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BSP looking at possible lapses in BPI systems upgrade


The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) on Tuesday said it is looking into the possible lapses during the recent systems upgrade of the Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI), which caused its services to be temporarily unavailable.

"We're still reviewing what's the situation -- were there backup plans or can we say meron ba talagang neglect or what, so 'yun pa 'yung tinitignan natin," BSP Deputy Governor Chuchi Fonacier told reporters on the sidelines of the Sustainable Finance Dialogue Forum in Makati City.

Online and mobile banking services of BPI were temporarily unavailable on April 11, which the lender attributed to its recent system upgrade.

Automated teller machines (ATMs) and other services were already earlier temporarily shut down from April 5 to April 7, as BPI migrated to a new system.

"We're still reviewing the situation, kasi we need to understand what caused it," said Fonacier.

"'Yung migration lang kasi nila, nag-migrate sila to a new core banking system and in that activity, in migrating, parang somehow, some portions of it didn't turn out the way they would expect it," she explained.

Fonacier noted, however, that BSP rules mandate institutions undertaking system upgrades to ensure that they have proper roll-back systems during the migration.

"Hindi ba sila naging careful about when they were trying to do the migration? Kailangan kasi, parang may ano ka, may back-up plan ka," she said.

Under Circular 808 issued in 2013, BSP-supervised financial institutions (BSFIs) are mandated to have a roll-back program, to ensure that they can reinstate the original programs, system configuration, or data, in the event of a production release program.

For its part, BPI defended the migration of its "highly customized" legacy system which has been in use for three to four decades.

"Unfortunately, a process that in a test environment took less than a day to complete, and had been scheduled for over a full weekend, spilled over to the following week, inconveniencing many of our clients," BPI president Cezar Consing said in a speech during the company's annual stockholders meeting last week.

According to Consing, the company made over 41,000 changes to its system — 21,000 programs, 15,000 lines of codes, and 5,100 copy books.

"Clearly, this was a challenging exercise, and we regret the inconvenience that this caused. But digitalization is the future, and we will stay the course," he elaborated.

BPI posted a net income of P6.72 billion in the first three months of the year, marking a 7.6% increase from the P6.25 billion posted a year earlier, on the back of strong growth of its core business. — RSJ, GMA News

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