You may recall my terrible arrival in Tokyo where I couldn’t get any money from the ATMs.
For historic reasons my bank in Germany is the GLS Bank, an alternative and esoteric bank that pretends it’s good. Their statement after the fact was the following:
Von Sammstag bis Montagmittag lag eine Störung vor, sodass Bankkarten als auch Kreditkarten nicht funktionierten.
This is quite staggering. It means they had a disruption to all card payments from Saturday until Monday afternoon.
I don’t consider a three day disruption to be acceptable for any service, but especially in banking there are supposed to be very stringent compliance requirements around uptime that should make something like this impossible.
The GLS does not ship any new features like ever, if they also can’t keep what they have stable, then there is no point.
I was curious and the good custom in our industry is to disclose details of the incident as well as about the remediation you undertook and will still do to make sure this does not happen again.
Their response to my request was:
Bitte haben Sie Verständnis dafür, dass wir zu bankinternen Störungen keine Details mitteilen. Sie können gewiss sein, dass wir die Ursachen ermitteln und präventiv arbeiten.
That they are a backward and not particularly customer friendly organization is something that’s not news to me. And I definitely do not trust that they will track down the root causes and prevent them from happening again.
The only question is whether there are any other German banks that are any better than this.
