Topic: Intersango Withdrawals (Read 3722 times)

Yes, its quite frustrating to have these fulfilled orders "open" all the time, I personally always manually cancel them when they fulfill, so that I can see which orders I really have. But one should not have to do such jobs manually, software should take care of it.

BTW: https://support.intersango.com/status still says: Metro Bank (UK) Online banking down. Online banking down.

And "bzwbk" "Payments sent daily." is sometimes also not very precise, my last withdrawal I waited 36 hours to be processed. And I have an account in BZWBK too, so transfers are instant once processed, so its quite frustrating to have money locked up for so long. If at least it was predictable, for example a fixed schedule that withdrawals are processed every day at 20:00 polish time (19:00 London time), so I could deposit being sure that if I don't buy coins at the price I want, I can have my money back by the end of the day (BZWBK internal transfers don't happen between about 20:30 and 03:00 AM polish time). And SEPA are done each day at 23:30 polish time by BZWBK.

If you can't make it more often then once a day, can you please at least make a fixed withdrawal schedule at 20:00 polish time, before BZWBK closes for the night? Please, pretty please...

oh yes, can you please change your script so that fulfilled orders are not shown as open orders any more? It's quite annoying, I have to admit.

Apart from that: keep up the good work and tanks for the great service!

@Intersango - can we have an update please

& what's with orders still showing as active when they've been fully filled

& what's happened to all the asks, no one want Intersango GBP any more? 

My deposit is now showing.

Looks like Intersango's bank got things sorted..

Hey phantomcircuit, any word on when Metro Bank will have the issue fixed and you can restart processing of deposits and withdrawals?

Thanks..

You should have more then one account in each country you trade it anyway - just for redundancy. So at least you can accept payments when one of them is down.

And as a bonus if you distribute your payments across several UK banks, the volume at each of them won't be so large.

Try to open at least one more other UK account. Having just one bank account in a country for such a large operation is quite... well.

See any currency exchange broker in Poland - each of them has at least 3 accounts at 3 different banks, usually BZWBK + Alior + BRE. Some of them have much more, one has 13 accounts. They do similar things, just trade PLN for EUR and GBP.

And seriously, do you really have so many transactions comparatively? If deposit transaction ID are consecutive, then in the 23 days in May you had 4357 of EUR deposits on your BZWBK account - that's about 189 per day. Your volume on GBP is about 2.75 times the volume on SEPA. If the average deposit size is similar, then you have about 522 GBP deposits per day. Is that a lot? I'd say its not a lot. Any medium sized web shop will have more. Any business selling anything online and is a bit more then a one-man operation will have a similar amount or more.

Or no, these numbers seem to be common for all kinds of deposits, even Bitcoin. So you don't have 189 BZWBK deposits per day, you have 189 of all kinds of deposits per day, including Bitcoin. That's minuscule amounts per bank account! I have had days when I had more on my private bank account.

Well I have to credit him for putting the hours in at least, last support PM to me was after 11pm & this one is before 7am on a Saturday, I've made other arrangements now & cancelled my GBP withdrawal request as it wasn't able to go through in the time that I needed it to

Just out of interest did Metro Bank fix their issue yesterday as they mentioned they would to you guys?

Notice that today from 17:30 (Central European Summer Time) till tomorrow 23:00 (Sunday) there is a scheduled maintenance in Bank Zachodni WBK and transfers won't work. Transfers will resume on Monday.

Full announcement:

Ladies and Gentlemen! Please be informed that due to maintenance work, between 17:30 on 26.05.2012 and 23:00 on 27.05.2012:
- access to BZWBK24 services may be hampered,
- transactions ordered during that period will be effected after 23:00 on 27.05.2012,
- 'Offer for You' and 'My Profile - My Data' tabs will not work,
- Details of Portfolio and Loans will not be accessible.

Additionally on 27.05.2012 between 02:00 - 06:00 BZWBK S.A. ATMs and payment cards will be out of service.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Aren't you using Alerty24 for BZWBK incoming transactions?

These are E-mail's sent instantly when a deposit comes to your account. These are OpenSSL signed, so you can actually verify the digital signature - ensuring that the E-mail really comes from the bank. That way you could credit deposits instantly without logging in to the website.

That would be absolutely awesome, it means that customers having accounts in BZWBK (which a lot of people in Poland do) would be able to deposit to Intersango instantly, which would surely increase attractiveness and thus volume. I noticed you recently lost a lot of PLN volume to MtGox, but instant crediting would bring a lot of it back.

The E-mail has all the data you need - including REFERENCE field.

It has a S/MIME Cryptographic Signature with the same certificate as the website, so its as safe as logging in on the website, but maybe for larger deposits you could log in after receiving the E-mail anyway to double-check.

Think about it, it would be definitely awesome.

