Standard Bank's chief engineering officer Alpheus Mangale, who is responsible for the stability of the group's IT systems, has resigned with immediate effect.
This is in the wake of a series of banking system outages in recent months, Standard Bank said in a statement on Friday.
Many of these happened on paydays, inconveniencing customers needing to make routine month-end payments. On 21 May, the bank had the biggest system outage in its history, leaving customers stranded at restaurants, fuel stations and shopping malls. Only customers making tap-and-pay purchases below R200 could transact.
The banking app, online banking and ATMs were not working.
"Since the major outage on 21 May 2022, our priority has been to stabilise our systems, ensure that services to our clients are fully restored, investigate and remove the causes of these outages, and demonstrate to our clients and colleagues that we are moving quickly and decisively to rebuild confidence in our systems."
In April last year, the bank was hit by intermittent outages for days. In September, its mobile app crashed. In October, it had another pay-day outage, while in December, another five-hour outage struck.
Standard Bank apologised for the outages at a briefing in May this year. SA CEO Lungisa Fuzile said at that event that it is hiring engineers in great numbers to build expertise at the bank. "We also make sure that the engineers that we have – to the extent that technology changes very fast – we continue to upskill and reskill them to make sure that they have the skills that are relevant to the future that we aspire for," he said.
It said on Friday that following Mangale's immediate departure, the engineering team will report to Margaret Nienaber, the group’s chief executive for client solutions.
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