RoyalBankOfScotland
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IT glitch sees 600,000 RBS payments go missing (updated)
RBS has just stepped into another IT nightmare. The company, which owns the Royal Bank of Scotland, NatWest, Coutts and Ulster Bank, has admitted that 600,000 customer transactions weren't completed last night. It hasn't revealed the exact nature of the problem, referring to it only as "an issue with our overnight process." The electronic mishap means a large number of customers haven't had direct debits and credit applied to their accounts -- the sort of transactions that people normally use to make important payments, like household bills. The banking group says sorting its customer's balances is now a top priority and that delayed payments will be processed "no later than Saturday." That's quite a wait, although the larger question is how such a technology-centric failure was allowed to occur in the first place. Shouldn't there be fail-safes for these sorts of situations?
Visa lets iPhone-toting NatWest and RBS customers pay with NFC cases, join the future
Two can play at the UK-banks-with-NFC-payments game. RBS (and by extension, NatWest) is partnering with Visa Europe to roll out TouchPay, a mobile payment system based around an iCarte case for the iPhone 4 and 4S -- sorry, early iPhone 5 owners. In tandem with a native app, the service allows paying for goods at British shops by tapping the phone at a Visa-capable NFC terminal without needing the short-range wireless built-in. Any purchases under £20 ($32) can even skip the PIN code, if you're just in that much of a hurry to get a Pret À Manger sandwich. Only 1,000 of the 9,000 who pre-registered for TouchPay are getting into Visa's wallet-free initiative at this stage, although all NatWest and RBS customers with one of Apple's semi-recent smartphones can participate once a trial run is over. We're just wondering if and when Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone 8 owners get in on the action.
