The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) gave assurance the so-called misposting in one of the country’s biggest banks was unique to the lender and that other banks were unlikely to experience the same technical error.
On Wednesday BSP Financial Consumer Protection Department Head Pia Roman-Tayag said the incident was “contained in one institution”.
“[It has] already [been] explained by the bank as an internal processing error so we don’t think it will be affecting other institutions. We also take comfort that they assured us that this will be corrected within the day,” Tayag told reporters.
For now, the BSP will remain focused on letting Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) fix the anomaly and allay the fear of financial consumers on their balances.
“Once this is established and once this is fixed, of course the BSP will also investigate and look into the matter and see what really happened, what the operational lapses were so that we can also come to our own conclusion and see what action we need to take and also to make sure that measures are in place to prevent these things from happening, not just with this particular bank but other banks as well,” Tayag said.
She also clarified there was really no financial loss on the part of consumers and that this was a misposting of previous transactions that were recorded again.
The BSP official declined to comment on sanctions to be imposed on BPI as consequence of the operational glitch.
“At this point we cannot speak of enforcement action because we have to do our own investigation first. And we don’t want to focus on that, yet, because the priority really now is for the records of the consumers to be fixed. We want the bank to focus their attention on that,” Tayag said.
“Sanctions should be commensurate to what happened. I think at this point all our attention should really be focused [on] how the bank resolves the issue, correct and puts it back to where it was,” she added.
The BSP reminded the banking public to keep track of their balances always and to keep the lines of communication open between themselves and their bank.
BPI accountholders were alarmed on Wednesday when balances were either unduly credited or debited, with several unable to access their accounts via the online portal.
BPI declined to disclose the number of accounts affected, but vowed to make sure the glitch will not happen again. The bank said all issues were to be resolved within the day.
BPI has 8 million total accountholders. BPI stocks trading at the local market was not affected by the glitch and was up 1.23 percent.