National Australia Bank has promised to compensate customers who suffered financial losses after a national outage that hit mobile banking, ATMs and eftpos for several hours.
Most services have now been restored after the outage, caused by a series of faults originating from a power failure, which left many NAB customers across Australia furious on Saturday.
NAB automatic teller machines were out of action for several hours on Saturday. Credit: AAP
"If there was a loss that was driven by the outage today then compensation will be provided to customers," NAB Business executive general manager Cindy Batchelor told reporters in Melbourne on Saturday afternoon.
"We'll work with each and every one of them to understand exactly what happened to that particular customer."
The outage from early Saturday morning left many shoppers stranded at checkouts.
The bank said its ATM and eftpos services came back online just after 12.30pm on Saturday, about five hours after NAB business customers and account holders began complaining of problems processing payments.
Customers had experienced difficulty withdrawing cash at all ATMs with NAB cards and paying for goods at all eftpos terminals with NAB cards.
The bank's internet banking, mobile banking, ATM banking and eftpos services have been offline since Saturday morning with earliest reports coming through at about 7.30am.
NAB informed its customers via social media hours later on Saturday morning.
NAB business customer Pauline Daniell, who co-owns Kingfisher Seafoods at Camberwell Market, said the outage could cost her $15,000 in sales on her biggest trading day of the week.
"Basically, we are losing. We normally take most of our money on a Saturday. We have a massive debt with NAB [to set up the business] and we are down so much for the week if we can’t trade properly on Saturday," Mrs Daniell said.
"We didn't know there was a problem for about an hour and we couldn't explain to customers why they couldn't pay. They were quite angry and were taking it out on my husband working in the shop.
"We take about 70 per cent of our payments on the NAB machine and there are quite a few other traders losing here today."
"Are we going to be compensated? Things happen, I get it. But lack of communication about the issue is disappointing ... NAB are happy to take our fees, but will there be compensation?"
A NAB spokesperson said anyone seeking compensation should contact the bank.
NAB chief customer officer of business and private banking Anthony Healy said "it's not good enough" and that the bank was working to fix the issue completely.
"On behalf of the executive team and everyone here at NAB ... I want to apologise to those who were out trying to do their shopping on a Saturday morning and particularly our merchants who are trying to do business and maintain banking services for their customers," Mr Healy said.
NAB also operates the popular HICAPS payment and claims system for healthcare businesses around Australia. It includes Medicare and WorkSafe Victoria payments.
Medical businesses, including Peak MSK Physiotherapy in the Melbourne suburb of Hampton, were unable to process payments on Saturday morning.
"Nothing working on #HICAPS terminal today," the business tweeted. "Nothing from phone support after 30 minutes of music."
with AAP