If you're a TD Bank customer, this has not been a good week. You already know that a computer glitch led to a delay in updating account transactions. This also means that customers' automatic payments weren't so automatic which is less than convenient as the first of the month is a pretty busy time. Larry Dignan over at ZDNet covers the situation well in his blog post.

This is just one of many recent glitches that have made headlines. Can they all be prevented? No. Can they be minimized? Yes. Absolutely yes. On this blog, I've addressed this issue in the past and yet again it raises the question about the level of governance that's currently actively used by I.T. departments.

While most I.T. teams believe in the value of governance, I'm going to venture a guess that TD Bank has it in place. However, what I'm finding from conversations with other financial services companies is that governance is often put into place for certain projects or by specific departments which leads to performance gaps. The other issue that frequently comes up is that governance is one of the last steps before the software is released. Seems that it would make sense to put in governance as the software code is being written so that policy violations and mistakes don't make their way through the entire infrastructure and potentially wreak havoc on consumers' bank accounts and credit reports.

Let me also say that while I’m not an expert on the TD Bank situation, I realize that now is not the time for finger pointing. the glitch is traced to the recent merger which is no small undertaking when you consider all of the systems and applications that need to be integrated. 

However, how many of you in the financial services industry are thinking, 'whew, wouldn't want to be TD Bank today,' yet realizing that you could be the next headline. And for consumers, you're probably also double checking your balances regardless of where your money is located.

I understand that the TD Bank team has been working around the clock to address this issue so hats off to them as they have a monumental task ahead of them.

Do you think the TD Bank issue could have been avoided? Share your thoughts at jeff@weblayers.com