The following information was sourced from an Australian ANZ customer.

WARNING: Anyone who holds any ANZ credit cards with automatic payment set up.

Review your December statement very carefully. Apparently ANZ had a problem with automatic payments in December which has impacted multiple customers.
The only hint my source received was a “late payment fee” on a card that is setup for automatic payment within the ANZ system.

ANZ are apparently aware of the problem, but don’t appear to be interested in fixing it proactively, only when customers point it out to them for their particular accounts.

At the time of writing, there is nothing on the front page of the ANZ site to suggest they are communicating the December glitch to customers or the public via their site.

Send this information to any ANZ customers you might know, we need to put pressure on big banks who’ve all made profits during the economic downturn at the expense of the general public and small businesses. If they are charging late payment fees for faults in their own systems, then this is just another way they profit from our inaction.

Keep the bastards honest.

UPDATE: My source further reveals the following:

The call centre operator in credit card solutions said that they were able to resolve the problem quickly because they (ANZ) are aware of the problem as it impacted a number of other customers as well.

My source:

1 – Saw unexpected “late payment fee” (auto payment was up to 40+ iterations on monthly cycle, so it has been there a long time…)

2 – Phoned bank to ask (a) why the payment was not processed, and (b) why the fee should be paid if they did nothing different, ie: the auto-payment is not the responsibility of ANZ customers.

3 – Got put through to credit card solutions after initial complaint about scenario

4 – Credit card solutions person was very helpful and advised on how to correct the problem. Apparently the problem impacts OLD / long-standing auto-payments.

5 – Got put back to telephone banking staff to setup a new auto-payment.

6 – Noticed that the new auto-payment has (a) different structure for ID from old one, and (b) has different terminology to old one. New payment IDs are much longer and alphanumeric versus simple 4-digit numeric. Old description read as balance due whereas new description says “FULL balance”, which may or may not be the same dollar figure… still waiting to see what happens in January…

So, the short answers are;

1. yes, they confirmed that the problem was with the old auto-payments

2. yes, they advised that more than just my source’s account was impacted