A few months back, Corporation Bank suddenly changed its account numbering system and issued new account numbers to all its customers. While doing so, it was expected that the Bank would prepare it’s systems to manage the transition by accepting old account numbers for a certain period of time so that if any remittances are received with the old account numbers, the amount would be automatically credited to the new accounts.
This could have been easily done with the maintenance of a mapping database which mapped the new numbers to the old numbers and initiating a process of checking of the data base whenever an error is logged. It could have been a manual intervention at this stage also if required.
Unfortunately, the system engineers did not plan the transition properly and hence NEFT remittances received in the new account number were rejected by the system. The old numbers are still getting accepted indicating that some systems have not yet been updated.
The branch does not seem to have a clue on this error and are unable to provide a solution. They seem to think that there could be problems in interbank remittances but not in corporation bank to corporation bank remittances.
I would like to draw the attention of the Bank to this problem which besides being a customer service issue could also be looked at as a “Denial of Service Issue”. If remittances are not received, businesses may not be able to conduct their regular business transactions and the ripple effect of this would be on many of the Bank’s customers as well as the business associates of the customers.
It is possible that the problem may be at the Switch maintained by NPCI or IDRBT where there may be a cache of account particulars which is rejecting the transactions due to the mismatch between the new account number and the names associated with the old account numbers.
I hope that the IT personnel of the Bank will be alert to this note and set things right at the earliest.
Naavi
Very well said. I wonder how a bank of the repute of Corporation Bank with such a good number of IT professionals can be so unaware of the technological (or techno legal) issues in data migration from one system to another and the resultatn change management processes. Many bank customers do not prefer going to courts under normal circumstnaces, which is what gives a misguided comfort feeling to such banks.