Laurentian Bank Faces Request for Authorization to Take Class Action Following Recent Outage

It was only a matter of time following last week’s more than five-day outage. The Laurentian Bank is the subject of a request for authorization to take class action.

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“That doesn’t make any sense. I didn’t have access to my money for 6 days, it was stressful,” says Johanne Clément, a customer of the banking institution which is the face of the collective action.

The 56-year-old woman from Saint-Jérôme, in the Laurentians, was waiting for her disability pension when the breakdown struck on September 24. She missed an insurance payment due to lack of access to her bank account.

“Of course it must have been even more stressful for others, like those who didn’t get their pay and couldn’t pay the mortgage,” says the woman, who is a Laurentian client. since 2005.

For her part, she regained access to her money on Saturday morning. She only left enough in her account to pay for her insurance. Everything else is already in a new account from a new institution. “Laurentian is over for me,” she assures us.

The icing on the cake, she says, was seeing that the bank charged her monthly fees on Sunday. “They can’t show me my balance, but they can charge me the fees? »

The institution has since indicated that all its customers will see their banking fees canceled for the month of September.

350,000 potential members

The Lambert Avocats firm is handling the case. “The bank has 350,000 customers and our action concerns them all,” says lawyer Jimmy Lambert.

He believes that it would be in the interest of the Laurentian Bank to resolve the dispute as quickly as possible. “We feel an exodus, many people tell us that they are leaving the bank. Paying quickly would allow the bank not to further disappoint its customers,” he says.

The lawyer emphasizes the communication problems of the Laurentian Bank last week, at the height of the crisis.

“They poorly informed their customers, but they charged the monthly fees. Yes, they withdrew the fees following our collective action, but people remain in the dark, without information,” says the lawyer.

He invites all clients of the institution to register for your appeal by going to the Lambert Avocats website.

CEO sacrificed

The outage has already caused two victims in high places among the institution’s leaders.

President and CEO Rania Llewellyn left office Monday morning while board chairman Michael Mueller did the same.

M^me Llewellyn was replaced by Éric Provost, who was responsible for business and personal banking.

The bank explains the outage which began on September 24 with a computer bug which rendered the BLCDirect service, i.e. online services to individuals, inoperable.