Vancity CEO apologizes for collapse of online banking

After a three-day service disruption, Vancity announced Saturday afternoon that the issues with its online banking system had been fixed, and immediately began doing damage control.

CEO Tamara Vrooman said she felt sick about the outage, which kept the credit union’s core banking system, online platforms, mobile apps and IT system offline since midnight on Wednesday. She apologized for the inconvenience caused to customers.

“We know that our members rely on our online banking system to transact with us, to run their business with us, and to live their daily lives,” she told Postmedia.

“They’ve been inconvenienced. The first thing I want to say to members is we’re sorry, and we’re 100-per-cent committed to making it right for them.”

Automatic teller machines, credit cards and point of sale purchases remained functional, but customers weren’t able to log into their online accounts, check balances, pay bills or complete electronic money transfers.

Now Vancity must deal with a backlog of banking needs as well as thousands of upset customers, many of whom incurred late fees and other penalties when they couldn’t make online payments.

To that end, Vrooman said the credit union would be open through Thanksgiving weekend with extended hours, 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., on Sunday and Monday, and that Vancity would cover any “penalties, interest penalties, late charges,” accrued by members unable to access their banking information during the outage.

“We’ve also reached out to TransUnion and Equifax to ensure members’ credit scores won’t be affected,” Vrooman said, adding the credit union had explained the situation to B.C. Hydro, Telus and other utilities.

Vrooman assured Vancity members their banking information was safe, and that there was no privacy breach — something the credit union hired an outside IT security firm to confirm.

“Once we knew our members’ data was 100-per-cent safe,” she said, the credit union went to locate the source of the problem.

On Saturday, Vrooman said crews were working around the clock to restore the e-banking system.