Wednesday 23 March 2022

Westpac Payment Bugs

The New Payment Platform (NPP) has been Australia's answer to real time low value payment solution for several years. Westpac being one of the adopters of NPP, supports real time money transfer between it and other participating financial institutions (OFI).

However, there are a couple of problems in Westpac's payment system:
  1. When sending one time code (OTC) via SMS during a payment request, its notification system gets congested from time to time. It had happened to me multiple times in the last few months and I am not even a heavy user of payments. Yesterday, when I tried to transfer money, the SMS did not arrive again. So I retried sending the SMS, as well as trying to use another mobile number. All failed. Then after 20 minutes also, both of my mobile phones received a whole bunch of SMS from Westpac all at the same time!
  2. The daily limits that you set on your account is accumulated when you ATTEMPT to pay. So even if you cancel your transaction, the limit still gets accumulated. So you can imagine, after the above SMS failures, if you try to cancel and re-initiate the transaction a few times, then you eventually will be met with an error saying that you have reached your daily limit, but in fact, you have not even completed a single transaction!
I can't imagine how such basic bugs can pass their design review and QA!