And it was costing the company money.īut no one – neither Guardiola, Oliu, TSB’s British chief executive Paul Pester, who’d turn 54 a month later, nor the 1,800 people sat in the stalls at Palacio de Congressos de Cataluña – could envisage what would happen a few months later, when TSB was brought to its knees by a crippling IT outage affecting around 1.9 million of TSB’s 5.4 million customers who use internet and mobile banking.īanking systems are almost as low-tech as they are complex.
When he took to the stage in Barcelona last December, the TSB migration (which was meant to take 18 months to deliver) was already behind schedule.
#Lloyds tsb online ban full
“It would offer a significant boost to our growth in the United Kingdom.” In all, 2,500 years-worth of labour had been put into the project, he added.īut testimony from an insider working on the Proteo4UK migration reveals that Guardiola’s speech was full of bluster. “The integration of Proteo4UK is an unprecedented project in Europe, a project in which more than 1,000 professionals have participated,” Guardiola told the attendees. Those in attendance had to sit through the Spanish bank’s chairman, Josep Oliu, a bald sexagenarian with expressive eyebrows jumping out from behind thick black-rimmed glasses, uttering platitudes like, “We must maintain our leadership in the SME segment, with a competitive and systematic commercial offer which is relevant, consistent and effective.”Īttendees would be forgiven for not catching a small passage of words in amongst the corporate speak, delivered by Banco Sabadell chief executive Jaime Guardiola, about TSB, the small British bank that the Spanish conglomerate bought for £1.7 billion back in March 2015. The day was a backslapping session, filled with impenetrable management speak. Two weeks before Christmas 2017, 1,800 Banco Sabadell managers – many of them in the regulation dark suit and slightly metallic blue tie – gathered at Barcelona’s Palacio de Congressos de Cataluña, a soulless, sand-coloured square building in the heart of the city’s business and financial district, on Avinguda Diagonal. Read more: Forget banks, in 2018 you'll pay through Amazon and Facebook And though the issue first manifested itself on the evening of Sunday, April 22, TSB’s problems started long before. As the scandal entered its second week, TSB warned customers of phishing emails and texts trying to steal their banking details. The situation was being replicated up and down the country: TSB customers struggled to make payments, pay off bills, or simply access their account without being confronted with someone else’s transactions or a miraculously vanished mortgage. Smith left the branch with just around £2,500 in banknotes. It was surreal.” Instead, the cashiers scrabbled to pull together as much of the £12,000 wage bill Mind had to pay while still leaving enough for day-to-day banking within the branch. “Because of the problem with the system,” says Smith, “the cashiers couldn’t transfer the cash they’d got in the building from the strong room to the cashier’s desks. The pair took their place in the queue and waited half an hour to see a cashier, who then told them they couldn’t access the system themselves.
0 kommentar(er)
