TSB

[57xx]

The bank’s boss, Paul Pester, said TSB will waive £10m in overdraft fees and pay extra interest on current accounts. He has hired a new team of IT experts from IBM who have been told the problems must be fixed by Saturday.

 

 

Fat chance of that with IBM involved. They'll still be dragging various people onto the P1 "bridge" call and getting others to repeat the problem over and over again for several days yet. No one will get a chance to work on it  because they be stuck on the call going round in circles. IBM will be looking "busy" in the "war room" and charging through the nose. Allegedly.

[rab]

The only computer changes I was involved in

affected mainly staff rather than customers,

but they were bad enough.

For some reason the IT department found it

hard to accept my increasing cynicism at their

reassurances that the new system had been

fully tested and there would be no problems

when it went live.

 

My wife went to our local branch yesterday,

and the girl serving her said she'd been

in tears three times the previous day.

I do feel sorry for the frontline staff

having to take the flak from customers

while those responsible are safely

hidden away in back offices.

[Brit70053]

Go Live (on due date) with known errors. Project manager gets their bonus for meeting the prescribed timescale, someone else can pick up the pieces/ take the flak.

Nothing has changed in the 15 years since I was last involved in testing IT systems.

 

Cynical, moi ?

[Guest CLARENCE]

TSB'S still offline here, after a full week and a bit. Very frustrating, especially approaching the end of the month!

[njee20]

The fine from the FCA on this is going to be monumental. RBS got £42 million for a shorter outage with none of the massive data breaches that have accompanied the TSB one.

 

Hope it's resolved soon for all impacted.

[johnd]

The fine from the FCA on this is going to be monumental. RBS got £42 million for a shorter outage with none of the massive data breaches that have accompanied the TSB one.

 

Hope it's resolved soon for all impacted.

And WHO will pay for any potential fine ?

 

Indirectly the customers, share holders etc in other words Joe Bloggs!

 

if its to much and puts to much strain on the bank then who knows what might happen looking at the worst position. The Ref Duncan must be turning in his grave !

Edited April 28, 2018 by johnd

[adb968008]

The problem with a bank account network is you cannot go back to “yesterday’s” version.

It’s a living organism.

 

Unlike other systems which rely on back ups or live standby or live failover or load sharing, accounts work on a rolling fail... that is you build up enough momentum in front of you that if something goes bad, you have enough buffer to continue.

 

But this was moving platforms the only way to do it is down time, where they went wrong was not cutting off but trying to keep going..by going with a rolling fail they ran out of buffer.

 

No point finger pointing Spain, the new team are based in Milton Keynes, the old team was Gresham St, London.

 

The banking industry is very low tech, it may surprise people to know that a swift banking transfer is actually just a text file...

Fromswift

Toswift

Amount

Currency

Date

 

Account data isn’t that much different, all account details, addresses, s/os etc would have been copied / moved and set up ahead of time, with a time stamped difference file to catch the difference between set up and cutover.

The second part is just the balance, which is what the initial offline time would be for. Some how.. between the account set up and the balance move... something seems to have gone wrong... I could speculate from experience how this happens..but as a 20year consultant in this industry I won’t, other than to say we’ve had an airline, a bank or two.. so far we haven’t had a telco.. but it’s a matter of time.

 

Much of the problem is experience, those who know were there at the start of the IT revolution, Which goes out of date much faster than any other technology before in history. The result is new comers go with the latest tech without understanding complexities of the old and why they are as they are. That’s what causes big bangs. Sadly older more experienced too want more pay and often leave in which is a very small gene pool of information (i’m Guilty of this myself), which means IT infrastructure knowledge rises and falls in organisations making them more vulnerable, when the knowledge tide recedes, to these types of situations.

Edited April 28, 2018 by adb968008

[Horsetan]

Maybe keeping your money under the floorboards is safer....

[adb968008]

Maybe keeping your money under the floorboards is safer....

Above floor boards... model railways inflates in value :-) and is much more fun than watching 0.1% interest rising.

Edited April 28, 2018 by adb968008

[4630]

Maybe keeping your money under the floorboards is safer....

 

 

Many a true word.

 

Without revealing my home address !, I certainly keep a larger 'operational cash float' at home now than I used to do.  And I say that as someone who spent the best part of 30 years working in retail banking prior to the 2008 'banking crisis'. 

