Re­pub­lic Bank Lim­it­ed (RBL) is own­ing up to the glitch which caused unau­tho­rised pay­ments and re­ver­sals to be de­duct­ed from cus­tomers’ cred­it card ac­counts re­cent­ly.

In a re­lease yes­ter­day, RBL blamed tech­ni­cal is­sues with its cred­it card pro­cess­ing sys­tem for unau­tho­rised trans­ac­tions and re­ver­sals from card hold­ers who were clients of oth­er banks.

How­ev­er, the bank as­sured cus­tomers that the is­sue had been cor­rect­ed.

The re­lease stat­ed, “Re­pub­lic Bank is aware that sev­er­al cred­it card hold­ers of oth­er banks saw trans­ac­tions that were con­duct­ed be­tween Au­gust 14 to Sep­tem­ber 6 at cer­tain mer­chants, be­ing re­versed and re-post­ed with­in the past few weeks.

“The bank ac­knowl­edges that this was be­cause of tech­ni­cal chal­lenges ex­pe­ri­enced with our cred­it card pro­cess­ing sys­tem which re­sult­ed in the orig­i­nal trans­ac­tions be­ing in­cor­rect­ly processed as USD trans­ac­tions. The bank al­so con­firms that these is­sues have since been cor­rect­ed.”

It added, “We are work­ing close­ly with all the lo­cal banks to iden­ti­fy im­pact­ed cus­tomers and will be tak­ing all steps nec­es­sary to ad­dress any dis­crep­an­cies. We ap­pre­ci­ate the con­cern that this sit­u­a­tion has caused to cus­tomers and our val­ued mer­chant part­ners and for this, we sin­cere­ly apol­o­gise.”

Speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, a se­nior bank of­fi­cial said none of its own cus­tomers were af­fect­ed.

How­ev­er, the bank is still try­ing to de­ter­mine how many card hold­ers of oth­er banks were hit.

Asked how much mon­ey was tak­en, the of­fi­cial was un­able to say.

Most af­fect­ed cred­it card hold­ers who came for­ward in re­cent days com­plain­ing of monies lost said they were re­fund­ed in part by PriceS­mart, one of the com­pa­nies which seemed to have been se­vere­ly af­fect­ed dur­ing the unau­tho­rised ac­tiv­i­ty.

How­ev­er, Trade and In­dus­try Min­is­ter Paula Gopee-Scoon said it was not on­ly a PriceS­mart is­sue.

On Mon­day, the Bankers’ As­so­ci­a­tion of Trinidad and To­ba­go said it launched an in­ves­ti­ga­tion in­to the mat­ter.

Mean­while, Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands the Trinidad and To­ba­go Po­lice Ser­vice’s (TTPS) Fraud Squad is yet to re­ceive any com­plaints and as such no in­ves­ti­ga­tion has been launched in­to the mat­ter.

Guardian Me­dia al­so con­tact­ed the Cen­tral Bank of Trinidad and To­ba­go to find out if it is in­ves­ti­gat­ing the mat­ter but re­ceived no re­sponse up to press time.

Ef­forts to con­tact the Trinidad and To­ba­go Bu­reau of Stan­dards and PriceS­mart were al­so un­suc­cess­ful yes­ter­day.