What on Earth is Happening at smile Bank?

DairyQueen

eskbanker said:

DairyQueen said:

eskbanker said:

but the fact remains that Smile is a tiny niche provider, in the context of the wider market you were citing, regardless of how long they've been in existence for.

So is Coutts. I very much doubt that the media would have ignored a 4-day outage at that establishment.

Not sure what the value or relevance is of unsupported speculation about a hypothetical scenario involving an entirely different small bank?

Disingenuous comment? Your username suggests so.  I doubt the relevance has been missed by the majority on this forum. 

blue.peter

It appears that it is now fixed. The Co-op Bank web site says:

8am, Saturday 11 July: 

Following emergency maintenance on both our smile and Co-operative Bank systems, we have been able to restore access to smile online banking and the smile mobile app for our customers. We are extremely sorry for the inconvenience this issue has caused as we know this is not the standard of service expected from us. Thank you for bearing with us.

We will work to support any of our customers who have experienced any detriment whilst smile online banking and the smile app were unavailable and we encourage any impacted customers to contact us to discuss their circumstances.

There's also a BBC News article (dated yesterday) here.

bloodynicebloke

And everyone is happy to rush towards a cashless society. Once it is in place you are then at the mercy of banks and authorities to prevent you using your account at their will. This is a taste of things to come.

eskbanker

DairyQueen said:

eskbanker said:

DairyQueen said:

eskbanker said:

but the fact remains that Smile is a tiny niche provider, in the context of the wider market you were citing, regardless of how long they've been in existence for.

So is Coutts. I very much doubt that the media would have ignored a 4-day outage at that establishment.

Not sure what the value or relevance is of unsupported speculation about a hypothetical scenario involving an entirely different small bank?

Disingenuous comment? Your username suggests so.  I doubt the relevance has been missed by the majority on this forum. 

Doubling down on the inaccurate speculation and wayward theorising then?

Anyway, you'll doubtless be delighted that the BBC have finally managed to scrape together a piece about this, albeit only by going for a patronising human interest angle - it mentions that Smile only has 100,000 customers so it shouldn't be a surprise that mainstream media choose to report on stories of more interest to the other 99.85% of the population....

SebH

j.p said:

DairyQueen said:

SebH said:

The Co-op website is working fine for me this morning, I logged in to internet banking about 15 minutes ago without any problems. It seems to have been fixed!

Co-op Bank appears unaffected. This issue is specific to smile. Go figure.

I think the fact that the Co-op Bank's online banking works but Smile doesn't is quite intriguing. I wouldn't have thought it possible, since they are seemingly the same system with different colours, and probably share most of the underlying infrastructure (besides the institution being one and the same of course).
It's also frustrating that Smile won't say what is wrong on the web site or how long it'll take, or have a dedicated status page displaying more information. Other banks have also a notification system whereby you can subscribe to an SMS alert that tells you when it's working again. This shouldn't be too complicated to implement. It wouldn't even need to match that against customer records: just notify any number that the web site visitor enters.
They could also make a statement promising to make good any fees or charges customers incur due to their inability to use online banking. As this is not any bank with an online system, it is a bank that is precisely predicated on being an online bank.
Meanwhile, the home page reads "These are just words. We'd rather let our products do the talking." Ironic if you ask me.

I'd just like to apologise for my ill-informed post the other day; I don't have a smile account (only Co-op) but, as others have said, assumed that the IT was completely the same as maintenance and outages have always coincided before. Pleased to read that posters are able to login again after the overnight maintenance, but it's even more intriguing to read that the maintenance which seems to have deployed the fix resulted in both Co-op and smile being down overnight. I wonder why this was if the original problem didn't seem to affect Co-op?

IanManc

eskbanker said:

but the fact remains that Smile is a tiny niche provider, in the context of the wider market you were citing, regardless of how long they've been in existence for.

So is Coutts. I very much doubt that the media would have ignored a 4-day outage at that establishment.

Not sure what the value or relevance is of unsupported speculation about a hypothetical scenario involving an entirely different small bank?

Disingenuous comment? Your username suggests so.  I doubt the relevance has been missed by the majority on this forum. 

