Computer Glitch Leaves Some Australians Without Cash 195
An anonymous reader writes "National Australia Bank payments to customers were again delayed today after a computer glitch yesterday morning due to a corrupted file in its mainframe computer. Upset consumers are now demanding compensation for any fees for late mortgage and credit card payments, overdrawn accounts or bounced direct debits charged by any institutions as a result of the mess."
Money meet mattress (Score:3, Insightful)
Still the safest place until you house burns down
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When I lived in Ireland and they switched to the Euro, I took all my Irish Puts, put them in two glass jars and buried them next to a church. My coins might still be there in a few hundred years when I hope some lucky person finds them, but at the moment it looks like the Irish banks could be gone.
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Or when a thief find money there. :D
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Or lots of currency floods the market, thus making that under your mattress worth far less than when you put it there. Gold, on the other hand...
Gold, like any commodity, fluctuates a fair amount. It won't be worthless, but you can see your investment crash if you buy at a bubble. Just look at the history for the price of gold -- it can lose it's value by half over a several year period. Currently it's trending very high, though. Will it go higher? Will it crash? Who knows.
It's also not as liquid as cash. You aren't going to get the best exchange price if you need your money within a day or two.
This could be good news (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This could be good news (Score:4, Insightful)
Because borrowing money and not paying it back is an honorable way to live?
Re:This could be good news (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This could be good news (Score:4, Informative)
They don't have it; They create it on a computer. Research fiat currency and how fractional banking works. You might be shocked.
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Read this:
http://mises.org/journals/scholar/hatch.pdf [mises.org]
That is only one article, there are others. The upshot is that banks loaned what they did not have and the Federal Reserve let them do it. And when the house of cards collapsed they are forcing other to pay for it and walking away from it. That is flat out theft and immoral.
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Re:This could be good news (Score:5, Informative)
The bible says to forgive debts every 7 years:
“At the end of every seven years you shall grant a release of debts. And this is the form of the release: Every creditor who has lent anything to his neighbor shall release it; he shall not require it of his neighbor or his brother, because it is called the Lord’s release.” – Deuteronomy 15:1
Darn (Score:3, Funny)
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To truly understand someone you need to war camel in their shoes.
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A shame (Score:2)
... Because the NAB is really one of the 'good' banks , a leader in lowering the absurd fees and penalties banks charge in Australia. I hope they haven't put unfair pressure to reduce costs on their IT department.
Reading the article (Score:5, Insightful)
It looks like consumers aren't demanding it so much as the bank is promising it, which is no surprise. Even if Australia doesn't have laws protecting consumers in that sort of event, the bank will do it anyhow because they have to.
As a practical matter all it'll likely take is phone calls/letters to creditors explaining that it was a glitch and no fault of the person involved. As a somewhat related example a friend of mine got hit because of a glitch years ago. The power company double debited his payment. That happened right about when a number of other transactions came which caused some of them to bounce, including his rent check. All the fees from the bank overdrew his account, he had other fees from the people he owed money to, and his landlord notified him he'd be evicted if he didn't pay. Well, the power company made things right and gave him back his money. They also called the relevant parties saying "Sorry, it was our fuckup." Every single one canceled all the fees. Since it wasn't his fault, they didn't fine him. Had they not, the power company said to send them the bills for the fees and they'd reimburse him.
So while this is doubtless a stressful time for those involved, in the end I have to imagine it'll all get worked out. Goes double since this is a major fuckup, and going to be well known.
Re:Reading the article (Score:4, Informative)
No way that was in the united states...
Companys doing the right thing... Not possible here. Or you got REALLY REALLY lucky.
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No it was in the United States. Might be because he actually spent some time working on the problem, making the company aware they had fucked up, rather than just whining online as so many people here are prone to do.
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Even if Australia doesn't have laws protecting consumers in that sort of event
Even if not we do have a fairly decent consumer advocacy group. The ACCC is in large responsible for the reduction in overdrawing fees from banks. I remember my bank once charging $50 because an automated internal transactions between two accounts held in my name at the same branch failed because one was short on cash. I remember being told tough when I complained. I remember getting a refund after the ACCC got involved. These days overdrawing fees are like $15 and only when the account is actually overdraw
Australian bank now looking to hire (Score:5, Funny)
Something tells me a system administration job just opened up.at a major Australian bank.
