I was listening to a BBC radio article last weekend about how some attempts to donate by debit or credit card to charity sites supporting the relief efforts for the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Haiti, have been thwarted by banks’ automated anti-fraud measures. Apparently charity donation websites happen to be a favorite for fraudsters testing card numbers to see if they have been blocked or not. And seemingly, some banks’ automated anti-fraud systems are deciding to block donations.

It would be easy to claim that this sort of problem was typical of organisations relying too heavily on machine learning and analytics rather than common sense (prescribed as business rules, perhaps). But this sort of “banking error – oops – oh no – now bad publicity” could just as easily be down to embedded rules in a process that could not be overwritten (or had no process for being overwritten…). Clearly the banks in question have some agility issues – either in management, business processes, business rules, software apps – or some combination thereof. The good news was that their “exception management” processes seemed to work – angry customers contacted their bank and were thence able to make their donation, it seems. A win for the call center, then…