[rockershovel]

There’s a detailed discussion of this in the Guardian. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but it DOES sound credible.. it goes like this...

 

Lloyds had a large, legacy system which had accumulated over quite a long time, with various branches grafted onto it from takeovers and acquisitions such as C&G. It was then submitted to a major shock; the rapid, forced takeover of HBOS. The system was then further stressed by the re-launch of TSB. TSB was equipped with a copy of the Lloyds system, costing a very healthy sum indeed... all very well, for a system which existed to interface with an identical system, and transfer funds (hire costs) within the same business group.

 

TSB was then sold, in what amounted to a forced sale, to Santander (the preferred buyer was apparently the Co-op...). Santander had a system of their own, which they had developed with particular respect to absorbing the numerous small local banks existing in Spain. The Santander system couldn’t cope with the very large, hugely complex TSB/Lloyds legacy system, and the very high interim rental costs of that system were a considerable issue, because this was now an outgoing cash flow.

 

TSB had, still has a further problem - because the IT system had been cloned from another system, the expertise to operate and troubleshoot that system were still with Lloyds. Now this was Santander’s problem...

Edited April 28, 2018 by rockershovel

[4630]

 

This may, or may not be wholly true, but it certainly seems to follow a consistent logic..

 

 

It sounds mostly true, particularly the outsourcing part, based on discussions I've had over this banking farce with Mrs 4630, who works for Lloyds in one of the retail finance Head Office teams based in West Yorkshire. 

[w124bob]

Only thing the surprises me is the lack of the three usual suspects being to blame

The weather

Brexit

The Russians

Just out of interest with the new rules regarding data protection looming I did wonder if that may have had any relevence to whatever updates went wrong.

[Horsetan]

....more fun than watching 0.1% interest rising.

Frankly there's been a total lack of interest in high-street banking for some considerable time.

[Metr0Land]

Only thing the surprises me is the lack of the three usual suspects being to blame

The weather

Brexit

The Russians

Just out of interest with the new rules regarding data protection looming I did wonder if that may have had any relevence to whatever updates went wrong.

 

Hey don't forget Maggie Thatcher!

[jonny777]

There’s a detailed discussion of this in the Guardian. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but it DOES sound credible.. it goes like this...

 

Lloyds had a large, legacy system which had accumulated over quite a long time, with various branches grafted onto it from takeovers and acquisitions such as C&G. It was then submitted to a major shock; the rapid, forced takeover of HBOS. The system was then further stressed by the re-launch of TSB. TSB was equipped with a copy of the Lloyds system, costing a very healthy sum indeed... all very well, for a system which existed to interface with an identical system, and transfer funds (hire costs) within the same business group.

 

TSB was then sold, in what amounted to a forced sale, to Santander

 

TSB was sold to a Spanish bank, but not Santander (that was Abbey National, Alliance & Leicester, et al). 

 

TSB was sold to Sabadell which is a different company. 

[rockershovel]

TSB was sold to a Spanish bank, but not Santander (that was Abbey National, Alliance & Leicester, et al). 

 

TSB was sold to Sabadell which is a different company.

 

Your point, sir. The curse of Autocorrect plus an unfamiliar name... the sense of the article remains, though.

[APOLLO]

Do you all appreciate that there is no such thing as money these days. It's all just a collection of 0's and 1's in some far away computer.

 

No wonder the rich diversify their wealth into tangible assets like art, classic cars gold etc.

 

One day the whole bloody lot will go bang and re-set to zero. Be warned.

 

Brit15

[ejstubbs]

...The system was then further stressed by the re-launch of TSB.

TSB was then sold, in what amounted to a forced sale, to Santander

 

To clarify: TSB was "re-launched" specifically in order to be sold.  It was Lloyds' way of meeting the European Commission's requirement for it to divest itself of a chunk of its business as a penalty for receiving a large amount of state aid (when it nearly went under following the HBOS merger/acquisition).  And, as jonny777 pointed out, TSB was bought by Sabadell, not Santander.

 

...the preferred buyer was apparently the Co-op...

