BancABC hit by Visa card outage

Banking group, BancABC Zimbabwe, was last week hit by another VISA card outage, which left scores of the bank’s customers stranded locally and abroad.

The bank’s Visa card system went down last Thursday, the second time in just less than a month following the blackout on October, 26, 2021. Chief executive officer, Dr Lance Mambondiani, confirmed the system challenges in an
apology to the banking group’s clients.

“In the last few days we suffered a serious Visa outage which affected 3 countries in which BancABC operates.

“Whilst service was fully restored on Friday for the majority of users, a significant number of our customers are still facing challenges and have been unable to transact,” he said.

Although Visa Card service was partially restored on Friday, some customers have continued to face challenges transacting.

The bank said it suspected fraudulent activity to be the cause of the Zimbabwe bank’s Visa Card system’s down time.
“We now know the root cause to be multiple transaction attempts by the affected customers when the service was down which erroneously resulted in some cards being blocked under suspicion of attempted fraud.

“Whilst we are working on a global solution to clear these errors, all customers still experiencing this problem should contact our Contact Centre team for help to have your cards unblocked instantly,” Dr Mambondiani said.

However, by the end of Tuesday this week customers had started reporting improved service although it is believed that a few were still unable to access the service.- The Herald