Glitches At BBVA’s Simple Illustrate Digital Banking’s Difficulties

For weeks, customers and BBVA’s digital exertion, Simple have complained about delays or total failures in scheduled payments as well as intermittent problems Simple’s perhaps unfortunately named app’s “Safe to Spend” feature.

“What Simple is realizing is that even though they started as a ‘nonbank,’ they face the same challenges as a bank in terms of processing and customer service,” Jacob Jegher, research director at Celent told American Banker.  

While all of online banking as suffered from outages and glitches, digital banking suffers from the rather unexpected problem of running off of systems that are actually out of date and simply unable to keep up with the real-time demands of most modern digital customers.  Moreover, customers who are increasingly online in some capacity or other all the time are more likely to notice and be displease by unexplained outages or glitches.

In the current case of the Simple difficulties, users unable to make payments have been given this guidance on the company website.

“”Payments may disappear from the ‘Scheduled Activities’ section of the app during processing,” reads the customer disclosure. “This display issue does not affect their processing, and the payments will reappear in the ‘Activities’ list when they are fully processed, which may be several hours later. Also, some Payments may have been dissociated with their respective Goals and deducted from your Safe-to-Spend twice. To correct your Safe-to-Spend, delete and re-schedule the payment or transfer the funds from the goal back to your Safe-to-Spend.”