Does anyone here know what's really going on with the Royal Bank? Their computer systems have been royally farked this past week. The Globe & Mail had an article which speculates that the transaction sequence numbers are screwy. Anyone know anything?
ISO - Royal Bank
- Thread starter xarir
- Start date
LOL. True. Must be hard though - so many transactions go through RBC on their way to other institutions. I'm sure people who don't do any banking at all with RBC are being affected by it all. I guess that's one of the problems when we only have a handful of banks to choose from in Canada.
I heard about it on the news. I just paid my Royal Bank Visa bill at an ATM. Does anyone know if the glitch is affecting the bank's ability to receive and register payments??
I think it is. I paid my RBC Visa bill via online banking and the money is still showing in my chequing account. (And my Visa bill is still showing a balance as well.) I also went to the bank earlier this week to do an FX transaction and that's not showing up either. While I obviously don't give a shit if they don't take the money out of my account, I'm concerned to see what will happen if and when they do. Will they get the amounts right? Guess I'll just have to wait & see.
My wild guess will be their system crashed when they tried to upgrade the system.
Or the system got hacked or being hijacked. The public can't tell since the banks won't admit there's security compromise on their IT system.
Normally the computer system in the big Six are very, very reliable because they have to. The probability of having the system down is really, really small BUT still you can't rule out the possibility. For RBC, it just happened at the worst time one can imagine.
Still it is better than CIBC and TD cause the later two had the system crashed during the weekends when many customers were trying to do shopping by debit or withdraw money from ABMs. One of the two banks have their system crashed twice within a year
People working at RBC are equally frustrated not only having angry and large customers at the branch to get their money out or what not, but also make their worklife miserable and possibly little if any OT pay. At best they may have store coupons say Shoppers Drug Mart or coupons from Tim Hortons to "thanks for the staff efforts to make the company better".
I suspect the CSRs are even worse cause they could have to do the money reconciliation and balance the cash for the duration...manually every single day, something when the system is working, they just "input the data and let the system does automatic balancing" and leave the branch within 15 minutes time. Now they could probably stay at the branch for more than an hour after the branch closes to make sure no out of balance or wrong transactions or more money missing.
So the RBC customers should keep their fingers crossed and hoped there aren't anymore screwups on their balances.
BTW, my suspicion on the slow fix on their computer systems may have to do with outsourcing. I believe hardly any big six still have a large in house IT personals for cost reasons. The majority of those people could have been outsourced to IBM or HP for cost savings. The chance will be there aren't enough IT personals from within and the outsource company to "nip the bud" right the way.
Again that's just pure speculation.
Or the system got hacked or being hijacked. The public can't tell since the banks won't admit there's security compromise on their IT system.
Normally the computer system in the big Six are very, very reliable because they have to. The probability of having the system down is really, really small BUT still you can't rule out the possibility. For RBC, it just happened at the worst time one can imagine.
Still it is better than CIBC and TD cause the later two had the system crashed during the weekends when many customers were trying to do shopping by debit or withdraw money from ABMs. One of the two banks have their system crashed twice within a year
People working at RBC are equally frustrated not only having angry and large customers at the branch to get their money out or what not, but also make their worklife miserable and possibly little if any OT pay. At best they may have store coupons say Shoppers Drug Mart or coupons from Tim Hortons to "thanks for the staff efforts to make the company better".
I suspect the CSRs are even worse cause they could have to do the money reconciliation and balance the cash for the duration...manually every single day, something when the system is working, they just "input the data and let the system does automatic balancing" and leave the branch within 15 minutes time. Now they could probably stay at the branch for more than an hour after the branch closes to make sure no out of balance or wrong transactions or more money missing.
So the RBC customers should keep their fingers crossed and hoped there aren't anymore screwups on their balances.
BTW, my suspicion on the slow fix on their computer systems may have to do with outsourcing. I believe hardly any big six still have a large in house IT personals for cost reasons. The majority of those people could have been outsourced to IBM or HP for cost savings. The chance will be there aren't enough IT personals from within and the outsource company to "nip the bud" right the way.
Again that's just pure speculation.
If my memory serves me right, all the big six banks use the same system to handle daily monetary transactions.xarir said:
Anybody can verify this?
