Fergie's Tech Blog

Australia: Consumers Pay for Banks' Creaky Old Systems

Karen Dearne writes on Australian IT:

Banks slugged householders more than $1.6 billion in penalties for failed direct debits, exceeding card limits and late payments on credit cards last year, consumer magazine Choice says, but they have been slow to adopt new technology to prevent errors.

Banking systems and practices will come under scrutiny in a Senate inquiry on the Fair Bank and Credit Card Fees Amendment Bill, introduced by Family First Senator Steve Fielding last year.

"Outrageous bank fees need to be reined in," he said. "Banks have been encouraging people to use electronic transactions, but instead of fees coming down they've gone up."

"The issue is doing away with fees that are totally unfair, and getting the rest back to reasonable cost recovery." Mike Aston, chief executive of real-time payments processing developer Distra, said most banks and credit card firms were still using systems that were 25 to 30 years old, and written in the obsolete Cobol language.

posted by Fergie @ 3/24/2008 05:44:00 PM