Deposit delays hit BoA, Wells Fargo

In a recent development, customers at leading U.S. banks, including Bank of America and Wells Fargo, have voiced their complaints over significant delays in their direct deposits. This issue stems from a glitch in payment processing that commenced on a Friday. Despite the Federal Reserve’s assurance that it was not a cybersecurity breach and had been resolved, numerous customers still faced difficulties with their direct deposits on the subsequent Monday.

Wells Fargo and Bank of America have directed inquiries to The Clearing House, a payments company responsible for operating the sole private-sector automated clearing house (ACH) system in the United States. According to an email response from The Clearing House to CBS MoneyWatch, the problem emerged when ACH payment instructions sent to banks on November 2 contained masked customer names and account numbers due to a “processing error.” These masked details are crucial for banks to facilitate incoming payments and credit the funds to customer accounts, resulting in payment delays.

The Clearing House is actively collaborating with affected financial institutions and the Federal Reserve to expedite a resolution to the issue. Many of the delayed payments have already been successfully processed, and efforts are underway to ensure that the remaining transactions are swiftly addressed.

A spokesperson for JPMorgan Chase has pledged to expedite the posting of scheduled direct deposits to customer accounts and has promised to refund any overdraft fees that clients may incur as a result of the ACH problem.

DownDetector, a service that monitors internet service outages, registered an increase in issues reported by Bank of America customers, including problems related to fund transfers and online banking. Customers at other prominent banks, such as Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank, also reported ongoing problems on Monday, including difficulties in retrieving account balances and conducting other transactions, as per DownDetector’s data. The affected banks are actively working to resolve these issues, aiming to minimise customer inconvenience caused by this unexpected disruption in banking services.