Tier two banking and insurance giant Suncorp today acknowledged it had suffered some internet banking problems over the past week flowing from an upgrade conducted over the weekend, with some customers concerned about a loss of functionality from the service.
“We upgraded our Internet Banking system over the weekend and have experienced some teething problems with this over the past few days,” the company said in a statement this afternoon. Some customers have experienced delays during this time, however, most of the issues have now been resolved.”
“We apologise to any of our valued customers who have been affected.”
The company also responded to anonymous critics online who claimed the company had actually removed functionality from its platform to do with the ability to export banking data into third-party accounting platforms. “We have not had any calls from business customers about difficulties in exporting data as a result of the upgrade,” said the bank.
One online complainer — whose identity could not be verified — whinged that Suncorp would now only support customers’ transaction history being downloaded into the popular financial packages MYOB, Microsoft Money and Quicken.
The bank had apparently previously supported the Quicken Interchange Format and the Open Financial Exchange format.
But Suncorp denied it was an issue.
“Our internet banking system supports all of the major accounting software packages, which the majority of our small business customers use,” the bank said. “For existing customers using other non-supported accounting software packages, we are always happy to consider other solutions should any compatibility issues arise.”
Image credit: Delimiter
Do they still support CSV? I do think the lack of QIF and OFE is an issue. I don’t bank with Suncorp, but recently I started downloading transaction history from my bank (ANZ) and credit union (ACCU), and they both support a range of formats, including all of these. I’ve been importing the downloaded files into “Money”, a financial management program for OSX, and it’s worked very well.
Transferability is essential for the effective use of data. This is the same problem we’ve been having with ebooks. If a format, program or platform is suddenly abandoned, or if you switch from one to another, you can be stuck without access to your valuable data. This is why open standards have been created.
I urge financial institutions to support CSV, QIF and OFE at least. CSV is a base format, and QIF and OFE are designed for transferability.
I would certainly consider leaving a financial institution which limited access to my data in the way Suncorp apparently has.
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