Bank of Ireland not very media savvy

Apologies to readers for sporadic entries over the last number of days.

This week’s Mediahuis/INM Irish regional newspapers’ column.

Michael Commane

Contrast the media savvy of Kevin Bakhurst with that of Myles O’Grady. I think it’s fair to say that most people in the country at this stage know who Kevin Bakhurst is. 

On the announcement of Ryan Tubridy not returning to RTÉ Bakhurst was all over the media telling the public what the story was. He appeared on various news bulletins and on Prime Time. He used simple language admitting faults had been made on both sides. 

Myles O’Grady is chief executive of Bank of Ireland. The bank’s IT system went down on Tuesday, August 15. It was certainly not working at 2pm that day and it was out of service until the following morning. 

And then that morning the big story was about people being able to withdraw money they didn’t have from ATMs. Not a word from anyone at Bank of Ireland to explain what had happened. 

All the media focus was on the free ATM money, people fiddling the system and gardaí being called out to keep control at the ATMs. The story became the people who were taking the ‘free money’.

I never once heard a word from Myles O’Grady until the following Saturday when I read a report in a daily national newspaper where he apologised for the IT glitch.

 

It is interesting that finance minister Michael McGrath has said that there have been ‘too many instances’ of IT glitches at the nation’s banks. Only in June did many of Bank of Ireland’s IT systems crash for the best part of a day.

Systems fail, machines break down. But what is not at all acceptable is how the Bank of Ireland dealt with its most recent outage. 

Once the bank knew the system was down why did they not send text messages to customers explaining the system was down? Why did they not keep their normal business phone lines open after business hours? 

Why did staff tell customers at 6pm that the system would be back in operation within two hours. Their entire communication with their customers was shambolic and there is no excuse whatsoever for how the bank behaved once the outage happened.

The next day all the luck was on their side. The story shifted to customers removing money from ATMs that was not belong to them. 

I don’t think there has been a critical word in the media about how badly the bank communicated the glitch to customers. And what makes it even more annoying, customers could easily have gone into their account, punched in all the requisite numbers to find the screen go blank.

Someone not too familiar with online banking could easily have thought their account had been scammed or hacked. In panic and worry they try phoning the bank, no reply, at least no reply for a long time. That’s no way to treat customers. 

It’s ironic how the RTÉ and Bank of Ireland stories happened so closely together. I sincerely hope Mr O’Grady is willing to learn from the media skills of Mr Bakhurst. 

And a bigger question, have we become too dependent on technology? Have banks closed too many branches far too quickly? It seems like that to me at times. It did on the day of the glitch.