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I would say its a DB2 Admin, Informatica specialist, Z/OS development specialist and the batch file creator. Most batch jobs just run.
Funny, but when I hear z/OS and batch jobs, I think JCL . . . and then I run away . . .
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When westpac fucked up like this, they just replayed the batch the next day and it was sorted.
The fact that this wasn't fixed on day one means they're trying to put the data back together from scratch. (ie: they are so fucked)
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Hardest hit (Score:2)
Meanwhile, the rest of the world ... (Score:2)
... are out of cash because the world economy tanked.
Although, the Aussies do deserve some sympathy . . . I recently saw a documentary, which showed how many poisonous varmints and critters are trotting around there. I would be afraid to put my hairy ass into bed at night there.
Having no cash would be one of the least of my worries.
My favorite is some type of squid, who is tiny, but a sting of it will kill an adult human in about two minutes.
Yo. "When I say it's not safe to surf this beach, it's not
Will be interesting to see if anyone switches bank (Score:2)
It will be interesting to see how many people end up switching to another bank over this (either because of the stuff-up or because of the lack of communication from the NAB when it initially happened)
I for one am glad I left the National Australia Bank years ago. I no longer keep my money in the bank, I use a Credit Union :)
Mainframe: File Corruption? (Score:2)
"corrupted file in its mainframe computer"
Do they honestly expect us to believe this shit?
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The western world's financial sector runs on ancient clunky COBOL batch systems that have accumulated a horrendous amount of cruft and as a result are very hard to update. Fuck ups are common although they're rarely as bad as this.
Quite possibly (Score:2)
This is just practice for..... (Score:2)
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/08nov_iswi/ [nasa.gov]
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/26oct_solarshield/ [nasa.gov]
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2010/16jul_ilws/ [nasa.gov]
etc..
When more than just programming glitches happen...
Whats the fee on the Emergency $500 advances (Score:2)
Whats the fee on the Emergency $500 advances?
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This actually happened on Thursday. Some people are still waiting for their money, with 40,000 or so likely to still be waiting on Monday.
Re:They deserve any late fees they get? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have a payment due on X date, you wait until day X - 1, and something goes wrong and delays you by one day, this is your fault, not your bank's fault.
I disagree entirely. In todays age of electronic payments and daily interest, it's important to pay things ON TIME. Paying early for most people means losing interest elsewhere. I pay on X date, not even X-1. I schedule most of this. Noone pays me 7 days early, the banks certainly don't clear a cheque early on assumption it'll be fine. The NAB appear to be acting very fairly on this matter, which is more than I've seen other banks (CBA) doing when a computer glitch duplicated a debit on my account. I was 50k down on an interest bearing mortgage offset account for a week - they didn't even remotely entertain my request $60 interest it lost me. They don't waste any time when the shoe is on the other foot though so good on NAB.
Sorry but doing that is gambling more or less (Score:4, Insightful)
If you take everything down to the wire to maximize interest, fine, but you are gambling the gains in interest vs the potential loss in terms of fees. If you are ok with that, fine, but then don't cry when you do get hit with fees and lose out. Personally I think the other way is smarter. I keep an amount of money in my non-interest bearing checking account since that is where all my transactions draw from. That way if there is a miscalculation there's no overdraw, no bounced payments, no fees. Likewise I pay things before the drop dead date.
Do I miss out on some interest? Sure, if I messed with funds all the time and tried to keep everything in savings till the last second I'd get a bit more interest. However it wouldn't take much in the way of a fee to negate any of that.
So I think there's some real validity to the GP's statement. Don't take things down to the wire, build in time to make sure if there's a glitch, there's no problem.
Re:Sorry but doing that is gambling more or less (Score:5, Insightful)
You aren't gambling anything, you are making use of modern infrastructure and a service your bank offers. It is no more of a gamble than not getting up early just in case the bridge on your way to work has collapsed during the night.
Well, no, you shouldn't cry but simply tell your bank to pay the bills that resulted in their failure to deliver a service as advertized, and sue them if they don't.
If your financial institutions really are this unreliable, then I can kinda see why your economy collapsed.