Even if it was the results of hackers, chances are it will never be public knowledge. The old "Upgrade or systems problems" excuse relieves everyone's anxiety.
As a former employee of Royal Bank I recall when their website was hacked and even printed out a screen copy of it (someone had replaced all of the little goofy icons with sexually explicit related ones, very funny stuff). So to see this happen does not surprise me, chances are it was some disgruntled employee/customer that was ass-fucked by the Royal Bank and had the connections to ass-fuck them back in a meaner tougher way. If it was, then good for them! The banks have been reaming our shoots long enough.
But most white collar crimes are kept under wraps to prevent it becoming widespread public knowledge.
This is going to take a big bite out of the profits...Look for a nice rise in service charges to make up for this glitch!
As a former employee of Royal Bank I recall when their website was hacked and even printed out a screen copy of it (someone had replaced all of the little goofy icons with sexually explicit related ones, very funny stuff). So to see this happen does not surprise me, chances are it was some disgruntled employee/customer that was ass-fucked by the Royal Bank and had the connections to ass-fuck them back in a meaner tougher way. If it was, then good for them! The banks have been reaming our shoots long enough.
But most white collar crimes are kept under wraps to prevent it becoming widespread public knowledge.
This is going to take a big bite out of the profits...Look for a nice rise in service charges to make up for this glitch!
Of course they are NOT using the same machine! I mean using similar system, not sharing the same platform.bbking said:
I should say I am told there should be no more than 2 companies providing similar systems to the big six. There is no way all six banks using similar systems from one company only.
Not bad but isn't that true they should speed up the recovery time since 911?
BTW, you sound you are working at retail banking at RBC.
Hehehehehe, what a crock of shit. As if an automatic payroll system could crash a banking system. If that is the case then it should have been hacked ages ago!!!!bbking said:
Hehehehe, thanks for the laugh.
He got anal because he can't meet the impossibly high sales targets set up by "community managers" repeatedly, or got screwed by single female boss.Ref said:
The clients, staffs from the frontline, low and middle management got reamed repeatedly.
Unless it's an extortion on millions and millions of dollars, otherwise the banks just give in and then jacking up the sales targets to recover the cost.
Definitely not good news for the shareholders and the case for bank mergers. Another trouble for Mr. Nixon.
You could be right but we never know for sure.bbking said:
Regarding Gay whoever her last name is. Her job is purely damage control. This is just simple PR move and I don't want to sound sexist but having reassuring messages from attractive blondes can mitigate the damage to the Bank's goodwill.
At least the RBC is still maintaining the reputation intact when you consider other banks using high levage strategies to be the "big guys" in the financial world, something in the end they need to write down the losses handsomely and worst getting the attention from Eliot Spitzer.
Tell me, how does a routine payroll transfer program bring down a fucking bank system?bbking said:
All you require is the account details where funds are to be deposited (which have not changed) and the account they are to be taken from.
It's not that hard (Debit: Company bank account - Credit: Various payroll accounts).
Many payrolls even from other banks were caught in this mess. I know first hand. Parent companies that deal with the Royal Bank and have divisions that deal with other banks and use an outside payroll system were caught in the same "Computer Glitch". This isn't a simple problem as reported by CFTO.
They are using it as an excuse for a bigger problem.
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"Unless it's an extortion on millions and millions of dollars, otherwise the banks just give in and then jacking up the sales targets to recover the cost."
True enough. At least they understand the concept of materiality.
Canada Trust?bbking said:
The combined system (IBM and Window NT) is still a piece of junk and their reliability is not as advertised.
Outsourcing
However, they all outsource their back office operations, eg. records management, transaction processing (for example cheque clearing, ATM deposit processing, etc.).
I'm not aware that any of the big five outsource their IT operations. Something like that is just way too big, too critical and have too many confidentiality issues to allow outsiders to handle at the Bank.sweet guy said:
However, they all outsource their back office operations, eg. records management, transaction processing (for example cheque clearing, ATM deposit processing, etc.).
W
WhOiSyOdAdDy?
Re: Outsourcing
IE: credit / debit card processing, BOM & RBC merged their operations to form Moneris Solutions
A few of them have merged some of these operations alreadyjakester1701 said:
IE: credit / debit card processing, BOM & RBC merged their operations to form Moneris Solutions
I don't buy the city of Toronto payroll thing either. That's just a cover story. They may have gotten caught in the mele.
