400,000 stranded without salary
The bank payments body Apacs is struggling today to address problems caused by a major technical hitch, which could mean that up to 400,000 people will not receive their end-of-the month salary.The data corruption issue, which came to light on Thursday night, may mean that customers are unable to withdraw cash from ATM machines, although they could still use branch counters for transactions.Despite this, Apacs said: "Our clear priority is to ensure that customers are not out of pocket and we guarantee that any customers affected will not miss any payments being made or suffer any charges for being overdrawn, where this has been caused by the missed salary payment."Apacs added: "The entire banking and payments industry is extremely sorry that this has happened. We are working to resolve the issue and limit the impact on individual customers." The spokeswoman said that the banks are currently liaising with employers who had been unable to pay their staff to ensure that those payments were made "at the next available date", and Apacs was confident that the problem would have been resolved and all salaries received by Monday.
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