Outdated tech behind Aussie bank IT outages

Australia’s banking sector needs to upgrade its legacy IT systems and adopt international best practice standards to address frequent outages, according to Tyro Payments CEO Jost Stollmann.

Commonwealth Bank was hit with a widespread outage on Thursday causing problems with credit cards, internet and mobile banking, ATMs, BPay and EFTPOS services.

This was the bank’s third major outage since June and the eighth time in the last eight months that Australian big banks’ IT systems have crashed, Stollmann said.

“Electronic payments are the arteries of a modern economy, but the banks have ageing and archaic IT systems that are expensive to maintain and prone to collapse,” he said.

“For too long, banks have starved the payment infrastructure of innovation and investment. Australia’s banking IT systems have the reliability of a 1970s Leyland PT76 [ed note: P76], when customers deserve a 21st-century BMW.”

He noted remarks by then CBA CIO Michael Harte in 2012 that the bank spends more than half of its $1.2 billion annual technology spend on keeping legacy IT systems alive.

Stollman said a $30 million investment in an up-to-date system has allowed Tyro Payments, which primarily provides EFTPOS for Australian retailers, to deliver 99.996% system availability.

Image courtesy of redspotted under CC