ING promises to improve after internet banking malfunctions

ING has apologized through CEO Nick Jue for the disruptions with internet banking that ING has had recently. The bank promises improvements to prevent failures in the future as much as possible.

In recent times, the bank has experienced several failures, including several in the past week. In one of the disruptions, it was unclear whether or not payments were being made, so it initially appeared that customers had accidentally transferred money multiple times. ING was furious when it indicated that they would not be corrected automatically. Afterwards, ING claims that it incorrectly appeared that payments had been made twice, but that in practice this was not the case.

ING CEO Jue emphasizes in a video for customers that failures cannot be completely prevented, but promises that the bank will do its best. “Internet banking has become very important. Where we used to log in once a week, we now check our balance daily,” says Jue. “Our customers can expect it to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week and I can understand that they are upset when internet banking doesn’t work.”

ING’s chief information officer, Peter Jacobs, says the outages in recent weeks are the result of a large number of changes in internet banking, not least because of the introduction of Sepa, a new pan-European payment system. The increased activity on internet banking is also said to be responsible for the disruptions.

The bank promises to improve the monitoring of its systems. Systems that cannot cope with the crowds are also being replaced by systems that are suitable for this. Finally, the underlying payment systems are ‘disconnected’, says Jacobs, if they do not work. As a result, ambiguity about whether or not payments have been made should be removed.