I deposited 2 cheques into RBC yesterday. The ATM gave me my balance and noted the cheques deposited. That was around 1:00 pm.
I deposited 2 cheques into RBC yesterday. The ATM gave me my balance and noted the cheques deposited. That was around 1:00 pm.
I think...
My thoughts are that someone definitely hacked into the system from either inside or outside. With mulitiple drives doing simultaneous write offsite and backups everyday, all it takes is a restore and minor append to the database.
Upgrade ? all that activitiy must be tested and signed off against existing parallel run data before use. A very unlikely story indeed.
I hear 255 people are working on it day and nite. This means that the database has to be rebuild or total reloaded (which explains the long duration required). On top of that, previous saved data must also be corrupt and unuseable without some processing.
My money is on a cyber invasion and hacking..or an inside job from a disgruntled IT employee.
My thoughts are that someone definitely hacked into the system from either inside or outside. With mulitiple drives doing simultaneous write offsite and backups everyday, all it takes is a restore and minor append to the database.
Upgrade ? all that activitiy must be tested and signed off against existing parallel run data before use. A very unlikely story indeed.
I hear 255 people are working on it day and nite. This means that the database has to be rebuild or total reloaded (which explains the long duration required). On top of that, previous saved data must also be corrupt and unuseable without some processing.
My money is on a cyber invasion and hacking..or an inside job from a disgruntled IT employee.
It has been a few years since I've worked with the Canadian banks, but I can share this:
- It was definitely WITHIN the bank. The banks' IT departments are HUGE (5,000 +/- each)... much bigger than the local IT operations who would like to outsource them (HP, IBM, EDS, CGI, etc.). Small pieces are sent out of shop from time to time (e.g. when they made the GM credit card, TD agreed to let GM subsidiary EDS process the transactions), but NEVER anything material or core to the business. Bankers don't trust ANYONE that much....
- There is no one "bank computer"... bank systems are very complex, with a shocking number of applications (programs) that inter-relate. Generally speaking, all of these applications feed a main transaction system (based on an IBM mainframe) that has real-time back-ups in a number of different physical locations.
The odds of a single feeder system (like a payroll system) being the cause of this are slim (it would be easy to "quarantine" and correct). There is obviously a serious problem with the main transaction database AND the disaster recovery sites, since they have to re-build from the transaction processing applications.
That said, do I believe it was an inside or outside "hack"? No. Their response (saying they understand the errors, and taking full blame for them) would preclude them from recovering the costs of resolving the problem, or the damages occured (either through insurance or litigation). And THAT is very "un-bank-like"....
I would bet that there was a major change to the main transaction processing system that wasn't tested thoroughly enough.
...and as a side bet, I think there will be a few IT openings at the Royal Bank over the next few months....
Best regards,
F.
- It was definitely WITHIN the bank. The banks' IT departments are HUGE (5,000 +/- each)... much bigger than the local IT operations who would like to outsource them (HP, IBM, EDS, CGI, etc.). Small pieces are sent out of shop from time to time (e.g. when they made the GM credit card, TD agreed to let GM subsidiary EDS process the transactions), but NEVER anything material or core to the business. Bankers don't trust ANYONE that much....
- There is no one "bank computer"... bank systems are very complex, with a shocking number of applications (programs) that inter-relate. Generally speaking, all of these applications feed a main transaction system (based on an IBM mainframe) that has real-time back-ups in a number of different physical locations.
The odds of a single feeder system (like a payroll system) being the cause of this are slim (it would be easy to "quarantine" and correct). There is obviously a serious problem with the main transaction database AND the disaster recovery sites, since they have to re-build from the transaction processing applications.
That said, do I believe it was an inside or outside "hack"? No. Their response (saying they understand the errors, and taking full blame for them) would preclude them from recovering the costs of resolving the problem, or the damages occured (either through insurance or litigation). And THAT is very "un-bank-like"....
I would bet that there was a major change to the main transaction processing system that wasn't tested thoroughly enough.
...and as a side bet, I think there will be a few IT openings at the Royal Bank over the next few months....
Best regards,
F.
good old Hal and Duncan Jackman .............. BB don't forget about Uncle Hal's other company at 165 University
