I had some funds that I wanted to invest but when I went into my RBC account, I discovered that my investing account had disappeared. I had not used it for a few years but I had never received a warning or a notice or that this was to happen. This is RBC Fault #1.
It looked like I had to create a new account. There was a link in my online RBC account to do this. After going through 10 screens entering all kinds of detailed information about myself and various investment options, I got to what looked like the last screen. I clicked on the button and received the following response:
This was incredible! I was dumbfounded that there could be such a catastrophic failure in such a critical application. RBC Fault #2.
Someone analyzing this may have estimated that RBC was losing 40 applications a day with an average portfolio value of $50,000. In other words $2,000,000 a day. Now this is really not a very thorough analysis, but it would not stop someone from posting headline news saying,
“Software failure causes Canada’s largest bank to lose $2 million a day”
I called the Direct Investing customer support number and was informed that there was a wait time of 1 hour and 45 minutes. I decided not to wait. I thought of calling outside of stock trading hours when the line might not be so busy, but I found out that the support line was only open from 8 am to 5 pm, weekdays only. For people managing an investment portfolio, where time is of the essence, this level of customer support is inadequate. Fault #3.
A few days later I was able to get to my local RBC bank branch. I asked if they could set up an RBC Direct Investing account for me. They said they were not able to do this at the branch. I would have thought that an investing account was a pretty important RBC product. Why aren’t branch banks able to help customers with it? Fault #4.
After about 10 days I thought that the web site error would be fixed, since the message said that RBC had its “best teams working hard to fix this error”. However, after painstakingly going through all the setup screens, I encountered the exact same error again. Clearly RBC’s “best teams” were not very good, or else they had never been informed that there was an error that needed to be fixed. Fault #5.
I decided I had to bite the bullet and call customer support. By now it was the December holiday season and things were slowing down. I had to wait “only” 45 minutes to get through to a support person. He could not understand how I was having such a problem. He put me on hold while he went to talk to a manager. They looked into my account and discovered that my Direct Investing account had not been deleted, it had been “hidden” from my view. They could not really understand how or why this had been done, but they were able to restore the account so I could carry on with my investment plans.
I don’t know if RBC ever fixed their web site. Clearly trying to create a new investing account when one already existed is a problem, but the error message never indicated this.
Whoever coined the phrase that the big banks are “too big to fail” clearly did not have any understanding of how software works, and does not work.
