HSBC

They messed … no fucked up big time today, well technically they did it on Wednesday.

All bacs payments received on Wednesday to be paid today had not been processed due to “a corrupted file”. Like how many millions in the UK should have received their salary today?? Answer: everybody who either gets paid on the 28 or 29 or 30 of April, and then there is all the Purchase ledger payments.

Fancy working in a Finance dept when people have not been paid??

My line manager and I arrived at exactly the same this morning. He told me that the txt from the bank did not include his salary. I checked my bank, nope no salary in my account either. In the meantime, he checks the company bank account and no payment has been deducted and there is no pending payment either.

Panic … until I verified that I had used the right value date on the payment and that the bank had received the payment.

Next step, kick some arse at the bank to find out what has gone wrong. I’d have to say that my line manager is great of kickin’ arse *hehe*.

First call to our branch managerbut he had not arrived yet at work. Next call he did went to a (Indian/ Pakistani/ Bangalore) call centre and he got the reply “Technical issues so sorry”. Well, we all know that call centres are there to fob off customers not to give service. And frankly it doesn’t help to come to an Indian (or similar) call centre where they read a scrip and don’t know about anything of the UK bank system.

My manager shouted down the phone “It is not a technical issue - it is people’s salaries” He might even used the work fuck in there too. In the meantime, the staff is just dropping by (yeah right) the Finance office with the sentence “I don’t know if you know but ...” We were like “Don’t say it, we know and trying to find out what has happened”

Next call and he got hold of our branch manager and my manager had to tell him the good news. With the questions, what are you going to do? At the end, we faxed over the bank details and amount and some poor staff had to manually input the into the swift system (my guess) and after a few hours the money appeared in my bank account *woooohooo*

My guess is that thousands or maybe millions of people did not get paid today and this is a bank holiday weekend so the payment will come in people’s bank account on Tuesday. HSBC issued a silly statement in the lines of “don’t worry the other banks have been told about the problems and the payment date will be 2 May. Do not use any other system to get the payments done today”

Yeah right, tell that to the people who can’t get out any money from the cash point or default on a mortgage payment.

I had a couple of conversations like “my mortgage goes out today”, “I am £1000 overdrawn without the payment” etc and of course the smart arse of our IT manager comes up to me and asks “What is going on in finance dept? What did you guys do wrong?” Jokes are mostly ok but trust me there are sometimes when it is not appropriate and this was one of them. I snapped back to him and said Not our fault (silent: you idiot).

Anyway it had a happy ending for our part and my line manager saved the day for a lot of people.