BPI operations back to normal Thursday: official

June 7, 2017

Bank of the Philippine Island (BPI) operations will return to normal on Thursday after experiencing “internal system error” nationwide on Wednesday, a senior official said. “Yes, we should be back to normal by tomorrow,” said BPI senior vice president for strategic marketing and decision support Catherine Santamaria said in a text message to the Daily Manila Shimbun. Santamaria said all operations, including electronic channels, will be available Thursday.. In an emailed statement, BPI said it identified a system glitch from transactions in between April 27 to May 2 which caused double debit or credit in some of its clients’ accounts. BPI did not receive any more complaints after explaining the root cause of the issue and constantly updating the public about the situation through social media, Santamaria said. BPI branches were open up to 7:30 p.m. to assist clients. Incoming Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas Governor Nestor Espenilla said the BPI issue is “an isolated case.” “It’s human error in BPI and not a hack,” said Espenilla in a text message to reporters. “Priority now is for BPI to correct wrong postings. Should be finished today.” Espenilla said the Bangko Sentral will investigate this “after the problem is fixed so the bank is not distracted.” In an earlier press conference, Santamaria said only a small portion of the total 8 million BPI clients were affected by the system glitch. "There were clients whose accounts were debited and we have clients who have double crediting", she said. She said the issue became big through social media. Santamaria said BPI is addressing the situation. “One of the things that we are really looking at is to make sure that before the day ends all your balances are the same”, she said. Santamaria denied hacking and scams caused the glitch. “This is an internal issue. There is a lot of rumor about it being hacking or scam. Let me please emphasize it has nothing to do with that. We have BPI at the highest security standards and we… actually make sure that all the things that we have in terms of processing is actually of the highest level”, she said. Alanna Ambi/DMS