Software Glitch at SunTrust Creates Overnight Billionaires
Posted by Jeff Papows on Mon, Mar 29, 2010 @ 07:49 PM
If you were one of the lucky – or perhaps unlucky -- customers of SunTrust, you may have noticed a temporary boost to your bank account. A boost of $88 billion to be more specific. It turns out that a software glitch in the system credited several customers' and showed they had an account balance of $88,888,888,888.88.
While the computing error was significant in and of itself, I have to wonder why it was first discovered by the customer as opposed to the bank. And after the good citizen reported the error, the problem was temporarily solved by SunTrust freezing the accounts that were affected by the glitch. Now that's a bit of an extreme solution if you ask me, not to mention the frustration it likely caused for the innocent customers.
Now I don't mean to sound like a broken record here, but it seems to me that there may be a lack of IT governance in place at SunTrust that would cause a glitch of this magnitude. Thankfully, the glitch was solved within a few hours. However, an all or nothing approach to banking is probably not the best strategy.
Of course, this isn't the first time we've seen issues like this. On the opposite end of the spectrum, a computer glitch at TDBank last summer failed to recognize payroll direct deposit checks of customers. The cause for this was the massive integration project that was underway at the bank in the wake of its merger with Commerce One.
Now glitches are a fact of life in our fully instrumented and digitized worlds.
However, we can decrease their appearance and proliferation as they continue to capture the spotlight. While IT governance certainly isn't a cure all, it's one way to stem the issue before it begins.
If you've been reading this blog for a while, you know I'm adamant about good software design and even more fanatical about the way it's executed so that these types of glitches don't continue to rear their ugly heads.
You can bet that the SunTrust software glitch will fade into the background as another glitch takes its place in the headlines. However, as of Monday afternoon, there wasn't any mention of it on the SunTrust web site. It seems to me that there should be some sort of statement from the company regarding the status of such a large snafu.
The duck and cover strategy that SunTrust currently has in place is not unlike other banks that were dealing with major glitches and not fully disclosing the cause of the glitch.
While IT governance is one way to address the issue, shared learning is another. I'm not asking these banks to disclose confidential information, but one would hope that they would be a bit more forthcoming about the cause of these glitches so that they can own it and move on appropriately, and perhaps enlighten more of us in the industry so that future issues can potentially be avoided.
Readers, what do you think? How much should a bank disclose to the public about a computer glitch if the problem is resolved and money isn't lost?