This is exactly right… legacy systems are struggling to add modern bolt-ons without causing a total catastrophe with either customer data, security or any number of bugs that creep in with such archaic systems.
As a student I worked at Lloyd’s Bank in the call centres, and Jesus EVERYTHING was so backward you’d be forgiven for thinking it was the 70s. All the TMS systems that they had for ordering currency, all the business banking was paper-based (and still is in some cases, even though the customer still completes transactions digitally). But this problem goes for any large corporate who hasn’t thoughtfully developed their own software.
Vodafone had a software update and systems merge in the UK that was catastrophic in terms of losing credibility, charging customers totally incorrectly, accidentally giving customers multiple accounts with multiple numbers. Etc. Etc. They were left with multiple data sources for what tariff the customer was on. None of it correct. All of it led to things like people paying for 4G, but only ever getting 3G. People got so pissed off because no one took ownership and eventually people left by the boatload and the ombudsman had to take notice.
In a nutshell… archaic backend systems with no scalability.
You’re not going to convince everyone here by posting to one positive link anymore than I am going to convince you with multiple links.
It’s OK to disagree on these things… I personally think Legacy banks are better at handling these things than the fintechs (all of them and not just Monzo)
I used to be with Vodafone. Had a fairly straightforward contract and didn’t ever make use of anything that would add charges on outside of the contract (never exceeded my limits, never roamed, etc), so charging wise that part never went wrong.
BUT
For many years, I could never access my account online. If I tried to log in, it would load an Oracle-branded login page instead (seemed to me like instead of showing me the customer page, it was giving me some kind of system maintenance login page instead). Obviously, I couldn’t log in with that. Chatting with support, getting my account reset, never led anywhere. I’d always have to resolve my issues another way instead. Thought I was going mad until I found other people on the internet saying they had the same problem (Vodafone never admitted there was a problem, always said there was nothing wrong with their site). It was only finally resolved when my contract was up and I thought “I might as well have one last plug at their site before I get very grumpy down other avenues” and it turned out the site (a) now looked totally different, and (b) worked, so I guess they built a new site at some point instead of fixing the broken one. It’d been so long at that point I was genuinely shocked the problem was gone.
tl;dr, suppose what I’m asking is, was the constantly broken site a consequence of their catastrophic systems merge, or was this actually a completely separate disaster?
I worked at Vodafone when this happened - they switched their system over from their own in-house house one to a system by Oracle.
When you logged in the online site had to determine which system your site was on and direct you to your appropriate ‘My Account’. It didn’t exactly go smoothly as we all know.
They even had to set up an internal call centre for staff calling with Oracle related issues because the system was just that bad. Everything you do is an ‘order’ - even changing an address and you’d often find an order just got stuck for no reason in ‘pending’ and this would lock everything out and any further changes or access.
It was a huge systems migration that was a total failure. Somewhere along the line, customer data and account info from the two systems was well and truly buggered. It led to a total crash in customer satisfaction throughout Europe. So guessing it will have definitely been linked. Some people reported that their bills had inflated, others had no access to account info. Some had no 4G because of a legacy data failure deeper than the new systems could even see.
I went to the ombudsman, got my contract ended 6 months in, got to keep my brand new phone too. But they were terrible throughout, clearly having to deal with a daily onslaught of customers not getting what they paid for. The call centre tech people never took ownability of anything, there was even a specific vodafone ombudsman Ombudsman team set up (the vodafone employees who had balls of steel) to deal with angry customers.
Before I was a teacher, I worked in a social work department. The department uses as database system to store all the personal details of children who came through or made contact with the department.
This system they used was built in the late 1980’s so they created a ‘new’ second system in the 2000’s to update the system. All this did was scrape the old first system for information and was much slower due to that fact. When I was leaving in 2012, they were introducing a ‘newer’ third system which used the second system, which scraped the first system…
All the complaints I ever heard from the social workers was how slow these ‘new’ systems were. Luckily, I had access to the original old first system (it was never restricted once the ‘newer’ systems were introduced) so always used that as it was much faster.
