After the five-day outage last week, it was only a matter of time. Laurentian Bank is the subject of a request for authorization to conduct a class action lawsuit.
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“That does not make sense. I didn’t have access to my money for six days, it was stressful,” says Johanne Clément, a customer of the banking institution that is the face of the class action lawsuit.
The 56-year-old woman from Saint-Jérôme in the Laurentians was waiting for her disability pension when the breakdown occurred on September 24th. She missed an insurance payment because she didn’t have access to her bank account.
“Of course it must have been even more stressful for others, for example those who didn’t get their wages and couldn’t pay the mortgage,” says the woman, who has been a client of Laurentian since 2005.
For her part, she regained access to her money on Saturday morning. She only had enough money left in her account to pay her insurance. Everything else is already in a new account from a new institution. “Laurentian is over for me,” she assures us.
The icing on the cake, she says, was that the bank charged her the monthly fees on Sunday. “You can’t show me my balance, but you can charge me the fees? »
The institute has now announced that all of its customers’ bank fees will be canceled for the month of September.
350,000 potential members
The law firm Lambert Avocats is handling the case. “The bank has 350,000 customers and our lawsuit affects them all,” says attorney Jimmy Lambert.
He believes it would be in Laurentian Bank’s interest to resolve the dispute as quickly as possible. “We feel an exodus, many people are telling us that they are leaving the bank. By paying quickly, the bank would not be able to further disappoint its customers,” he says.
The lawyer highlights Laurentian Bank’s communication problems last week, at the height of the crisis.
“They didn’t inform their customers well but charged the monthly fees. Yes, they withdrew the fees after our class action lawsuit, but people are in the dark and without information,” says the lawyer.
He invites all clients of the institution To for his recourse through the Lambert Avocats website.
CEO sacrificed
The failure has already claimed two victims in high leadership positions at the institution.
President and CEO Rania Llewellyn resigned Monday morning, as did CEO Michael Mueller.
Ms Llewellyn was replaced by Éric Provost, who was responsible for commercial and retail banking.
The bank explains the outage, which began on September 24, as a computer error that rendered the BLCDirect service, i.e. online services for private individuals, inoperable.