Major bank's outage leaves borrowers in 'limbo', broker says

According to the website Downdetector, by around 1:00pm there were more than 30,000 customers who had reported problems with either mobile or online banking.

Mortgage broker and director at JT Home Loan Joshua Trevitt said some of his clients were unable to make fixed rate changes as the online “manage my loan” function was down.

Mr Trevitt said technical failures can be expected as digital advancements in the banking sector grow.

“It is a problem CBA can have from time to time being at the cutting edge of banking platforms and having the functionality they do comes at a cost of reliability,” Mr Trevitt said.

Just over a decade ago, the Commonwealth Bank introduced ‘real-time data’ to the online banking experience, based on SAP software, to improve the user experience.

“The old way our major banks used to platform their tech offerings was through mainframe systems… [But] CBA broke away from others like ANZ and Westpac who still use mainframe at the cost of cool upgrades for more reliable platform performance.”

As such, some of his clients are in “limbo until this is remedied”.

“The call to prioritise features and data over slightly better reliability is still the right call in my eyes.”

Mr Trevitt said while clients “rave about their functionality”, it's moments like this where they are impacted by tech failures that outweighs the positive impact of changes.

In an updated statement at 4:00pm CBA said services were "recovering following intermittent issues that some customers experienced".

"We can confirm we have identified the cause of the issue and services are being restored.

"We are very sorry for the inconvenience this has caused. We know how much customers depend on us and we sincerely apologise to those who have been impacted today.

"Please note there may be delays in some payments as we continue to bring services back online."

The bank recently announced a series of innovations and technological advances designed to strengthen and deepen the customer experience as increasing numbers of customers switch to digital banking.

The improved CommBank app 5.0 was launched to deliver individually tailored content and new dynamic navigation to make it simpler, better and easier for its 7.7 million users.

CBA CEO Matt Comyn said: “Utilising global leading artificial intelligence and building on the digital investments and advances we have made in recent years, we are now able to better understand the needs of our 8.3 million digitally active customers, delivering them more tailored and relevant services, and offering more choices and highly-differentiated benefits than ever before.”

Through its partnership with Silicon Valley-based H2O.ai, which CBA announced two years ago, the bank is exploring and building out capability to experiment with new generative technologies resulting in more personalised customer offerings, such as the Benefits finder service and improved fraud and scam detection systems.

[Related: CBA to offer reduced serviceability buffers]