You couldn’t make it up: only days after the publication of a highly critical report into a massive IT failure in April 2018, TSB experienced further IT problems last week. Customers started noticing delays to payments arriving in their accounts on Thursday. TSB attributed the delays to a “processing error”, and advised that this had been remedied by early on Friday. There are also unconfirmed reports of wider disruption to internet banking and the TSB mobile app.
As we have repeatedly blogged about before, all large banks suffer periodic IT disruptions: it would be somewhat surprising given the complexity of their operations if they didn’t. Therefore, as well as minimising the technical risks of a disruption, banks must plan, train and exercise for dealing with disruptions as and when they occur. The most concerning point in the media reports of this recent incident is the problems customers apparently had in getting in touch with the bank when they experienced problems. This issue was specifically highlighted in the recent report into last year’s IT failure; but last week’s events provide no evidence that any action has been taken to address this.
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