Nicky Morgan demands answers over TSB meltdown
The chair of the influential Treasury Select Committee is demanding answers from TSB over its IT “meltdown”, which has blocked consumers from accessing their accounts for several days.
Nicky Morgan has written to TSB’s chief executive Paul Pester demanding to know what went wrong after a planned upgrade blocked some people from accounts for more than the two anticipated days, and gave some customers access to others’ accounts – including allowing them to transfer money.
This morning the bank confirmed it was entering its fifth day of problems, prompted as the bank transfers 1.3bn customer records from the Lloyds platform to one built by its new owner Banco Sabadell.
Read more: TSB customers complain they still don’t have access to online accounts
The former minister is calling on the bank to explain the extent of the failure, and whether it plans to compensate those who have suffered a breach of potentially highly-sensitive personal data. She also plans to write to the FCA “in due course”.
Morgan said: “The reports of unauthorised transactions, access to other customers’ accounts, and failures of in-branch services have all the hallmarks of an IT meltdown.
“This is yet another addition to the litany of failures of banking IT systems. Potentially millions of customers could be affected by uncertainty and disruption.
“It simply isn’t good enough to expose customers to IT failures, including delays in paying bills and an inability to access their own money. Warm words and platitudes will not suffice. TSB customers deserve to know what has happened, when normal services will resume, and how they can expect to be compensated.”
This morning a TSB spokesperson said: “We are currently experiencing large volumes of customers accessing our mobile app and internet banking which is leading to some intermittent issues with people accessing our services. We are really sorry for the inconvenience this is causing our customers and want them to know we are working as hard and as fast as we can to resolve this problem.”
Read more: Financial Conduct Authority in contact with TSB over online banking issues