Business was already not going particularly well for one of the oldest banks in Quebec. After a five-day outage of its online services, Laurentian Bank could now be experiencing an exodus of its customers.
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“This is unacceptable for a bank,” the institute’s spokesman, Merick Seguin, openly admits about the outage that has affected the institute since Sunday.
He says everything has returned to normal since Thursday afternoon, but this was not the case for two of the institution’s customers interviewed by the Journal.
“It looks amateurish…” says Jean-François Racine, a customer for 25 years. His app still wasn’t working as of 2:30 p.m. Thursday.
The trucker is worried about missing payments and feels held hostage. “My appointment at another institution has already been taken. It’s over for me, I’m taking all my assets out of it,” he asserts.
The same goes for Jean-David Sénécal, who had been thinking about leaving Laurentian Bank for some time.
“Knowing that they weren’t very healthy anyway, that’s the nail in the coffin. One day down, OK. But five days? Honestly,” says the 58-year-old, who works in insurance.
Additionally, he still did not have access to his banking services as of Thursday afternoon.
Solved according to the bank
However, according to Laurentian, the problem has been solved. “It is certain that it will happen gradually, but we have done it. All customers should regain their access on Thursday,” assures the spokesman.
The customers’ paychecks are deposited, he says, even if not everyone can see it. Also old age pension checks, such as benefits from various governments.
The bank also promises that all customers who have incurred late payment interest or other costs will be reimbursed. “Nobody is going to take this out of their own pocket, that’s clear,” says Mr. Seguin.
Very good, reply Jean-David Sénécal and Jean-François Racine, but it is too little, too late.
Worse and worse
The problem is due to a central system update that failed on Sunday. Laurentian will take the time to analyze everything once the storm passes.
This five-day outage is another blow to the struggling company.
At the beginning of the year, the institute put itself up for sale before ultimately calling off the transaction.
According to some media, she received at least one purchase offer, but it was not generous enough.
This led to the dismissal of three of the bank’s ten senior employees at the time.
Otherwise, according to many customers, the quality of service for private individuals has been in free fall for several years.
Let us also remember that the institution has as CEO a monolingual English speaker, Rania Llewellyn, who is currently learning French. His controversial appointment in October 2020 caused a lot of ink to flow.
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