BPI says system glitch caused by programmer rushing to process transactions

The double-posting of transactions, which affected some 1.5 million clients of the Bank of the Philippine Islands (BPI) earlier this month, was due to a system programmer who was in a rush to post transactions, the bank said Wednesday.

The errors that showed up in the outstanding balances of clients' accounts, executives of told a Senate hearing on the matter.

BPI Executive Vice President for Enterprise Services Ramon Jocson said the programmer processed the transactions immediately, before sending a request from her supervisor.

"What she did was maybe because of expediency," Jocson told the Senate Committee on Banking, Financial Institutions and Currencies.

The bank executive did not identify the programmer, but said she had been reassigned to another department while an investigation into the fiasco is ongoing.

BPI also ruled out hacking. "100 percent not a hack," Jocson said.

The bank told the Senate panel some 1.5 million clients were affected by the error in processing the transactions.

Senator Francis Escudero, who chairs the committee, was compelled to call for a hearing after another bank, BDO Unibank Inc., issued a statement last Friday that its ATMs were potentially compromised – less than two weeks after the BPI incident was made public.

BPI suspended access to its electronic channels on June 7 as an internal error caused double-posting of transactions – from April 27 to May 2 – starting June 6.

BDO clients noted there were unauthorized withdrawals from their accounts.

According to the bank's initial report to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP), the incident was caused by a "localized skimming attack." — VDS, GMA News