HSBS Secure Epayments failure

[Deleted member 21013]

Many thanks Derek for the email information, I will get onto this at once. I, like you guys am amazed at how incompetent HSBC are in resolving this matter when it is apparent how many businesses are affected. I have actually emailed the Times newsdesk to make them aware of this as I feel that some bad press may give HSBC the kick up the backside that they need to sort out their shambolic systems. I urge you guys to also email some national newspapers as HSBC should not be allowed to simply sweep this under the carpet.

I have emailed the Daily Mail a link to this thread
Howard

 

[jd1977]

If this is seen by the wider media/public, can I recommend keeping any confidential emails details or company details to a min, purely on legal grounds of course, ie. my name iis X and by branch manager is X and my company name is.. etc.

just being safe

 

[NickW]

duplicate post

 

[NickW]

As a small UK business whose online trade is conducted 100% via HSBC Secure ePayments, we've watching this latest outage with disbelief.

Aside from the thousands in lost sales, it's also costing us massively in out-of-hours developer and administration hours as we started integrating with another payment gateway (Protx) last night. Although it looks like we'll have a working system by tommorrow morning, it transpires that we'll still have to wait 48 hours for Protx to review our application and get us trading. Consequently this is going to be a very expensive issue for us.

We've certainly learned a hard lesson this weekend about having more than one internet payment gateway available to us.
I have the utmost sympathy for any firms who solely use HSBC secure ePayments for online payments, but do not have technical staff at hand to help them get up and running immediately.

As for comment on HSBC Secure ePayments handling of this situation:

+ No communication from them at all in any form, at any time, regarding the outage.
+ No explanation of what caused the issue, what the consequences are likely to be, and when the system will be available again.

This is in keeping with the way they handled to their last outage earlier this year (HSBC 'lost' a whole days trading data across their system in January this year. Customers who contacted them received varying vague explanations over the 'phone. After the event they also received a 'sorry' letter that promised a 'major incident review' and a hard copy of the transactions in question. Customers who didn't bother to contact them received nothing.)

We will be taking every action possible to claim against HSBC Secure ePayments for the consequences of their incompetance.

I'll be posting any information that may be useful to others about our claim against the HSBC here, and will be watching this thread with great interest to see how others get on over the next few weeks..

 

[jd1977]

I will also be keeping a close eye on the compensation progress, for those who rely 100%, I do have a sinking feeling this may not be resolved. (thousands of retailers x ££££'s each) The contract writers will be working away as we speak to get out of this one.

I'm sure a lot of businesses do however rely on a daily cashflow to keep going, I know clearance times allowing after 3 or 4 days of no sales it would be enough to cripple my business from further trading. At the very least there should be extended an overdraft period to shelter the businesses through this knock back (which they have caused).

We all work very hard as small businesses to survive, and make cutbacks within the business to save £££'s

All the hard work I have done since December in making cutbacks and lowering my overdraft have all been lost in 3 days of lost trading
nearly £3000 worth. Any shrugging of shoulders by HSBC on this one should not be allowed at any costs.

 

[CLSLTD]

Hi JD, well really i'm happy to share any information! Last time HSBC 'lost' 200+ peoples payments data, that included names, addresses, what they bought etc. No media covered it. Where it went... or who now has that data we don't know.
Their reconciliations team sent me via email a list of all payments they had for the Jan incident, ie the only data they had secured was funds data. I have been asking roughly once a week for them to send me the lost data, and they still won't (for obvious reasons) admit they don't know where the data is.
Therefore either they had a catastrophic hardware failure, or they were victim of a sophisticated hack or server hijack. If that was the case then its the case now... and that means someone now has all of your customers card details and could be charging your customers AS YOU!
This is serious stuff,
Jonathan

 

[jd1977]

According to an email I received, the system is working, they are just testing it with robots to make sure every part of it is robust and unbreakable for people to use again.

This would lead me to believe it was subject to a sophisticated hack or crap equipment/software.

 

[CLSLTD]

ha ha I can just see this insane robot wandering around knocking cups of coffee over! I've had no email, and there IP still isn't responding... More lies is my guess. Really, I've spoken to people at all levels many times, they have no idea what they are doing.
They outsourced it to India and management have lost complete control of it. ePayments is not a professionally run organisation.
Jonathan

 

[jd1977]

You have just raised a very good point there, although the call centre is in India (I have no problems with this, and have received an OK service in terms of other services) but where is the actual payment server, or system/s ? Is this UK based ? or America? or even India. It would be interesting to know where the actual "Nuts and Bolts" are.

 

[Grassman]

According to an email I received, the system is working, they are just testing it with robots to make sure every part of it is robust and unbreakable for people to use again.

This would lead me to believe it was subject to a sophisticated hack or crap equipment/software.

You've had more information than me then
Oh how I relish being kept in the dark

 

[jd1977]

You've had more information than me then
Oh how I relish being kept in the dark

I have phoned them at least 3 times a day since Friday 11am.

