Stephen Hester – RBS Group chief executive has sent a letter to the UK Treasury Select Committee chairman Andrew Tyrie.
In the letter he explained what has caused the problems at NatWest and Ulster Bank he also said he is determined to “personally lead the process” of regaining the trust of customers hit by the IT meltdown. The letter was dated 29th June . he starts by saying
“As we have confirmed, account balances have registered as normal for the vast majority of RBS and NatWest customers over the last few days. We have more work still to do in Ulster Bank and I apologise especially to our customers there for the slow return to acceptable service levels”
He goes on to give a summary of “The Incident” and seems to admit that some transaction data has been lost!
The initial reviews we have carried out indicate that the problem was created when maintenance on systems, which are managed and operated by our team in Edinburgh, caused an error in our batch scheduler. This error caused the automated batch processing to fail on the night of Tuesday 19 June. The knock-on effects were substantial and required significant manual interventions from our team, compounded because the team could not access the record of transactions that had been processed up to the point of failure. The need to first establish at what point processing had stopped delayed subsequent batches and created a substantial backlog. It is not clear at this stage why that record was not available. Consequently, a significant number of customer account balances did not update as they should have from Thursday 21 June.
He continues to explain that the majority of Natwest accounts have been sorted out – but that Ulster Bank has been more heavily affected – and the problems are expected to continue into next week .
“As we have confirmed, the major backlog of account balance updates cleared on Monday and Tuesday for RBS and NatWest customers. This means that account balances have registered as normal for the vast majority of RBS and NatWest customers this week. As previously cautioned, however, progress towards a completely normal service is likely to be affected by the system volumes over recent days.
Ulster Bank has been more heavily affected, which we particularly regret, as it is, in part, dependent on NatWest systems. While progress is being made we are being purposefully cautious in our approach to ensure our solutions are sustainable. We expect the Ulster Bank situation to have improved substantially by early next week. We continue to work closely with the Central Bank of Ireland and regularly update them on progress. We are working day and night to process the backlog of transactions for Ulster Bank as quickly as possible though some level of inconvenience is likely to continue into next week.”
Ulster Bank in Ireland are opening some branches until 7pm every day next week.
Visit this link for the Latest Ulster Bank developments
Can’t believe the easy ride that RBS/UB have had in the media in this country. This guys wallet and passport should be confiscated and not given back until this is sorted.
Really and truly sick of UB at this point,cannot wait to be shot of this useless shower of donkeys,I would advise anyone who gets paid into a UB a/c to make alternative arrangement’s for the July’s salary…I am actually quite concerned now that they may never get on top of this and that my money is lost forever.
This is really unacceptable because whatever issues should be resolved in 48 hours time. But here is big disaster happened. We couldn’t manage our rent or other utility bills and we couldn’t receive our wages. Bank needs to compensate for this major issue. Me and my family had accounts and we are not really happy about this.