Security Bank Corp., the country’s fifth-largest bank in terms of assets, said it experienced a delay in posting banking transactions in its system Tuesday.
The bank, however, said in a statement the incident would not impact the financial integrity of its customers’ accounts.
“Yesterday, we encountered a delay in posting banking transactions on our systems. We continue to perform system maintenance activities to address this and expect our systems to be fully updated by close of business today,” Security Bank said.
“While some services were affected, the delay did not prevent our customers from accessing their funds,” it said.
Security Bank apologized for the inconvenience the delay might have caused its customers. It said all bank branches and customer service representatives were ready to attend to and accommodate any and all transactions as necessary.
Security Bank extended banking hours until 7 p.m. on June 21.
Meanwhile, a Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas said Bank of the Philippine Islands could face sanctions if investigations showed that it violated regulations on the banking laws after an electronic glitch affected some of its accountholders early this month.
Bangko Sentral assistant governor Chuchi Fonacier, representing the supervision and examination sector, said at the sidelines of a Senate hearing Wednesday, the imposition of any sanction “would also depend on how the bank [BPI] took action or responded to the problem.”
“It would warrant a sanction if there were really violations of regulations on the banking laws. But as I said, it would also depend on how the bank took action on the problem. So those things need a really holistic assessment of the situation,” Fonacier said.
She said as a general rule, Bangko Sentral could impose monetary or non-monetary sanctions on any bank but these would depend on the nature and whether they violated the rules of banking laws.
BPI, the third-largest bank in terms of assets, suspended access to its electronic services on June 7 after an internal processing error resulted in transactions from April 27 to May 2 to be double-posted.
BPI president Cezar Consing told the Senate hearing that the bank immediately informed the Bangko Sentral about the incident, assuring the regulator that there was no breach in its privacy and that it was doing all it could to regain its standing. He said the glitch was fixed on June 9.
He said 1.5 million accounts were affected out of the bank’s 8 million clients. He said this was a result of a programmer’s “error in judgment.” He said the person responsible for the error was already transferred to another department.
Senator Francis Escudero, chairman of the Senate committee on banks, financial institutions and currencies, asked Bangko Sentral officials to submit to the committee a copy of the report of the regulator’s investigation.
Fonacier said the investigation might be completed in July. She also urged the banking public to make initiatives themselves to go to their banks and have their ATM cards be EMV (Europay Mastercard Visa) compliant.