 

[sculli]

I have had an email - promising regular and honest (!) updates (that will be a first). For two years I have complained about the problems I have experienced with secure e payments and have been fobbed off with every excuse possible. I am 100% reliant on it as a payment method, I have no technical back-up and have lost thousands of ££££ through the incompetence of the site. I had one of my many conversations with Ashish and his boss (I think there are only the two of them) on Thursday and was assured that everything was working perfectly and it was my customers pressing the back cursor that caused that dreaded 'waiting for HSBC message', none of my french customers have any money in their accounts which is why their payments don't go through and at the end of the day all my customers who have experienced problems are liars (in not so many words) ..................
I thought of alerting the press in January, however due to the loss of customers credit card details thought it would be more detrimental to my own business if it went public - however this weekend has been the final straw!
Please everyone make your business managers aware of the situation (very few of them seem to have any information on secure e payments), this is a situation that has got totally out of hand and is terminally damaging to small businesses.

 

[jd1977]

I received an email from the same person sculli, you have to wonder whether the server is kept in someone's back bedroom in India with just 2 people keeping check, one of those a toy robot lol . Seriously though, dont lose your rag, try stay calm and talk to your commercial manager be firm and make it clear to them you are unhappy and demand to know what they intend to do to compensate you for the loss in trade.

 

[matty262]

I am finding the whole HSBC experience beyond belief (banking, e-payments - the whole lot!). We have lost thousands this weekend and as others have mentioned, we rely heavily on the regular cashflow we experience through secure e-payments. We have Paypal but as we all know, these funds don't reach your account for 5 - 7 days. I have made several phone calls since Friday but there is no commitment to a timescale to resolve this and then, at 5pm, the update message was gone and they just said these offices are now closed - goodbye!! Unbelieveable. In my opinon, there has not been a single person working on this and if you want to know where the server is - you can get a good idea by the time it comes back on again when the technical team walk in Monday morning at 9am in whichever country they are in and switch the server off and back on again to reset it. I was even told on Saturday that it was up and running but they were resetting the links! Absolute garbage that they were told to say because if you disagree and tell them how ridiculous that is, the person on the other end of the phone can honestly say they know nothing about e-payments (because the e-payments team don't work at weekends) and this is all the information they have. In the end, there is no point even speaking to them because nobody there knows anything about what is going on!

 

[julie@affordablelighting]

can anyone give me the email address to send my complaints/claim to of hsbc secure payments

thank you

 

[jd1977]

can anyone give me the email address to send my complaints/claim to of hsbc secure payments

thank you

secure-epayments AT hsbc DOT com.

 

[boarderblokey]

Hi all,

Just wanted to share our frustrations with you and give support to everybody else in the same boat.

We're a small company running 3 sites all with HSBC epayments. We do have Paypal as back up but many still seem reluctant to use this.

We're down around 1k from this outage, I'd guess.

In the last month we've had 2 of our sites taken off-line due to billing errors (our hosting companies fault not ours). This lost us around £1000 and took a while to re-appear in Google and also wasted Google Adwords click as we did not realise for 24 hours.

BTBroadband have kindly charged us £25 a month extra (on top of our £19) since November 2007 but only informed us in March with a total surcharge bill of £100 for downloading more than our allowance.

Three mobile kindly ended our 18 month 1/2 price line rental a whole year early and it took 45 minutes on the phone to sort their error out.

It seems that all the big boys will just use and abuse us and take our money and then expect us to sort out their errors.

Phew, end of rant-it's been a bad month!

Let's hope HSBC get it sorted.

Cheers

Nick

 

[divorce-online]

According to an email I received, the system is working, they are just testing it with robots to make sure every part of it is robust and unbreakable for people to use again.

This would lead me to believe it was subject to a sophisticated hack or crap equipment/software.

Could you post the e-mail on here as we might have to refer to its contents at some stage. Just their bit would be fine.

 

[angelbud]

I have been away for 3 days and have come back to no trade for 3 days - i will be going into see my business manager monday morning and have sent an email notifying my intention to claim compensation.
It does not take much these days to have an email system updating there customers of a situation - this is totally disgusting service from HSBC.

 

[jd1977]

Well here we are the 4th! DAY.

https://secure-epayments.hsbc.com/cgi-bin/HSBC_Engine

And still blank as at 1am 31st March 2008.

So much for "up and running this evening" yesterday.

Worldpay and Nat West have just gained a new customer. Too late HSBC

 

[PayVector]

Hi All,

Some of you contacted us via PM and email to see if we can help. The answer is yes we can. Please feel free to send a note to [email protected]. There are a number of things we can do and will look at each of your cases individually. We will be doing the connections as fast as we can and in the order they come in.

Iridium Support

 

[matty262]

7.40 on Monday morning - still not working. The home page is there but no message giving any update as they promised yesterday. I assume sales we did get on Friday before it went down won't be settled today! How much worse can HSBC get!

My mistake - 7.45 and it appears to be working but I have been checking since 6.30 and it has only just started to work for me

 

[benjo132]

It seems that Matty262 above was right, as soon as Monday morning comes round and the engineers come back to work things start working again!

 

[sculli]

Lucky you! but will you ever trust it again?
08.17 and I still have nothing.