 

The Co-op Bank signed heads of agreement to buy TSB for £750 million in July 2012, but had to pull out of the deal in April 2013 when its own finances turned out to be a mess - primarily arising from the purchase of Britannia in 2009.  (It subsequently transpired that Co-op Bank's corporate governance was pretty much of a shambles.)  Lloyds then floated TSB in 2104, in two tranches which took Lloyds shareholding in TSB down to 50% by September that year.  Sabadell launched a takeover bid for the publicly quoted TSB in March 2015, which was agreed to by TSB, the takeover being completed in July 2015.

Edited April 29, 2018 by ejstubbs

[rockershovel]

To clarify: TSB was "re-launched" specifically in order to be sold. It was Lloyds' way of meeting the European Commission's requirement for it to divest itself of a chunk of its business as a penalty for receiving a large amount of state aid (when it nearly went under following the HBOS merger/acquisition). And, as jonny777 pointed out, TSB was bought by Sabadell, not Santander.

 

 

 

The Co-op Bank signed heads of agreement to buy TSB for £750 million in July 2012, but had to pull out of the deal in April 2013 when its own finances turned out to be a mess - primarily arising from the purchase of Britannia in 2009. (It subsequently transpired that Co-op Bank's corporate governance was pretty much of a shambles.) Lloyds then floated TSB in 2104, in two tranches which took Lloyds shareholding in TSB down to 50% by September that year. Sabadell launched a takeover bid for the publicly quoted TSB in March 2015, which was agreed to by TSB, the takeover being completed in July 2015.

Well, indeed. It’s probably just as well that Co-op DIDN’T buy TSB, but it does raise the rather awkward point that the decision making at Lloyds/TSB was so flawed, or the available information so misleading even to those within the sector, that such a decision was ever made.

 

Then there are the, shall we say, “difficult” circumstances surrounding the HBOS merger. The political logic of this isn’t hard to follow (there is also the not-so-small matter of the BOS role in issuing Scottish banknotes, which has in effect, passed to Lloyds since 2008). The business benefits to Lloyds were much less clear, then or since.

 

It also rather begs the question of what, exactly, Sabadell thought they were buying. Whatever their intended outcome was, this surely wasn’t it.

Edited April 29, 2018 by rockershovel

[jonny777]

Your point, sir. The curse of Autocorrect plus an unfamiliar name... the sense of the article remains, though.

 

 

Yes, sorry. I wasn't meaning to be critical. Just being pedantic really. 

[jjb1970]

A few years ago I was asked by my then employer to look at entering the market to provide power to data centres. Although it could have been profitable the liquidated damage liabilities were horrendous. My recommendation (which was accepted) was that the technical and liquidated damage liability far outweighed the potential profit and not to go near it. A recommendation I've never regretted. Some of the financial institutions were really trying to get us into the market, one advantage to them would have been the surety (a bit like if the Deepwater Horizon disaster had hit most of the GoM operators then the US tax payers would have ended up paying most of the bill).

[rockershovel]

Yes, sorry. I wasn't meaning to be critical. Just being pedantic really.

 

Correct, though.

[rockershovel]

A few years ago I was asked by my then employer to look at entering the market to provide power to data centres. Although it could have been profitable the liquidated damage liabilities were horrendous. My recommendation (which was accepted) was that the technical and liquidated damage liability far outweighed the potential profit and not to go near it. A recommendation I've never regretted. Some of the financial institutions were really trying to get us into the market, one advantage to them would have been the surety (a bit like if the Deepwater Horizon disaster had hit most of the GoM operators then the US tax payers would have ended up paying most of the bill).

Yes, but no. The Deepwater Horizon disaster didn’t hit the rest of the GoM operators because they had better judgement than to take risks of that nature, judging them to be too high and the consequences too great. It also hit BP much harder than necessary, because BP had taken the flawed decision to open up the structure of the company, judging rapid capital movements to be so beneficial that the risks of uncontained spread of problems were acceptable. This is the sort of thinking which relies upon the unstated assumption that risks WON’T happen...

[Guest CLARENCE]

Still unable to get into my account in the normal way, but if anyone else is still having problems, try this;

Try to connect as usual, you should get the "sorry,internet banking is currently unavailable" page.

On my computer, at least, there is a link (bottom left) to "LEGAL". 

At the top right of this page, you can click on "LOG ON".

This will take you to the normal log on page (at least it worked for me!"),

 

Don't ask me why it worked, or why it's necessary to go round the houses to reach my account, but's worked a couple of times now. Just hope everything gets back to normal SOON!