The worst is over for depositors of Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) who have had to endure at least three major technology-related service outages over the last two years that resulted in them being unable to service ATM withdrawals or electronic transfers.
But the top brass of the Ayala-controlled financial institution declined to categorically rule out future disruptions, saying only that recent computer system upgrades have put the 168-year-old bank—the oldest in the country—over the most difficult challenges.
“There’s light at the end of the tunnel,” BPI president Cezar Consing said during a briefing following the bank’s annual stockholders’ meeting. “This is a process. We think we’ve gotten the hard part behind us.”
The BPI chief explained that the long-running systems upgrade involved 41,000 changes to the banks programs and processes which were complicated by the old computer systems it had been using, having been one of the earliest financial institutions to use computers and deploy ATMs in the Philippines.
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“Our core deposit system was three to four decades old, and it was highly customized,” he said. “Because it was highly customized, with each new version of the system, it became harder and harder for some things customized to conform to this new version.”
Meanwhile, BPI’s transaction volume tripled over the last three years, leaving legacy computer systems struggling to keep pace.