 

[sculli]

I take it back - it is working on my website, however I am still unable to log in.

 

[Grassman]

you can get a good idea by the time it comes back on again when the technical team walk in Monday morning at 9am in whichever country they are in and switch the server off and back on again to reset it.

I really hope you're not right.... but

 

[TimmoB]

THis has been a big problem, this weekend i will have lost lots of sales, i do have a backup in place which is Paypal, but clients seem reluctant to use it, i think they think that they are buying from ebay if they use paypal.

I started the process of moving to Protx on saturday and hopefully that will be live by wed.

I will be writing a strong letter to my Business manager, informing him that this weekends, debarcle has cost at least one customer, me, and I urge the rest of you to do the same.

Good Luck.

 

[divorce-online]

I take it back - it is working on my website, however I am still unable to log in.

As at 10.13 am it still is not working.

We are on the phone as apparently the time stamp on the site is now wrong because of daylight saving and my IT manager is trying very hard not to shout at them.

They are saying we need to change the clock on our server to GMT? This has never been an issue before.

Has anyone else got this problem?

 

[jd1977]

Looks like the server monkey came in this morning and switched the commodre 64 back on running Windows 95.

 

[divorce-online]

The thing is they could not or would not explain why we have never had to do this before in 3 years of using this service.

We are signing up for protx as we speak as we have used it before when we bought another site and never had any problems.

 

[divorce-online]

Just to let everyone know we are back up and running at 11.31 after our hosts changed the time on the server by winding it back 2 minutes!!!

Thanks for all your help it has been good to know there are others out there to vent ones spleen at.

Any advice on obtaining compensation as we go through our business managers will be really helpful.

 

[jd1977]

deleted post

 

[jd1977]

The thing is they could not or would not explain why we have never had to do this before in 3 years of using this service.

We are signing up for protx as we speak as we have used it before when we bought another site and never had any problems.

I think they are very embarressed this time, and recognise the January problem on top of the last 3 days, if you speak to your branch manager he will give you more details.

Cant say anymore but it looks like HSBC are now taking seriously and will not be wanting to lose any custom at all.

 

[CLSLTD]

My branch commercial manager told me to write to:
servicequality[at]hsbc.com

Dear Sir/Madam,
We are extremely unhappy with the level of service from ePayments.
I have a catalogue of complaints that I do not have time to list here - but my branch manager Simon xxxx is fully aware of the issues and has been in extensive correspondence with me about it.
ePayments is not functioning as a payment gateway. Its is regularly offline. We are not notified of this. They deny theres a problem.
We spent many f thousands of pounds to create an integration with ePayments - so we are stuck with it.
Urgent action is required.
I have been communicating with other angry customers about this and we are considering a Class action against you.
I expect your swift response.
Jonathan Money

 

[CLSLTD]

I have also written to my area Merchant Services manager demanding discussions about compensation. My branch have given me extra £5k overdraft without any questions btw.
If anyone is interested in joining us to take them on for compensation - we are looking for 10k in compensation...
Jon

 

[jd1977]

I'm discussing my case on an individual level, as my b manager has been helpful so far, I have emailed a previous weeks sales figures for the 3 days to the email address they provided. So I am hoping they act upon that.

In the meanwhile, I'm sure the local branches themselves will cover any overdraft issues due to shortage of cashflow. They are pretty willing if you speak to them directly.

Try not to lose your temper in a direct manner with any staff, as previously proved with the bank charges reclaim: they might stop your account if they feel you are going in all "guns blazing." This will take some tact, but it's looking good so far

 

[Dwebs-Ltd]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/31/hsbc_epayments_badness/

 

[jd1977]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/31/hsbc_epayments_badness/

Not a good advert is it, I think they realise this aswell because the correspondance I have received today , has been in all fairness really good.

 

[Pelenna]

What correspondance? I think, like last time, if you haven't been in constant contact with them they won't bother to contact you - I know I haven't had any communications from them at all! Just waiting to hear back from streamline now, and then I'll bother to ring HSBC - to cancel.

 

[matty262]

Well done to all of you who have managed to have any contact at all with your branch manager. I called my "Relationship" Manager at 9am this morning then again at 11.30am and then tried a further two times this afternoon with no response at all. A colleague of hers took a message and I explained briefly what the problem was and when I called back, the same colleague told me that she had contact epayments to verify that it wasn't just me having problems and that it was all OK now and I would be getting a letter of apology (I bit my lip until it nearly bled at that point). I explained that it was not another apology I wanted - it was assistance with handling the damage to our cashflow that I was looking for and she said my manager would call me back. I then sent an e-mail to secure e-payments giving them details of our daily sales for March up until Friday, our sales for each Friday, Saturday and Sunday since January and the projected sales for the last weekend based on the orders we received upto the time the payment system collapsed and gave them the financial compensation I would be pursuing based on the average of all these figures. I also stressed how disappointed I was not just with the failure of the system but also the lack of communication and copied in my Relationship Manager. I had read receipts from both parties at 4.30 and 5pm but still not a single word from anyone as to how, or if, they intend to assist me. Frustrating!