TSB turned down an offer of help from Lloyds Banking Group, its former owner, in the early stages of an IT meltdown that left up to 1.9 million online customers unable to access their accounts.
Lloyds contacted TSB on the morning of 23 April, according to a report in the Financial Times, after it became apparent that a transfer of accounts and customer information to a new IT system had gone badly wrong.
But TSB declined the offer, despite the fact its customer information was being transferred from a Lloyds system to one designed by its current owner, the Spanish bank Sabadell. TSB was spun out of Lloyds in 2013 but had continued to pay for the use of its IT systems.
Almost a week into the crisis, TSB drafted in a team from IBM to help solve it, after the chief executive, Paul Pester, admitted the bank was struggling to fix the problems with its internet banking and mobile app.
The Labour MP John Mann, a member of the cross-party Treasury select committee, said TSB’s failure to accept help was a sign it had failed to acknowledge the scale of the problems and had been “hoping to get away with it”.
“They were playing fast and loose with the customers and also with their reputation, which has been so damaged by it now,” he told the FT.
Four weeks on from the IT transfer, some customers were still reporting problems accessing their accounts and transferring money.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
