A planned system upgrade at Suriname-based Finabank has hit an unexpected delay, pushing the full restoration of most banking services much later than initially projected, the financial institution announced on Monday, 13 April. What was originally scheduled as a three-day maintenance window running from 10 April to 12 April, part of a broader initiative to improve the bank’s digital and core service infrastructure, will now keep most key services offline until 8:00 a.m. local time on Tuesday 14 April. The extended downtime has left large swathes of the bank’s core offerings limited or completely unavailable for account holders through the end of Monday.
In a public statement, Finabank confirmed that customers will be unable to access a wide range of routine banking services until service restoration is complete. This includes all withdrawals and deposits via ATMs, point-of-sale (POS) debit payments using local-issued Finabank bank cards, and all online and mobile banking transactions for both domestic and international transfers. The outage has already created tangible disruptions for retail shoppers as well: at local merchants that rely exclusively on Finabank’s POS terminals, standard pin-based debit payments are currently impossible, forcing customers to seek alternative payment methods.
Not all of the bank’s card services are affected by the outage, however. Credit card transactions using Finabank-issued Visa and Mastercard products remain fully operational, both for in-person POS purchases and online payments.
For customers needing in-person assistance, Finabank’s physical branch locations will remain open on Monday 13 April for limited, priority services. Account holders can still visit branches to submit product and service applications, make cash deposits, address urgent banking matters, access general customer support, and retrieve or add items to safe deposit boxes held at the branch.
Finabank has publicly acknowledged the inconvenience that the extended maintenance window creates for its customer base, and has urged account holders to adjust their upcoming financial plans to account for the current service disruptions. The bank has not shared additional details on what caused the maintenance work to run longer than initially forecast, but reaffirmed that the work is intended to deliver long-term improvements to its overall service reliability for customers once completed.