be digging out last paper statement tho and doing a reconcile on all transactions.

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Please Be Aware

    That if you are seeing double, it is only an understandable result of your anger at our utter incompetence. We cannot tell you how long this will go on for.

  17. El Biggles

    The effect has spread to other banks

    I made a payment on 19th June from my Santander account to pay a bill - the payee has a Nat West account. The payment appeared to go through, but the payee never received payment and when I checked my Santander account last night there was no trace whatsoever of the transaction although the payee details (including invoice number) were still there. I assume the transaction has somehow been reversed as part of Nat West/RBS recovering from the IT fiasco. The lack of any kind of audit trail being shown on the account is however shocking.

  18. krokodil99
    Meh

    Is Worldpay affected?

    Just curious, is Worldpay payment processing affected by the "glitch"? I know it was sold by RBS last year, but afaik RBS still has around 20% in it and some of Worldpay IT systems are still with RBS...

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Bet lunch it's an IT outsource/offshore entanglement, again.

    Bet lunch it's an IT outsource/offshore entanglement, again.

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