The technical outage has so far been an unmitigated disaster, but the response from the board (which is nonexistent – I do not consider a form email from staff to be even close to a communication from the board) and from management is nothing less than offensive. Board members need to know that Vancity members are not happy with them or the management they are supervising, and they need to hear our specific concerns. I sincerely hope that, as the board liaison, you are not filtering messages to the board. The public relations campaign thrown together in a rush this afternoon is not a substitute for effective communication with members. And suggesting that the fact that the CEO has been talking to media is evidence of proper communication ignores the fact that members trying to get information – from our website, from our social media platforms, and so on – have been told less than the media has. “We don’t know what’s going on” 40 hours into an outage is not a good enough answer. This communication (this email and the video from the CEO) all came too late – and is thoroughly incomplete. Lara, and Board, with a copy now to the Financial Institutions Commission, Our Member Services Centre will be open to serve you from 8:00AM to 8:00PM each day.Īgain, we thank you for your letter, and we hope that we can continue this dialogue, and to serve you in the manner you deserve. She has also participated in a video message, which you can find here: Īll of our branches will be open each day this weekend, including Thanksgiving Monday, from 9:30AM to 3:00PM. She wants everyone to know that we have ruled out a privacy or security breach and that we understand what this outage means for our members. Tamara has also been responding to media inquiries, getting important messages and updates to the membership and the public at large. They have been working with our technical team and partners in an effort to repair the system and return it to its normal operating condition. Our president and CEO, Tamara Vrooman, and the rest of our senior executive team have this top of mind. Part of the effort means standing up and taking accountability. As we do that, we are also working closely with our members to make sure their needs are being met. Our first priority is to have the system returned to its proper functioning capacity. You can be assured that all of us–everyone across the organization–are working on a solution. As an organization, we want nothing more than to explain what has caused the technical problems we have experienced these past few days, to resolve those problems, and to communicate to our members precisely what steps we are taking to address their concerns. Please know that we are doing our utmost to resolve what has been a difficult few days for all Vancity members and employees. We understand your frustration and apologize for the inconvenience and stress that our online banking system outage and its impacts are causing you. On behalf of the Board of Directors, thank you for taking the time to write. This appears to be the beginning of management and the board gaslighting us into believing that this is a mere triviality, rather than a failure of the entire banking system at our credit union. Note the word “inconvenience,” which will continue to be used throughout this process. That video has since been deleted from their YouTube account.įriday evening I got the following email in response to my earlier email, addressed to me from a staff member – still no word from the board itself at this point. Late in the afternoon on Friday (40 or so hours after the outage started), the CEO released a hastily-recorded video repeating the talking points that the social media team had been using, and still refusing to give any further information on what was going on. After I wrote this email to the Vancity board on Thursday, we endured two more days of a system outage.
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