How does a username which indicates that someone is on the bank of the River Esk suggest that their comment is disingenuous?  🤔

London7766551

I do wonder that they transferred everything over to the co-op back end working system. Both Smile and Co-Op went down. One wonders why they have kept Smile going in the first place.

bloodynicebloke said:

And everyone is happy to rush towards a cashless society. Once it is in place you are then at the mercy of banks and authorities to prevent you using your account at their will. This is a taste of things to come.

Unfortunately it is the way of the world. Didn't we used to pay for everything with gold etc? I always use the logic that cash is king. But you can bet once Covid is "over" a lot of shops won't go back to accepting cash. But at the end of the day, I suspect cash will be around for another 50 or so years, it is just that most people will not use it. But it will still be there, harder to get hold of or use. The simple thing to do is to have more than one bank account or have a credit card at a different bank. Never put all your eggs in one basket. If the banking system ever fails, the cash will be no use anyway.

gsmh

The strangest of the almost obsolete brands has to be cahoot. I've had a cahoot current account for years and it is still fully functional. I used it the other day to pay cash in at the Post Office to then transfer to my day-to-day current account which has no means of paying in cash. I notice Santander, of which cahoot is a brand, is advertising cahoot loans. I have often wondered why Santander keeps it going and hasn't simply shifted accounts over to the main brand. The main office for cahoot is now in Belfast, another oddity for a bank based in England.

Zanderman

DairyQueen said:

eskbanker said:

DairyQueen said:

eskbanker said:

but the fact remains that Smile is a tiny niche provider, in the context of the wider market you were citing, regardless of how long they've been in existence for.

So is Coutts. I very much doubt that the media would have ignored a 4-day outage at that establishment.

Not sure what the value or relevance is of unsupported speculation about a hypothetical scenario involving an entirely different small bank?

Disingenuous comment? Your username suggests so.  I doubt the relevance has been missed by the majority on this forum. 

Perhaps you should visit non-financial sites now and then. 
This one seems quite restful.  https://www.facebook.com/Eskbank-Wildlife-and-Biodiversity-corridor-451587875613462/
And this one quite educational: https://www.visitscotland.com/info/towns-villages/eskbank-p240221

SebH

London7766551 said:

I do wonder that they transferred everything over to the co-op back end working system. Both Smile and Co-Op went down. One wonders why they have kept Smile going in the first place.

bloodynicebloke said:

And everyone is happy to rush towards a cashless society. Once it is in place you are then at the mercy of banks and authorities to prevent you using your account at their will. This is a taste of things to come.

Unfortunately it is the way of the world. Didn't we used to pay for everything with gold etc? I always use the logic that cash is king. But you can bet once Covid is "over" a lot of shops won't go back to accepting cash. But at the end of the day, I suspect cash will be around for another 50 or so years, it is just that most people will not use it. But it will still be there, harder to get hold of or use. The simple thing to do is to have more than one bank account or have a credit card at a different bank. Never put all your eggs in one basket. If the banking system ever fails, the cash will be no use anyway.

It seems they have now admitted, in a roundabout fashion in a little-used part of their website, that this was a database issue caused by maintenance going wrong. I don’t think I can post a link as I’m a new user, but if you are interested you can search for co-operative bank app upgrade and you will probably find the article.

Essentially, it seems very similar to the great RBS/NatWest/Ulster meltdown of 2012, when a faulty upgrade to CA-7 ruined their batch processing and cut off access to accounts. In this instance, it seems like, whatever upgrade it was, was tried first on the smile system as it’s the smaller number of customers. Normally, it  would presumably have been applied to the parallel Co-op system immediately after. Except they must have noticed immediately that it had gone wrong, so it was never applied to the Co-op system. This must be why only smile faced problems.

My guess is both were then taken down as the two databases were merged from the “good” Co-op copy and the transactions were then re-applied through batch processing. Either that, or fixing the problem with the patch took all week, then it was applied to the Co-op system overnight and the smile system was rolled-back to before the maintenance, the fixed version of the patch applied and then batch processing run again to get accounts up to date?

I find this sort of thing oddly fascinating, so it’s interesting to see what might have happened. Personally, I think it’s poor that they don’t bother to come out and give customers a proper explanation!