BL Premium reports that Standard Bank’s chief engineering officer has resigned following a series of systems outages in recent months that have left customers unable to use many of the bank’s services.

Alpheus Mangale, the group’s chief engineering officer and the senior executive accountable for the stability of the bank’s IT systems, has resigned with immediate effect, Standard Bank said in a short statement on Friday.  Standard Bank’s most recent systems outage occurred on 21 May, when customers were left unable to pay for transactions at point of sales devices or draw money for more than six hours. The bank blamed its last outage on the failure of a component responsible for processing card and ATM transactions and switching them from external devices into the bank’s internal systems. It added that the six-hour systems crash was unrelated to three other “high-impact” incidents that occurred in recent months, which it said were due to a software bug. According to Mangale’s LinkedIn profile, he joined Standard Bank in September 2017 as the group’s chief information officer after having spent almost three years at MTN, where he had been chief enterprise officer. His role at Standard Bank was changed to chief engineering officer as of January 2021 as part of a group-wide revision to its operating model. While it is not certain who will take Mangale’s place, Standard Bank said its engineering team would now report to Margaret Nienaber, the group’s CEO for client solutions.

• Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Garth Theunissen at BusinessLive (subscriber access only)
• Lees ook, Standard Bank se ingenieurshoof bedank, by Maroela Media

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