Re:Sorry but doing that is gambling more or less (Score:4, Insightful)
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No, actually you pay for the privilege of letting the bank hold onto the idea of your money. Once you hand it over, it's just a number in a database. With that privilege, you let them make money by loaning out your money, until which point where you may want it back. Converting that idea of the money back to currency is at the discretion of the bank. For example, if you've deposited $100/wk into your account every week for 10 years, you can't just walk in and tell them to give you $52,000
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If you take everything down to the wire to maximize interest, fine, but you are gambling the gains in interest vs the potential loss in terms of fees.
Please explain exactly how asking a bank to transfer funds on a certain date, and expecting it to happen on the requested date, is a "gamble". Under exactly what circumstances do you expect banks to fail to process scheduled transfers on time?
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You know... you're right, besides you normally don't get any interest on the deposit anyway.
BUT: you're being pedantic and acting righteously... Ok, so you pay your bills in advance and accidents such as this wouldn't affect you? Fine, good for you... want a pat on the back? ;)
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Of course you can do so, but it is not advisable, and you bear the risk if you choose to wait to the due date, you are the one taking on the risk, and you get to pay late fees if your bet was wrong about how long the payment would take.
Why, exactly? Banks are perfectly capable of scheduling transfers to happen on a certain date. Banks are perfectly capable of keeping their systems running 24/7. If they didn't the modern banking system would not function. Now I would agree that it's risky to wait until the due date to schedule a transfer; in addition to the reasons you listed you could have some personal emergency disrupt your day... But if I have scheduled a bill to be paid automatically on a certain date, then by god it better happen (an
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Parent says he schedules the payments. As in, he goes into the bank's website weeks ahead of time and sets up a bill-pay, choosing X as the target date. In this case, I find it difficult to argue that it could be anyone other than the bank's fault for the payment not going through on time.
Though I still leave a week's buffer in my bill-pays, because I'm a pretty small account, and the bank can afford better justice, especially when it's spending my money (and yours) for it...
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RTFA
The problem was not that they "left it too late" - the problem was the money that should have been put into their accounts to cover the bills (from paycheques, etc) did not actually make it into the accounts.
If the money that was supposed to go in the account did not actually make it in, then they would not have anything to be able to pay the bills as they became due.
Keep in mind also that many repetitive payments, such as like credit card repayments, are often timed to come out automatically the day af
Re:They deserve any late fees they get? (Score:5, Insightful)
Telephone sanitizers better not lose their jobs... (Score:2)
Telephone sanitizers got re-hired (Score:2)
Re:They deserve any late fees they get? (Score:5, Informative)
and it's normal not to have any money on your accounts and live from payday to payday?
For some people, yes.
Welcome to the real world.
okay, the banks made an error and should compensate... but do people really find it normal not to save any money and be screwed when the tinyest thing goes wrong?
Some people don't earn enough to "save any money". When 90% of your income goes in basic and essential expenses, being able to save even 10% is a luxury not always afforded should any emergency expenses come up.
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A shame you were modded flamebait ... I think it more truth.
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Stupid fucking poor people! *shakes fist*
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Yes, in the real world people live pay check to pay check. Let them eat cake.
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Welcome to the real world. Some people, in fact more people than you think, live like this. It's not due to not saving, but many other factors.
Take for example my in-laws. He use to have a great job at ChemCut in State College, PA. The downsized, and he (as well as another friend of mine) got laid off. His wife had a great job at a nursing home, but due to MS a doctor basically said with her knees the way they are and the pain of MS, she couldn't work. It took 3 years for her disability to go thru, so for
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I make sure all my savings get socked away asap, and live on the rest 'paycheck to paycheck'. In this case, I couldn't have put in additional money into my account from my savings!
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I'll see your anecdote and raise you 1 reality.
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Really?
Well my payment from work arrives the last day of the month, my bills are due the day after.
So what you are saying is, at any given point everyone must have enough to cover all their next months bills?
Also, why isn't it reasonable to expect the bank to be online? I'm 29 years old, in the 10 years I've been taking care of myself, I've never had troubles with paying the bills just in time, been using online banking since about 2000 without problems.
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> ...any responsible adult will have enough in savings...
More than 50% of the children in my country will grow up in poverty. That's 50% will grow up beneath the poverty line. 50% will grow up in families that are unable to meet the bills on time. Over here, the cost of living increases at a notably greater rate than the median wage.
