Technical hitches mar BK cash points

Accessing and depositing money through Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) operated by Bank of Kigali wasn’t possible from Tuesday evening till yesterday morning.This left many of the bank’s clients frustrated and opted to make long queues in banking halls.Bank of Kigali has 62 ATMs countrywide which are used for both deposits and withdrawals. The ATMs accept major cards including VISA, AMEX, Diners, CUP and Smart Cash(R switch) cards.Vanessa Mutamba, the bank’s public relations and corporate communications officer, in a phone interview yesterday attributed the temporary failure to technical difficulties which have since been fixed.Early morning yesterday, The New Times met a frustrated Diana Umuganwa after she was unable to withdraw from any of the Bank of Kigali machines at Gisimenti, Kimironko and Remera.Others took to social media like Twitter to express their frustrations. “@BankofKigali your ATMs are not working yet. I have been to three of them myself so far and none of them is working,” tweeted David Rugamba.“@Bankof Kigali is there any possibility that your system will be updated so that we can withdraw money before closure today?” queried another client whose Twitter handle says he is called Manzi Bery.According to the Monetary Policy and Financial Stability statement released in August, between December last year and June this year, the number of ATMs by all banks increased by 10.7 per cent from 292 to 323 , while the number of Points Of Sale devices increased by 19.7 per cent from 666 in March to 797 in June this year. The number of debit cards also increased by 13.25 per cent, that is, from 389,269 to 440,875 while the number of credit cards increased by 182.1 per cent from 418 to 1 179.However, the ATMs’ availability decreased from 94 per cent in March to 91 per cent in June this year due to the frequent hardware and network issues encountered during the year’s first half.Meanwhile the ATM interoperability also decreased from 87 per cent in March to 86 per cent in June this year, mainly due to the increase in the number of the machines by banks which are not fully interoperable.

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Technical hitches mar BK cash points