When it comes to our finances, we place an enormous amount of trust in technology. It can be very frustrating when it lets us down even in ways which might be considered relatively minor in the grand scheme of things.
A reader called Elizabeth has been a customer of An Post Money for some time and is happy enough with how it manages her money and – perhaps more pertinently in this case – how it tells her it is managing her money.
But, on a recent shopping trip, she found it to be just a little bit misleading and that led her to spending a little bit more than she might have liked.
“My husband and I have a joint account with An Post Money and for the most part the service is fine,” her mail begins. “Last week, my husband, in advance of a weekend away, transferred €500 to a jar,” she writes.
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The question you might find yourself asking at this point is what on earth is a jar? It is certainly the question we were asking.
Don’t worry, we have you covered. Jars are sub-accounts which An Post customers can use to store funds transferred from their main account balance. The An Post Money app displays these jars and their balances alongside the customer’s main account.
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“Once it’s in there, it needs to be withdrawn from the jar in advance of spending,” Elizabeth says.
“After checking the bank account on Friday evening and seeing available funds plus the €500 in a jar, we said we’d head in to town on Saturday to do some shopping,” she continues.
“Between the jigs and the reels then, on Tuesday, we discovered that the jar was empty and we could see there were transactions in the jar – these were all the spending from the weekend and our available balance was €500 lower than we thought it should be.”
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She called An Post and was told there is “a known issue with newly created jars for the last month and it’s causing any spending to come from a jar first”. She asked “why there has been no communication to this regard and the customer service agent had no response. He said I was not the first person who had called to raise the issue.”
The central issue here is that what Elizabeth and her husband were seeing as available funds plus the €500 in the jar was in fact available funds including what was in the jar she says. “A delightful piece of information to discover when you think you’ve put spending money aside,” she writes.
“I was asked if I wanted to raise a complaint which I did. It’s now Friday morning and although I received a letter of acknowledgment from An Post Money that they received my complaint, there has still been no communication to say there is an ongoing issue. There will always be technical issues, that part is fine and according to customer service there is a fix to be implemented by the end of this week but to continue to allow jars to be created and have no communication on a known issue is unacceptable in my opinion.”
We contacted An Post and a spokeswoman said that “unfortunately [Elizabeth] was one of a small number of accounts impacted by a brief technical issue which incorrectly used funds from a jar, rather than the main account, to cover card transactions.”
She stressed that “at no time was the customer’s account compromised or the funds in jeopardy”.
She said that the issue “was quickly identified by An Post Money staff and resolved by way of a permanent fix. A further exercise is now under way to recalibrate impacted accounts. We have apologised [to Elizabeth] for this inconvenience. Despite the glitch, the An Post Money App displayed the correct balance available to the customer in both their main account and jars.”