Hell, the last time my job got a pay increase was when minimum wage was increased this year. The time before that was two years ago, when minimum wage was increased. You
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More than 50% of the children in my country will grow up in poverty. That's 50% will grow up beneath the poverty line
Not being able to keep a buffer is not a matter of poverty or not. It is a matter of foresight and discipline. In fact, if you live in poverty, a buffer is even more important than if you are rich, because the margins of error is smaller.
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Studies show that you move up the pay-scale faster by changing jobs, rather than "hoping for a raise." Probably for the same reason that you get a better deal when you change to a different broadband carrier than when you simply renew your contract with the same company.
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The way the banking system is here in AU. it would be bad financial management to have 18 month worth of cash in the bank if you have a mortgage.
Not when you have it in an offset or redraw account.
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Some of us have dependants and we can't change our budget.
It is highly unlikely that you cannot change your budget at all. It is far more likely that you do not want to change your budget.
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That is almost painfully naive.
Hardly. I've been there myself with a rock-bottom budget. However the vast majority of people who complain about not being able to cut their budget further, are simply full of it.
This is not to say that they have so much income that it should be obvious how to build up a pad, nor that they're lazy, nor that they're not underpaid. Just a simple observation that people will blithely pay >$50/month for cable tv, and a decent amount on entertainment, and eat out for lunch, and buy expensive convenience foods
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Was it right that I helped her with the cost of private treatment rather than saving that money as a buffer in case my bank made a mistake one day?
Just to be clear, the notion that banks shouldn't be expected to make transfers on time, the notion that you need a buffer against bank errors, is absolutely insane--as I've argued elsewhere here.
I'm speaking specifically to the notion that one needs a buffer for one's own unexpected expenses--as far as I'm concerned, helping an elderly relative with treatment as you did falls under the category of things for which you need to save up a pad, in other words, things for which you properly spend your pad, thi
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Agreed :-)
On slashdot? Are you kidding me? Or do I need to explain to you how this site works [youtube.com]?
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Up until around age 27 I lived from payday to payday. During any point at that time if you had asked I would have told you that there was no way I could save cash.
But then I met somebody who made a few suggestions. The first one was record a spreadsheet of *every* cent you spend. You have to be really honest here .... EVERY cent. At the end of the payperiod if you are out by a cent then you have to do it again.
After doing that, you then go through and classify every cent. Essential, non-essential. Bui
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"National Australia Bank payments to customers were again delayed today after a computer glitch yesterday morning due to a corrupted file in its mainframe computer. Upset consumers are now demanding compensation for any fees for late mortgage and credit card payments,
If you have a payment due on X date, you wait until day X - 1, and something goes wrong and delays you by one day, this is your fault, not your bank's fault.
Matters would be different if there was a problem at day X - 7 that lasted for 7 days,
or X - 14 that lasted for 14 days.
It is not reasonable to expect there will never be any problems with electronic payment systems.
1 to 2 days is reasonable to sort this out, you are taking an unreasonable risk if you don't attempt to complete payment to a bill at least 3 days before the due date.
In other words, these consumers should get stuck with these late fees, and learn about a valuable lesson in
taking reasonable steps to ensure their obligations are met, even if something goes not quite as expected with the payment.
Yeah, I guess that's an option when you still live in your parent's basement and the most pressing payment is your latest Steam download or XBox live bill.
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If you have a payment due on X date, you wait until day X - 1, and something goes wrong and delays you by one day, this is your fault, not your bank's fault.
While most industries would _love_ it if everyone paid a day early and they got to suck on the interest, i'm keeping my money until the last minute. If my payment is delayed because of a bank error then it's the banks fault, not mine.
Maybe you are a bit older than me, but for pretty much the whole time i've been paying bills it's been electronic and it's never gone wrong, ever. We generally try and keep a bit of a buffer in the bank but I suspect that if we were with this particular bank it might not have h
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Actually they would hate not being able to charge the 150-200% of the owed amount penalties and late fees. I would love to be able to tell Payroll that since they had a glitch, and didn't get me my check till a day late they have to pay me extra. $30 fee versus $0.00001 interest? Sign me up for that.
