YEREVAN, March 10. / ARKA /. VTB Bank (Armenia) will make an in-depth analysis of a situation that resulted in a major technical fault last week halting the operation of its processing center in order to avoid its repetition in the future, head of the bank’s operations department, Armen Sargsyan, said today.

Speaking at a news conference he said the bank’s processing centre has been operating since 2003 and last week failure was the first such large-scale and continuous. The fault was reported March 4 at 13:20 - banking cards were not served by ATMs and requests were not answered.

He said ATMs did not work because the problem was with the processing center that gives orders to all ATMs, but not within the ATM network. He explained that all the programs managing the work of ATMs, POS- terminals, security and customer information via SMS are controlled from a single center, which reports every second about customers’ accounts balances.

According to Sargsyan, the failure was partly restored on March 6 overnight allowing pensioners to get their money by cards while other cardholders were able to use ATMs on March 7.

"Now, we have all customer segment functions operating. At the moment we have one service only that does not work – it is after service mailing of short messages to customers,’ he said.

"We have recreated the entire database on a new platform by using new computers, equipment and information duplicates. However, we can not talk about complete elimination of the fault unless we make an in-depth analysis of the previous system that failed and understand the reasons behind this problem,” he stressed.

He declined rumors that the failure was the result of aggravating economic situation in Russia or political developments in Ukraine.

“The best response to the rumors is that the system works today,” he said.

VTB Bank (Armenia) is owned by the second largest Russian VTB Bank.  It runs 67 branches across the country and boasts the largest branch network. -0-