Butterfield debit card purchases were rejected for an entire working day after the bank signalled a problem with the service.
The bank said in an e-mail to customers early on Tuesday morning that customers were “experiencing issues” when they tried to use their cards using point-of-sale machines.
“We are working to identify the root cause and rectify the issue,” the email said.
It added that ATM withdrawals using the cards and credit cards were unaffected by the glitch.
The bank said just before 2.30pm that it had identified “the root cause” and that point-of-sale transactions were the only service hit.
A spokesman ruled out a cyberattack as the cause of the problems.
It added that “our IT team is working urgently with our vendors to resolve the problem”.
The bank said that, as well as ATMs, debit cards still worked for e-commerce transactions and when keyed in manually by a merchant.
It added that Google Pay and Garmin Pay transactions using already enrolled debit cards were also functioning as normal.
“We will share further updates as soon as they are available.”
A Compass reporter tried to use a Butterfield debit card in a service station at about 3.30pm, but the tap and pay function and the manual insertion of the card plus the PIN number were both declined.
But the card did work in the service station’s ATM machine.
The bank has also been asked when the problem was detected, when it was likely to be resolved and how many customers had been affected.
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