And anybody in Poland who still doesn't have one, can walk up to a BZWBK branch and open a free BZWBK account in a few minutes, and instantly deposit cash to his account and then make a transfer to yours. It means anybody in Poland could buy Bitcoins instantly.

It takes BZWBK about 60 seconds to generate the csv file for our account, I know this because I recently had to increase the delay in our script.

That being said BZWBK has far better systems than any of the UK banks.

I remember in December last year BZWBK made a competition for customers with a Asus laptop as a prize to the customer who gets the most Alerty24 (e-mail/SMS notifications about transactions in an account) in a month. People started making scripts to make automated transactions to generate those notifications to win a laptop. The winner in December 2011 had 110000 (110 thousand) notifications in a month. The winner in January 2012 about twice as much. Then they cancelled the competition, because they didn't expect people to be making these with automated scripts. But even thou people did, they did honor the winners with a laptop, and nobody's accounts was blocked because of having over two hundred thousand bank transfers in a month (and that on a normal private account). When they cancelled the competition, they gave a free prepaid MasterCard with 100 PLN to everyone who participated in the competition (no matter how many transactions he did) as a "sorry" for cancelling the competition. Although their IT was surprised about the volume of transactions that resulted from this strange competition, they only where calling some users and where "begging" them to stop because the IT systems where overloaded. That's what is Bank Zachodni WBK respect to customers - they where begging them to stop, and only slightly suggesting that their online access might some day stop working if the volume continue to increase, but in the end nobody's online access was blocked, even though the top user had made over 200000 transactions (transfers from one of his account to another).

So how is that compared to the volume you do?

Banks in Poland are definitely awesome.

That being said very few companies have as many direct bank transactions as we do, typically they either have special deals with the bank (utilities and such) or the transactions are processed by credit card providers and appear in their bank account proper in batches.

Any idea when it will be fixed?

Thanks. And something like this can be for days and there is no general outrage in the whole country?

In Poland if online banking of any bank is unexpectedly down for more then a few hours, or unannounced earlier on the bank's website as a scheduled maintenance, then the bank gets so much heat from customers that they get their technical team working ASAP, and things like being down for more then 24 hours are unheard of! BZWBK sometimes gets down also, but I don't ever remember it taking more then a day, and rarely more then a few hours, and if it was more then 24 hours the bank would lose hundreds of outraged customers.

I remember one situation when Bank Zachodni WBK was down and not fixed until the next day. It was a exception, there where articles in nationwide newspapers about it and outrage on web forums was tremendous.

Hundreds transactions a day? That's nothing. Thousands of companies have more, and some MANY more. What about utility companies, they'll have a hundred thousand transactions a day on their account. Any medium sized webshop in Poland has hundreds or thousands of transactions a day in their bank account.

And there in UK, if banks go down so often, how do people do business anyway? After such things a company loses a large chunk of their customers (if they have competition). If a webshop has orders delayed for more then a day, their phone lines are ringing hot and some customers start preparing to go to the police.

If that's the case then they have not told us. We had a similar problem before where they thought our issue was that we weren't using Internet Explorer/hadn't cleared our cookies. It later turned out to be a problem on their end and I had to visit a branch to reset the details.

We were assured today that it should be fixed before the weekend (when the technical team is unavailable). We had to send them screenshots of the error. I attached a screenshot below. It seems like another run of the mill error (page fails to load).

Compared to other banks, they are far better. HSBC and Lloyds had constant problems all the time. We would be constantly calling in to move them to fix their technical problems. We are not the normal customer as we have hundreds of transactions a day.

Metro Bank are a very small player in the UK, they have only been around maybe 3 or 4 years at most I think and have just 12 physical branches in the entire country, for instance compare that to Barclays who have over 1600 in the UK. Plus we've better things for the news here, the impending collapse of the Euro is center stage.

I don't see their online banking being down, there would be a message here: https://corporate.metrobankonline.co.uk/

@phantomcircuit: if there is something else going on, like they locked your account because of something, then just tell us the truth, so people stop sending money to the account, and not let us believe "Online banking is down", when I see it isn't. They would have put a message on their login page, wouldn't they?

I'm sorry for not fully believing, but if we put our money in there, we need to know exactly what's going on. I don't believe a major bank has online banking down for more then a few hours - they'd be out of business soon. Does it make headlines of newspapers in UK already that Metro online banking is down so long? In Poland it would.

Funny Metro Bank have one of their major sales pitches they are more available than other banks, longer hours, branches open weekends and Internet Banking and yet their Online site is stuffed up for a week.. I assume they know about this and have given some reason why?

Oh and I hope they don't force you to have that Trusteer Rapport installed to access their online banking, it has to be the worst piece of crap security software ever.. You want to have a laugh watch this.. http://youtu.be/EimZQgt7WPg Takedown of it at a security conference last year..