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If you have a payment due on X date, you wait until day X - 1, and something goes wrong and delays you by one day, this is your fault, not your bank's fault.
No, it's the bank's fault. To whit:
Matters would be different if there was a problem at day X - 7 that lasted for 7 days, or X - 14 that lasted for 14 days.
There is no difference between trying to pay at X-7 and trying to pay at X-1 and either failing, due to a bank problem. The bank is still at fault.
It is not reasonable to expect there will
Re:They deserve any late fees they get? (Score:5, Insightful)
This entire thread you've been racing to the defense of the banks. If I have money in the bank, and cannot use it due to a corrupted file on the bank's server or whatnot, THEN IT IS THE BANKS FAULT.
Its that simple.
Its not that I didn't have enough money, or that I didn't initiate the transfer. The bank fucked up. They sure as hell want to charge me for everything under the sun when I'm late. If they are late its their fucking fault, and I will pass the late fees on to them.
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The business world is all about contracts. The banks charge you fees because it's part of the contract you agreed to. You'd have to check the contracts to see if they specify a certain level of service. They also may be subject to consumer protection laws. In the end, they may tell you to stuff it, and then it's up to you to sue for damages.
It does help to be an enraged consumer, though. If enough people are pissed, and threaten to leave the bank, then they might cough up regardless.
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This entire thread you've been racing to the defense of the banks.
Seems pretty clear to me that a lot of /. PHP script kiddies don't have a clue about the level of reliability that is expected (and required) for banks to maintain. The concept of it simply not being allowed for a "glitch" to delay service is more than they can handle.
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Well, legally that is not what has happened. You scheduled a payment to be made, and until the payment is actually made, as scheduled, the obligation is not yet met. You have merely taken an action that can be expected to meet the obligation; if that action fails, it's still your responsibility.
No, it's not. If I instruct my bank to take an action, and they fail to take that action, the fault is theirs and theirs alone.
On the other hand, if you scheduled a "bill payment" on date X from a different bank
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Again, if you're an American you might not be used to this sort of thing, but it's how it's been in Australia for 10+ years now.
FYI, in the U.S. it is often but not always the next day. It depends on exactly how the transfer goes from bank to payee. However, you are most certainly told the maximum time the transfer will take, and that most certainly does not change randomly month to month, and you can most certainly use that information to schedule the payment to arrive on the date due, and you can most certainly expect that to happen.
The above all is about going to your bank's website and scheduling a transfer out. For nearly all t
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FYI, in the U.S. it is often but not always the next day.
Well, it's two days for all the payees in my Wells Fargo BillPay, except for the Wells Fargo Credit Card, which is one day.
The above all is about going to your bank's website and scheduling a transfer out. For nearly all the big bills (mortgage, credit cards, car payment), you can go directly to your creditor's web site and schedule the transfer in for the date due. They will initiate the transfer on that date and credit your account on that date,
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Tell me, do you hold everyone you contract with to such a low standard? If sometimes your box of cereal turns out to be totally empty do you just shake your head sadly and say "well I should have checked at the supermarket"? If you pay a mechanic to fix your car and he doesn't bother do you write off your loss while mentally chastising yourself for not training as a mechanic yourself so that you could verify what he'd done?
I don't know about where you are, but in this country if someone fails to do what the
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...delays of that nature are to be expected, you are responsible..
Please explain why, exactly, "delays of that nature are to be expected" in electronic funds transfers.
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In other words, these consumers should get stuck with these late fees, and learn about a valuable lesson in
taking reasonable steps to ensure their obligations are met, even if something goes not quite as expected with the payment.
The obligation was that the customer would make the payment by day X, not that he would attempt to make it on day X-7 to pad against uncertainty. A "reasonable step" would be to attempt to make the payment on day X-1 instead of a few minutes before COB on day X.
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When you receive a bill it is your responsibility to always make sure that it is successfully paid, before that 14 day grace period expires.
And as others have pointed out to you, your responsibility is fulfilled the instant you schedule the payment through your bank. That's how modern finances work. If you don't accept that, you're free to attempt some sort of barter system with your creditors.
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Payment remains your responsibility until payment is made.
It turns out due diligence is still in effect, and in our electronic society, your obligation is NOT to pay your creditors on day X-7, but on day X. If the bank that was supposed to handle that transaction for you screwed up, then they are responsible for fees and charges, not you. I believe the opposite was your initial argument.
