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Totally Sardonic Bank: Well, it must be, to have a TITSUP* the same week as THAT report

Has learned from its mistakes... again

Updated TSB has again managed to capture the ire of thousands of customers after a technical glitch meant delays to payments into some accounts - just days after a damning report heavily criticised the bank for last year's IT meltdown.

The comedy bank has deployed that over-used five-letter word - sorry - to the legion of account-holders about the latest wobble, which started last night and continued into today, only being resolved at the start of lunch.

TSB first admitted troubles after 8am UK this morning, saying: We apologise for the inconvenience that has caused and will ensure customers are not left out of pocket… customers can still use their cards to make payments or withdraw cash.”

This is true, but only if those affected customers had sufficient funds into their accounts. This wasn't the case for many who had been expecting payments to clear, and they leapt onto Twitter to voice their annoyance.

And here:

And here:

The Register has called and emailed all the PR reps at TSB to ascertain the technical issues that caused the latest service interruption. We won't hold our breath for comment.

TSB has been pulled over hot coals for its flakey approach to IT: a badly specified migration of its core banking data and payment records left 1.9 million customers unable to access services last spring.

The whole sorry debacle cost CEO Paul Pester his job and the bank £330m, including £125.2m in customer compensation and £49.1m in fraud and operational losses. TSB was forced to hire external help in the shape of IBM.

The 262-page report - commissioned by TSB - which was published earlier this week – concluded TSB needed stronger oversight of its suppliers as the bank migrated from former parent Lloyds Banking Group’s IT Platform to new owner Sabadell's equivalent infrastructure - this was supposed to cut costs by £160m.

The "highly complex" migration required project managing services from more than 70 suppliers and the efforts of over 1,400 people.

"In particular, a key cause of the extent of disruption was that the two data centres, built to support the new platform were, in certain areas, configured inconsistently despite having been specified to be identical. Additional issues around coding and capacity also arose," the report stated. "These technical issues were then compounded by the high volume of customer enquiries as public concern increased – enquiries which exceeded the contingency resources already in place."

The Proteo4UK platform run by Sabadell to which TSB moved its ops had not been sufficiently put through its paces. There were 2,000 defects relating to testing when the systems went live yet the board was made aware of only 800.

TSB CEO Richard Meddings apologised and he insisted the bank had learned from its mistakes. ®

* Total Inability To Support Usual Payday

Updated 22 November to add:

A TSP PR rep has sent us a statement, assuring that "Customers will not be left out of pocket."

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