Westpac's BT Panorama wealth platform offline for days

Westpac’s BT Panorama wealth management platform is suffering a major outage that has taken the platform offline for three business days.

Users of the platform, which include advisers, accountants and their clients, have grown increasingly frustrated at the situation, and at BT’s characterisation of the problems as “intermittent” on social media channels.

There are over 9000 registered advisers on BT Panorama and over $100 billion of funds under administration.

News of the outage was first reported by The Australian Financial Review.

A notification to its advisers, current as of 2pm Wednesday, said the platform is “currently unavailable” but that a fix has been applied.

“We have now fixed the underlying issue and are currently completing a refresh of our desktop system,” BT advised.

“We expect that this process will take several hours for the system to completely refresh and for us to test that everything is working, so we anticipate being offline for the duration of Wednesday 4th August.”

BT said that the issue “only impacts your online access to BT Panorama” and sought to reassure users that “clients’ cash, assets or investments held on Panorama” were not in danger.

“As the registry system has not been impacted, scheduled payments and transactions (such as pension payments, drawdowns, regular investment plans, cash sweeps and periodic rebalances) will continue to be processed during the current desktop outage, subject to regular requirements such as available cash,” it said.

“We are also continuing to process managed fund income distributions. 

“You will be temporarily unable to access your client accounts and reporting, or [to] submit new transactions online for your clients, including cash withdrawals, managed fund or equity trades.”

The cause of the current outage was unclear, however the institution has recently performed a large-scale customer migration onto Panorama, which a spokesperson said on Facebook had "resulted in outages on the platform previously."