People’s Choice Credit Union customers irritated by outages and slow online banking

A system upgrade is blamed for leaving tens of thousands of Australians without access to their online bank accounts.

People’s Choice Credit Union customers said the outage began on Sunday and they have been unable to log into their account since then.

Others said they were able to log in after waiting several minutes, although they were unable to see their transaction history.

In an email last night, People’s Choice chief executive Steve Laidlaw assured customers their funds were safe.

“It is unacceptable that you have not been able to access your funds for so long. You expect complete reliability from our systems, as do I,” Laidlaw wrote.

Adelaide-based People’s Choice says on its website it has 375,000 customers across Australia, with 27 branches in South Australia and nine highways.

The company also took to social media to let customers know about the issue.

This morning he posted on Twitter: “We understand that the issue many of you have been experiencing is related to an upgrade to our IT system. While there are still delays, there is improvement performance of internet banking applications and services.”

Customers are still struggling

The majority of customer responses have been far from lenient.

On Wednesday afternoon, many said they couldn’t log into the mobile banking app, while others said they could log into online banking, but after a long delay.

“I was only able to access my quick balance at 2:30 am!!!!! I still can’t access my accounts, and I can’t afford to wait to get to the call center,” said writes a customer.

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Others threatened to change financial institutions after the debacle.

One user wrote: “You are going in the right direction if you expect customers to find another more reliable banking experience!”

Another client requested that staff be made redundant during the three-day hiatus.

“Hi. I believe as a voting member of People’s Choice I want to start a petition for the IT team to be fired,” the person wrote.

“In a big company like this, why don’t you do some upgrade testing on another dummy server to make sure there are no issues before rolling it out to the main server?”

One member, Cassandra McRae, was even contacted by the credit union after she failed to repay a home loan due to the issue.

She tried to go to an agency, but was told that her payment could not be processed there either.

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She said the credit union’s lack of communication had been a serious problem.

“I think their public relations could have handled this in a way that would at least let us know they know they’re working on it – yeah, okay, maybe it’s out of their control, but they do something about it,” she said.

“But to have an arrogant attitude because their systems don’t work, what am I supposed to do with that?”

In a statement, People’s Choice acknowledged that customers “were experiencing slower than normal connection speeds for their online banking and mobile banking app,” leading many to abandon their connection attempts.

He said there were no problems with telephone banking, branches or people using cards.

“We understand this is not acceptable and will work with members negatively impacted by this issue.

“Solving this problem is our top priority.”