In one of the worst messes since banks put their faith in computers, today is the fifth day in which the Royal Bank of Canada cannot tell its 10 million Canadian customers with any certainty how much money is in their accounts.
Canada's biggest bank, suddenly a symbol of risks facing an automated society, has a problem that has kept tens of millions of transactions — including what appears to be every direct payroll deposit it handles — from showing up in accounts for days at a time.
The chaos has hit other banks whose customers awaited transfers from the Royal, notably in New Brunswick, where it processes payroll deposits for more than 10,000 provincial employees. It is unclear how many people have suffered hardship despite bankers' pledges to bend the rules where possible to help those with pressing needs.
Vicky Deschênes, a New Brunswick Finance Department official, said she could afford to wait a day or two for her pay, "but for some employees this morning when I came to work, it was a concern for them and they were asking: 'Am I going to pay fees for that? Am I going to be penalized for that?'."
Bank officials said customers can still get at their accounts through branches or bank machines and can withdraw money that was there before the trouble hit, plus varying sums based on individual limits attached to their client cards.
Judi Levita, a Royal Bank media-relations officer, said anyone facing a crunch should make a personal plea. "You go into a branch, talk to the branch manager, bring along your pay stub, because they can usually pull [past transactions] up on a computer and they're going to be able see, oh, yeah, John has this deposit made every other week, etc., and we're sure it's sitting there."
In those circumstances, the customer could withdraw the money, she said.
The bank also promised to reverse services fees and overdraft interest charges incurred by its clients because of the glitch, including those charged by other banks, and to consider paying "other reasonable costs" on an individual basis.
Its nightmare began during what it called a routine programming update. As best it could explain yesterday, its entire national system failed to register withdrawals and deposits against customer balances on Monday, on Tuesday and again on Wednesday, and by yesterday, the system was stalled by the weight of the backlog.
Restoring data a day at a time, the bank hopes to get Wednesday's transactions on-line today but warns that yesterday's transactions are unlikely to show up until tomorrow.
"We have 155 people on the day shift working just on this alone, and then we have another 90 people who are in doing nights and graveyard shifts," said Ms. Levita, whose duties included trying to describe the origins of the problem.
"I am not a technical person," she said. "It did have to do with computer software and at this point I understand it did have something to do with sequencing."
Sequencing of what?
"I honestly don't know. As I say, I mean, it's one of those tech things."
None of the bank's technical people could discuss it, she said. "At this point, no. They're too busy working on getting everything corrected."
George Geczy, a software developer and computer consultant based in Ancaster, Ont., guessed that the problem involves identification numbers assigned to transactions.
"Obviously if somebody made a deposit before they made a withdrawal then the bank needs to know the order that happened in. Programmers rarely use time stamps any more because time can actually be a little imprecise. Everything gets assigned a unique sequence number."
Such numbers can paralyze computers when gaps or duplications show up, he said.
Perhaps the system "was expecting the next number to arrive — the next sequence number, the next transaction — and didn't get the next transaction and then it would go into a state where it was waiting for that missing transaction. It wouldn't process anything else because if it did move on past the missing number everything would be out of order."
In New Brunswick, provincial pay deposits were expected to reach employees' accounts by this morning at the latest. But in Ontario, many provincial employees joined the list of those affected by delays yesterday, Canadian Press reported.
One area of bank operations was not hobbled.
"I owe them a Visa payment, but this glitch hasn't affected their ability to collect the money that's owed to them," Maria Janchenko, 26, said in Toronto, adding that she had been contacted three times this week by a collection agency.
With a report from Erin Pooley
