Dragonpay's system is fully automated and its time is synchronized with the Atomic Clock time server used by the U.S. military, scientific and academic institutions. We suspect that Metrobank's back-end system is also synchronized with some external clock. In fact, there is no problem between our time and the time reported by Metrobank's back-end as our transactions data are consistent.
The only real problem is the time being printed on the deposit slip which is the basis of our users when validating their payment transaction. Because the time printed is often incorrect, our system replies by saying that it cannot find the deposit made at that time. This, in turn, worries our customers because they are sure they made the payment.
To avoid this problem, we encourage our customers to check the time at the branch's wall clock, or to check their own wrist watch when making the transaction. If the time printed on the deposit slip significantly varies from the time of your watch or the branch's clock (ex. more than 5 minutes apart), take note of the time on your watch/clock and use that instead when validating online with Dragonpay. You might also want to bring this to the attention of the branch officer.
Take note that this time problem does not happen at all Metrobank branches. There are some branches which seem to return the correct time. We suspect that the time being printed is based on the clock of the local PC of the teller instead of the back-end. So if the local PC time is incorrect, the time printed is also incorrect. Metrobank does not seem to do any time synchronization among its branch PC's.
I was able to confirm with our Metrobank branch's manager that, indeed, the time being printed on the deposit slip receipt is the time of the teller's PC, and not their server time. And since the teller PC's are not time-synchronized, they can print wrong time.
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