The BCA fiasco

The BCA fiasco

Some hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Bank Central Asia (BCA)'s approximately nine million customers found themselves unable to carry out transactions at one of the country's largest private banks on Monday, March 25.

On the first business day of the week, people were lining up at BCA branches to withdraw money for their families' needs or to transfer funds for urgent deals, only to find their transactions could not be completed. The operational fiasco involved not only BCA's automatic teller machines but also ordinary bank transfer systems. The cause of the fiasco were computer failures said to have resulted from a power outage.

Only after 3 p.m., when it was too late in the day to make transactions, did the computers resume operation, though not completely.

There were rumors that the disturbance was an act of sabotage by parties within BCA to show their displeasure with the outcome of the recent divestment tender of government shares in BCA, which ended with the Farallon group being named the winner of the tender. The trouble was seen by some as a message from bank insiders to the new shareholder.

Residents of large cities, including Jakarta and its environs, are accustomed to banking matters and tend to be dependent on banking services. Salaries and most payments are transferred directly into bank accounts, while most people here have savings accounts. So an incident like the one on March 25 has adverse effects on more than just the business world.

In the business community, the inability to make transactions at BCA definitely slowed the movement of cash, the payment of debts, etc. Is it right that businesspeople must bear the cost of default brought about by BCA?

-- Warta Kota, Jakarta