However, only hours after the switch was flicked, systems crumpled and up to 1.9m TSB clients who use internet and mobile banking were locked out. In a LinkedIn post that has since been removed, those involved in the migration were describing themselves as “champions,” a “hell of a team,” and were pictured raising glasses of bubbly to cheers of “TSB transfer done and dusted.” The team behind the development were celebrating. Josep Oliu, the chairman of Sabadell, said: “With this migration, Sabadell has proven its technological management capacity, not only in national migrations but also on an international scale.” On April 23, Sabadell announced that Proteo4UK-the name given to the TSB version of the Spanish bank’s IT system-was complete, and that 5.4m clients had been “successfully” migrated over to the new system. It was an expensive delay because the fees TSB had to pay to LBG to keep using the old IT system were still clocking up: CEO Pester put the bill at £70m. Sabadell pushed back the switchover to April 2018 to try to get the system working. TSB announced a delay, blaming the possibility of a UK interest rate rise-which did materialize-and the risk that the bank might leave itself unable to offer mortgage quotes over a crucial weekend. To make matters worse, the Sabadell development team did not have full control-and therefore a full understanding-of the system they were trying to migrate client data and systems from because LBG was still the supplier.īy the autumn the system was not ready. But tiny Spanish local banks are not sprawling LBG legacy systems. TSB people were saying that Sabadell had done this many times in Spain. The time period to develop the new system and migrate TSB over to it was just 18 months. But the Proteo system was designed in 2000 specifically to handle mergers such as that of TSB into the Spanish group, and Sabadell pressed ahead.īy the summer of 2016, work on developing the new system was meant to be well underway and December 2017 was set as a hard-and-fast deadline for delivery. “It is not overly generous as a budget for that scale of migration,” John Harvie, a director of the global consultancy firm Protiviti, told the Financial Times in July 2015. Sabadell was warned in 2015 that its ambitious plan was high risk and that it was likely to cost far more than the £450m Lloyds was contributing to the effort. When the Spanish Banco Sabadell bought TSB for £1.7bn in March 2015, it put into motion a plan it had successfully executed in the past for several other smaller banks it had acquired: merge the bank’s IT systems with its own Proteo banking software and, in doing so, save millions in IT costs. It controlled the system and offered it as a costly service to TSB when it was spun off from LBG. Under this arrangement, LBG held all the cards. That banking system was a combination of many old systems for TSB, BOS, Halifax, Cheltenham & Gloucester, and others that had resulted from the integration of HBOS with Lloyds as a result of the banking crisis. When TSB split from Lloyds Banking Group (LBG) in September 2013, a move forced by the EU as a condition of its taxpayer bailout in 2008, a clone of the original group’s computer system was created and rented to TSB for £100m a year. If you just want to read more project failure case studies? Then have a look at the overview of all case studies I have written here. If you want to know where you are standing with that large, multi-year, strategic project? Or you think one of your key projects is in trouble? Then a Project Review is what you are looking for. If you want to make sure your business critical project is off to a great start instead of on its way on my list with project failures? Then a New Project Audit is what you are looking for. Then, we’ll look at what went wrong and how it could have been prevented. First, we’ll examine the background of what led to TSB’s ill-fated system migration. The bank’s CEO, Paul Pester, admitted in public that the bank was “on its knees” and that it faces a compensation bill likely to run to tens of millions of pounds.īut let’s start from the beginning. With clients locked out of their bank accounts, mortgage accounts vanishing, small businesses reporting that they could not pay their staff and reports of debit cards ceasing to work, the TSB Bank computer crisis of April 2018 has been one of the worst in recent memory.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |