Bank of America and Zelle Going Through Hell(e) This Morning

CEO Brian Moynihan in Switzerland Playing in the Snow

Bank of America, a company I was a manager for among other jobs for 13 years is going having a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad day at the moment. The problem though? So are thousands of their customers.

The bank, which has around 67,000,000 clients to their name and their “third party affiliate” (what we were told to call it at BofA) Zelle is currently experiencing an outage. Conflicting reports from many users about what is going on. Reports of Zelle transfers being sent out multiple times leaving clients in the red, or clients received transfers disappearing overnight leaving them a negative account to wake up to.

I couldn’t even enjoy my Cinnamon Dolce cup of coffee this morning before Twitter was blowing up with tweets and memes about the issues. The great thing about social media is how people express their anger with humor. But let’s be frank here, this is something serious. The majority of clients with Bank of America will not have multiple commas in their bank account. They will use this money for gas, eggs, bills, and other necessities.

Here is a chart documenting how many people have documented having a problem this morning:

As you can see, issues have had a rise that would make a Cialis user blush.

So has Bank of America responded to the complaints? Well, if you mean by customer service reps on the phone telling people they can’t talk right now because they are busy, then you can say BofA is doing a great job of pretending nothing is wrong the same way a child closes their eyes and pretends they are hiding.

Look at these tweets:

“Extenuating Circumstances”

Imagine a bank, who holds your money telling you that “Extenuating Circumstances” is the reason they can’t talk. Dude, I picked you as my bank to help me during “Extenuating Circumstances”.

Did SBF publish a customer service manual that banks train on?

Anyway, it is totally frustrating. Bank of America’s “Help” is getting bombarded with tags like a hot social media influencer getting tagged on her birthday.

Part of BofA_Help’s M.O. is they DM immediately, tell you to do something like send your information, hoping you don’t see the tweet for an hour or two while they try to keep the spinning plates from falling around them.

Most of BofA_Help’s staff are not trained to fix issues or equipped to refund any fees associated. There’s still a process through a system BofA has called COMMIT which I believe was an acronym. I forget. Think of some cheesy acronym, and you probably nailed it.

Needless to say their staff of 5-10 associates working the social media beat cannot take on the thousands of pissed people who need help and need to use THEIR money today.

Zelle has been a pet peeve of mine since I saw its debut in 2017 while I was working at Bank of America. Zelle is owned by EWS, which is owned by Bank of America, Chase and other big banks. Most big banks will claim that Zelle is an independent company most of the time, though affirming their hands in Zelle during recent congressional hearings.

Zelle was used to shift the liability of issues with your money from your bank to your responsibility, so when you are defrauded, it was your fault for being stupid, and when there was an outage, they can point to “their partner” as having the problem, leaving the bank blame-free, or so they thought. It’s like the big brother who tries to pin all the dumb shit they do when they are 5 at their 2 year old sibling who isn’t potty trained, much less capable of property damage.

Bank of America pushed out a notification on their app a few minutes ago that looked like this. I will then explain what I think happened:

Lol at “Please Note”

Like there was a sign somewhere that said this shit was going to happen. Please Note is the way smart people say, “I already told you…”

Zelle transactions made between January 14-17, huh?

What happened between that time?

MLK Day, aka a federal holiday.

Why does that matter? Here is my theory of what happened in bold letters. Sorry, I am still learning Substack. I created this on the fly because I wanted to for a while and this is a BIG story.

So, MLK is a federal holiday. January 16th, banks were closed. Everything financial for the most part is closed. End of business on Friday means the next business day was yesterday, which was Tuesday the 17th. So everything transferred, deposited, withdrawn, etc between those two days will be pending throughout the weekend, and not closing until end of day Tuesday, aka midnight Wednesday.

That’s not just Zelle stuff. That’s everything BofA does.

I am thinking since it is seemingly just impacting BofA, that somehow, someway, their Zelle system didn’t recognize Monday was supposed to be a holiday, and when Tuesday rolled around and nothing “posted” because the system didn’t have the data which showed the transfers happening between those days, it bounced back.

So when I was a shitty bank teller, I made this mistake before. You would take all the checks you cashed, deposit work you took in and created a “batch” of proof work. You rubber banded it and a courier took it to a processing center for further processing. So if I forgot to put my work in the bag, everyone that I helped will get their shit reversed back, causing issues.

As I mentioned, I was a really bad teller, so this happened more than once, and I got yelled at pretty good.

I think digitally, the federal holiday was not acknowledged, and Zelle’s system within BofA was like, “Where the fuck is the data?” and basically reversed everything as a result of a glitch/human error where MLK day was not acknowledged as a federal. It seems like something like that would be automatic, but considering my BofA computer was still running Windows XP in 2017, nothing surprises me. I was using Windows XP when I was downloading the Pam and Tommy Video as a 16 year old in High School, for god’s sake. I am going to be 40 in April!

So, I despise Zelle with a passion. I could say it is a contributing factor as to why I am not a banker anymore. I despise Bank of America for their ruthless disregard of their at-risk clients… But I don’t think it is a hack. I think it had something to do with the Zelle system trying to batch out all the weekend transactions and the system not acknowledging the federal holiday.

Hope I made sense. You won’t hear that shit from BofA media relations. Because all they will do is apologize for the inconvenience You also won’t hear from CEO Brian Moynihan, the biggest cheerleader for Zelle while testifying in Congress. He is in Davos, Switzerland, with all the other rich assholes divvying up this world a little more for the wealthy. His only comment was, “Hey, what wine goes with Chilean Sea Bass?” while hobnobbing with people who have more zeroes in their bank account than a large city Comic-Con’s attendance base. I don’t mean to rag on you geeks. I was one in high school!

The Switzerland based World Economic Forum is always big news in the financial world. I am sure so many important things will be talked about there, but this story won’t be talked, because Zelle adoption means more revenue for the banks as they try to destroy the competition in that field.

Look. I know it’s a pipe dream of mine, but I want Zelle to go away. It has caused so much harm. There’ll be more blogs about it in the coming days, while trying to introduce you to my work as a consumer advocate/writer/podcast host, but needless to say it causes more harm than good.

I often tell my clients who I help get money back from, “Would you feel as passionately about this had it not happened to you?”

Most say no. Therein lies the problem.

These are problems that need attention. It shouldn’t take a massive outage to finally talk about them. Looking at you, financial media.

TNB