Treasury Committee calls TSB CEO for grilling

The Treasury Committee will take evidence from TSB and its parent company Banco Sabadell on 2 May, following the widespread reports of IT problems and access to its online banking services.

TSB chief executive Paul Pester and chairman Richard Meddings, along with a representative from Sabadell, have been called as witnesses.

Treasury Committee chair Nicky Morgan wrote to Pester on 24 April to find out what had gone wrong, the extent of the failure, and how TSB intends to compensate customers who have suffered a breach of potentially highly-sensitive personal data.

Pester responded on Friday, with his letter apologising and explaining that IBM had been brought in to lead a full review of the situation.

“It is important to note that fundamental record keeping and account management functions within the platform are working as designed. This means that the fundamental components of the bank, such as regular payments, debit cards, credit cards, and ATMs, are working as normal,” he wrote, adding that no customer will be out of pocket as a consequence.

Commenting on the correspondence, Morgan said that the Treasury Committee is “extremely concerned” by the problems at TSB, and by the apparent miscommunication to customers about the extent and nature of these problems.

“It’s been reported that services such as online banking have been down for some TSB customers for over a week. Many individuals and businesses will have made arrangements for the planned outage, but not for the additional time that the systems have been unavailable,” she said. “We will take evidence from TSB and Sabadell representatives to find out how they got into this mess, who is responsible, and how they are putting it right.”

Issues began for TSB on 20 April when an attempted migration of accounts from a legacy Lloyds platform to a new system from Sabadell led to several customers reporting missing payments, unexplained credits and views into the accounts of strangers.

The bank warned customers to expect disruption to services over that weekend, but issues continued during the following week. TSB was forced to switch off its online services entirely for several hours on the 24th to find a solution, but ran into more issues when it came back online as an influx of customers attempting to access their accounts crashed the system once more.

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