Good luck getting payment to every one of your creditors in cash, or gold bars, or whatever the fuck it is you use to avoid banks and their various electronic failures.
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It depends on the user agreement for the automated bill payment service...
I seriously doubt that. Banking is a highly regulated industry, and failure to perform one of the most basic of all banking tasks, inter-bank transfers, seems unlikely to be an allowed option for banks.
Your point about the creditor's obligation to the debtor remaining is correct, however I seriously doubt that the bank in error can simply shrug off failure to timely perform transfers as "shit happens, get over it".
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The thing you seem to be missing is that the bank fucked up in exactly this way. The bank didn't cover their financial obligations first. Why would the customers deserve the late fees and not the bank when both failed to meet their obligations and the bank was the root cause of it? Regardless of how stupid you think the customers' cash-flow strategy is.
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This is no different than if you mail a check 2 days before it's due and the postal service takes an extra day to get the item, so it arrives after the due date.
Actually it is, because in Australian banking systems transactions are expected to be instantaneous, or at worst batch-processed at CoB each day.
The correct analagous situation is if I mail a cheque in a "guaranteed next day delivery" envelope, and it doesn't arrive the next day. In that situation the postal service is absolutely at fault, and I
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Actually it is, because in Australian banking systems transactions are expected to be instantaneous, or at worst batch-processed at CoB each day.
FYI, this is not relevant to electronic transactions, but 20+ years ago when I worked in banking (in the U.S.), if a bank failed to process checks for 24 hours, the regulators could step in and take over the bank's operations. That's the kind of standard to which banks can be (and should be) held.
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expected does not mean guaranteed.
Nor does it need to. If the bank says it's going to do X, then fails to do X, it is the bank's fault to rectify any penalties incurred from its failure to do X.
When I schedule a payment using BPay, or a transfer between accounts, the bank says that transfer will be completed before opening of business the next day (or often instantly, for transfers within the same institution). If they fail to deliver that service, the fault is theirs, not mine.
It is not my responsibi
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The biggest problem is things like automatic debits and rent/loan payments.
My rent for example goes out every fortnight as an automatic direct debit setup via online banking. If I was affected by this (I used to bank with the National Australia Bank but switched years ago) and my automatic debit didnt happen or there wasnt enough money in the account for it, the rent wouldn't be paid.
Same with things like my ISP bills and insurance (all of which are automatic debits)
And I DO pay all my other bills (power, m
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In my case, they managed to BACK OUT some inter-account transfers I made on Wednesday, which screwed up some things (after rent payments and other things).
At this point, I have a negative amount in my checking account (it's all in savings), with no way to move money into it. Attempts to purchase with this account or draw money from it fail, so I have no choice but to pay for things with credit card. If I get billed either credit card interest or any sort of debit fees on the checking account, it will be t
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If you have a payment due on X date, and you leave orders to the bank to pay said payment at X date, but the bank fails to do so, it is clearly the banks fault. How could it not be? Also, if you can't access the money on your account at X day, then yes, it is also the banks fault.
Failure to deliver electricity is the power companys fault, failure to de
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Yeah, but we'd file a class action lawsuit and eventually win $2 coupons towards our next savings accounts.
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So it's all because of Women and Jews?
What kind of idiotic drivel is this? No wonder you posted as an AC.
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And the bank will fix the credit of those who missed mortgage payments? I highly doubt it.
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And the bank will fix the credit of those who missed mortgage payments? I highly doubt it.
Australia, fortunately, does not have a credit system remotely like the insanity in the US, so a missed mortgage payment in this situation wouldn't cause anyone any major problems.
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My sources tell me they doing their batch run on a cluster of PS2's.
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Well, I've never heard about a Windows mainframe...
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Unisys has been slogging their large scale x86 machines running Windows Datacenter Edition as mainframes for almost a decade.
Few people take that claim seriously, any more than they would believe a claim that a 32 CPU Sun or HP server was a "mainframe". Such machines are just mid range servers with a larger than usual number of CPUs.
The basic difference is that mid-range servers (system software and hardware) are more "commodity-ish" (and much less expensive) than true mainframes where companies spend on t
Re: (Score:2)
via a console on a windows box.