caused by an upgrade which started last autumn, according to the bank.

Bank customers have been issued with a letter thanking them for their patience over problems with the system.

"All of us at Bank of Bermuda are very well aware that these problems have tired your patience,'' said Danny Fox, senior vice president of retail clients at the bank in a letter to EasyLink customers.

"We have worked hard to resolve them over the past nine months, and we are very grateful to you for bearing with us during that period.'' The letter added that the bank's goal is now to offer an electronic banking platform that offers a consistently dependable level of convenient service said it hopes to achieve this with the new system.

The bank has been hit by a series of problems with the machines since Christmas. Hundreds of customers were unable to use their EasyLink cards in the middle of September because money was wrongly taken from their account and others denied access to automatic teller machines.

The mistakes occurred when customer's accounts were wrongly debited twice for transactions made through or with an ATM machine or through the bank's VRU. At the same time Bank of Bermuda customers were not able to use their Mastercard credit cards in the United States because of a computer problem. The bank confirmed about 200 people in the US had problems.

ATM problems blamed on bank upgrade Hundreds more were left out of pocket in June after salaries paid through ATM machines got stuck on the wrong day. The fault was attributed to a software malfunction.

In December ten ATM machines in the Hamilton area experienced problems between the Christmas weekend and New Year. Most machines in Hamilton were not dispensing cash and customers reported having transactions declined despite having money in their accounts.

Some accounts automatically voided some cash withdrawal transactions due to a "technical difficulty related to systems enhancement that we have previously announced''.

In December last year an ATM error crated an overnight millionaire as non-Bank of Bermuda customers are wrongly shown to have extraordinary sums of cash in their accounts. Bank customers are unable to use the machines. The bank blamed `unexpected problems' with the upgrading of ATM machines.

But the problem goes back further than the bank states, with reports in January 1999, when the bank apologised to customers for an error which resulted in customers not being able to use ATM machines or open new accounts.

The error was attributed to "bugs during a system upgrade''.

As far back as October 1998, customer accounts were not upgraded for three days because of `system upgrading'.

The bank said in its letter, dated October 2000, that the bank was now well advanced in replacing or upgrading all of its ATM machines.

Mr. Fox said that 11 new machines had been installed and nine have been overhauled and upgraded "greatly improving their speed and dependability''.

The upgrading will be completed by the end of this month.