TSB fined £49m over IT banking chaos

TSB has been fined nearly £49m for an IT meltdown in 2018 that caused chaos and left its customers unable to access online accounts for several weeks.

The UK’s financial regulator said the failings were “widespread and serious” and led to “significant disruption”.

The problems began in April 2018 when an attempt to move data to a new computer system went wrong.

All areas of TSB’s services were affected, including branch, telephone and online banking.

The issues were not fully resolved for eight months and “a significant proportion of its 5.2 million customers were affected by the initial issues” said the watchdog.

It led to the departure of the bank’s then chief executive Paul Pester.

Mark Steward, executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the Financial Conduct Authority, said: “The failings in this case were widespread and serious which had a real impact on the day-to-day lives of a significant proportion of TSB’s customers, including those who were vulnerable.”

TSB’s chief executive Robin Bulloch said: “We’d like to apologise again to TSB customers who were impacted by issues following the technology migration in 2018. We worked hard to put things right for customers then and have since transformed our business.”

The problems were triggered when TSB tried to move 1.3 billion customer records from an old system run by its former parent bank, Lloyds, to one managed by its current Spanish owner, Sabadell.

However, it proved disastrous with many customers being locked out of their accounts and some customers being given access to the confidential records of others.

The problems continued for many weeks and TSB came under fierce criticism for the IT failings.

The FCA said while data itself was transferred successfully, the IT platform “immediately experienced technical failures”.

“This resulted in significant disruption to the continuity of TSB’s banking services, including branch, telephone, online and mobile banking,” it said.

Mr Steward added: “The firm failed to plan for the IT migration properly, the governance of the project was insufficiently robust and the firm failed to take reasonable care to organise and control its affairs responsibly and effectively, with adequate risk management systems.”

TSB was fined £29.75m by the FCA and £18.9m by the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA).

“The disruption to continuity of service experienced by TSB during its IT migration fell below the standard we expect banks to meet,” said Sam Woods, the PRA’s chief executive.