By Ntombi Mhlongo
“It can’t be”!
This is probably how clients of Standard Bank Eswatini, whose slogan is ‘It Can Be’ have been feeling in the past few weeks.
While it is regarded as Africa’s largest financial services provider, the Standard Bank brand has brought about misery and anguish to its thousands of customers and the public locally.
The inconvenience has been in the form of unending system maintenance which made the services unavailable for hours and even days.
The most frustrating part has been that the system maintenance, which the bank would announce to its clients via cellphone through short messages service (SMS), has been taking place on weekends, a time when citizens conveniently run their errands like grocery shopping, paying bills or even travel.
While banking services being down is nothing sinister, the frustration of Standard Bank Eswatini clients has become serious since the beginning of February this year and the notification of system maintenance would come on Fridays. On Friday, February 3, 2023, the bank circulated a notification to that effect.
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This was followed by another notification on February 10, 2023, and this time, the bank made it known that their auto teller machines (ATMs) and point of sale (POS) machines were not going to be available from 11:00 pm until 12 noon the following day.
The POS machine is an electronic device through which a customer can make payment to a merchant in exchange for goods or after the provision of a service through debit/credit/prepaid cards or QR scanning.
On Friday, March 10, 2023, clients were notified of another scheduled system maintenance.
It was the same story on Friday, February 14, 2023.
As if that was not enough, clients were left confused when they received the notification and waited for the completion of the maintenance but the availability of the services did not happen at the time that had been communicated by the bank. The notice, issued on April 14, 2023, implied that the banking services were to be unavailable from 12:00 am-5:00 am on April 15, 2023. However, after 5 am, the services were still not available, and the bank did not give feedback to its clients on what had happened.
Instead, some clients had to find out for themselves what the problem was from the nearest branches.
The recent incident is said to have occurred on Monday, April 24, 2023, but this time, some companies felt the pinch as they could not process salaries for employees. It was alleged that the Standard Bank system did not link with other banks which made it difficult for companies to process the payments.
As a result, some employees vented their anger on social media platforms including Facebook detailing their pain of not being paid.
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Others decried the fact that while they heard that the problem might be associated with a system challenge at Standard Bank, there was no communication from the bank. The Eswatini Financial Times reliably established that the system challenge at Standard Bank where it failed to connect with other banks triggered rumours that the banking system in Eswatini has serious problems to the point of almost collapsing. However, the fears were quelled by the Governor of the Central Bank of Eswatini Dr Phil Mnisi who said there was nothing of that nature.
Furthermore, Mnisi said the CBE could have known if the country’s banking system was facing serious challenges because they (CBE) are part of the settlement system. “On behalf of CBE we assure you that we would know if there was a problem since we are part of the settlement system and we receive reports from banks, there have been no interruptions,” Dr Mnisi said.
Astoundingly, Standard Bank’s failure to keep its clients informed about the system failure challenges indicates a failure to uphold some of its core values. Standard Bank has eight core values which are: serving our customers; growing our people, delivering to our shareholders, being proactive, respecting each other, upholding the highest levels of integrity, and constantly raising the bar. Observably, its action of failure to account to its clients regarding the system challenges they are facing beats several values which are being proactive and respecting each other.
Some clients relayed that they feared they could face the same predicament recently experienced by South Africans who bank with Capitec Bank on Monday, April 25, 2023, which was payday for many.
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South African media platform News24 reported on Monday how the neighbouring country’s biggest digital banker, Capitec frustrated its customers after they woke up to their bank accounts reflecting zero balances. Capitec eventually admitted that it had experienced a technical glitch which it rectified on Tuesday.
News24 highlighted that payday technical glitches have become common in some of South Africa’s big banks and that Standard Bank is another bank that experienced these more frequently in the past and has dedicated extra resources to minimise outages. The technical glitches are a surprise since in 2015, the Standard Bank Group became the first bank in Africa to implement core banking systems SAP and Finacle, amid ever-increasing pressures to consolidate client data.
It was reported at the time that Standard Bank would spend E21 billion to roll out new software platforms, as competition between lenders for clients hots up. The African lender implemented SAP in South Africa, and Finacle throughout its banking network across the rest of the continent, including in Eswatini within a financial services context, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software such as SAP can provide bankers with universal access to customer information and data through a single repository. The then Chief Executive Dr Phil Mnisi was holding fort when Finacle was rolled out.
Finacle is a service that can integrate entire core banking systems – e-banking, payments, treasury, liquidity management and wealth management – into one online platform. In January this year, Standard Bank Eswatini announced that it had reached a landmark by being the first bank to generate E1 billion in total revenue.
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This was outlined in the bank’s abridged financial statements for the year ended December 31, 2022.
The bank achieved a profit after tax (PAT) of E203 million for the 2022 financial year, which is 14 per cent above the prior year’s E178 million.
Its Chief Executive (CE), Mvuselelo Fakudze, is on record saying that the high revenue demonstrated the bank’s resilience despite an uncertain trading environment. Efforts to get a comment from the bank had not been successful at the time of compiling this report.
A questionnaire was sent to the bank’s Brand and Marketing department, but this publication did not receive responses at the time of going to press. Standard Bank’s Brand and Marketing Manager Sibusile Sigwane acknowledged receipt of the questionnaire but the bank has still not responded.