Don't any solicitors bank with Natwest?

GDB2222

Given the computer issues at Natwest, I was expecting a whole raft of posts "My house purchase/sale has not completed because my solicitor banks with Natwest", but nary a one. Friday is a big day for completions, so how come it's all gone smoothly?

agrinnall

Clearly it hasn't all gone smoothly as there have been several reports on the tellybox of exactly that issue. I supect there are also posts on here about it but that they are buried in the pages and pages of other complaints about NatWest.

propertyman

They announced this morning that all late completion monies had been transferred and that these were being prioritised.

It's odd that this happened the same day that Microsoft issued a series of updates that caused 2 of our laptops, and mine, to enter the bios and have to be manually booted. They all gave off the single long tone of warning of an electrical short.

FireWyrm

Well I for one dont believe for one second this was all a 'computer issue'. Frankly, it's inconceivable that a bank should effectively cease to trade for two days...quite appart from an apparent lack of failover, its just not possible for all banking servers to go down at the same time and they are unable to recover for two whole days. Where the hell were the backups, the failover, the bloody IT department? No...something else is going on. Either they ran out of money, or this was a dry run to test how the public would react to a sudden shut down of banking in this country. Considering that the government owns a sizeable portion of NW, suggests the latter.

lincroft1710

Certainly in the past, solicitors would have accounts with more than one bank, but I don't know if solicitors still do this.

G_M

Yes, and there are reds under the beds too!

FireWyrm

G_M wrote: »

Yes, and there are reds under the beds too!

Why do would you dismiss what I said as nothing more than a conspiracy theory? Please do enlighten us as to how several hundred distinct servers running as load balanced, fire walled to hell and beyond actually failed and caused a bank to cease trading for TWO days? I assume your background in IT security and large server farm maintenance can offer an alternative explanation that is more plausible than mine. While you're at it, I would be interested to hear your opinion on how backups could not be bought online within hours and IT managers were not sweating bullets and it was barely reported in the papers despite the no doubt widespread disruption to everyday life.

I take it that you are also one of the many who believe the 'assurances' from the BOE that the chaos currently being experienced across the EU could not possibly effect the financial life of this island?

It was a dry run. They were testing a shut down proceedure in case it was needed in the near future to protect the bank against a run. The good news is that most citizens were reasonably well behaved and trusting, a testament to the continuous diet of general misinformation and propaganda that the people are fed daily via the BBC. How those same people will behave when it is more than one bank...I shudder to think.

PasturesNew

Mine was completing on Friday and held up due to NW issues.... big delay.... all sorted by employees walking necessary bank transfer papers into physical branches.

G_M

FireWyrm wrote: »

Why do would you dismiss what I said as nothing more than a conspiracy theory? Please do enlighten us as to how several hundred distinct servers running as load balanced, fire walled to hell and beyond actually failed and caused a bank to cease trading for TWO days? I assume your background in IT security and large server farm maintenance can offer an alternative explanation that is more plausible than mine. While you're at it, I would be interested to hear your opinion on how backups could not be bought online within hours and IT managers were not sweating bullets and it was barely reported in the papers despite the no doubt widespread disruption to everyday life.

I take it that you are also one of the many who believe the 'assurances' from the BOE that the chaos currently being experienced across the EU could not possibly effect the financial life of this island?

It was a dry run. They were testing a shut down proceedure in case it was needed in the near future to protect the bank against a run. The good news is that most citizens were reasonably well behaved and trusting, a testament to the continuous diet of general misinformation and propaganda that the people are fed daily via the BBC. How those same people will behave when it is more than one bank...I shudder to think.

:rotfl::rotfl:
Thanks! Love it!

PasturesNew

.... and before you say "but you don't have a house"... I'll say to you that you don't need to have one or own one to be selling one .... executor/Power of Attorney.

PasturesNew

I've built and executed a live "systems shut down" in the past (1998) of a financial institution system. I was doing it in reverse... the shut down was real, I was hiding it from the staff as being a "test scenario". They're actually easily done and this c0ck up is nothing like a test of a real shut down at all.

To shut down a live system and do full lock down took just one middle-range techie half a day to program and test.

Then, when I told him "hit it" and told everybody in the room to watch - and I explained what they were watching ... the batch then took nearly 30 minutes to run, with all the confirm/OKs running down the screen.