pinged to let me know he urgently needed to purchase some items for a school project. The shopping list was a little more than his allowance would cater for, so we said we’d send some funds over.
Undoubtedly, the banks - all of them, not just the two involved - will learn from this. Hopefully, they will build in better public relations and customer recovery, double down on redundancy systems and improve their scenario planning. The initial take-up wasn’t exactly speedy. In a study commissioned by the Monetary Authority of Singapore , KPMG found that 60 per cent of consumer payments were still being made in cash in 2015.
And, even if we want to hold banks who falter accountable, we must be careful to separate the system from the players in the system. So, while the two banks had, albeit massive, backend issues, the larger “cashless” system in Singapore remained intact. It was the human in the mix that was inadequately equipped and unprepared for the situation, even after the experiences of the previous outages.