F__*__c__kwits
That's all I have to say on the matter.
RBS Banking Group is still refusing to say what went wrong with IT systems in its third major outage in less than two years, despite the fact that customers are still facing problems with their accounts today. In a mea culpa statement, chief exec Ross McEwan said that the systems failure on Cyber Monday was "unacceptable" and …
"couldn't give a f__k what us Yanks think of some bank we have never had to deal with"
Many of your compatriots DO have to deal with RBS, because they own Citizens Financial who have about 1,500 branches across the North West of the US. And the dodgy practices that RBS are famous for seem to have been matched by Citizens, who were fined $140m for excessive overdraft fees.
Er, Citizens Financial seems to be located only in the Chicago area. Although there IS a university called Northwestern there, it has been at least 200 years since that was considered to be the "North West of the US". The Louisiana purchase in 1803 definitely ended that, as did the later organization of the Oregon Territory (today's Washington, Oregon, Idaho and a few extra bits).
"Er, Citizens Financial seems to be located only in the Chicago area"
Oops. North East US was what I meant, not North West. It being West of me by some few thousand miles causing some cognitive problems. There is quite a lot outside of Chicago, with a reasonably large footprint:
http://www.citizensbank.com/pdf/AtAGlanceFactSheet.pdf
But to return to the topic, Citizens is still part of the Rancid Bank of Scotland group, albeit with a big "for sale" sign above it.
It's the same across every industry I can think of.
If in any industry all the big players can be assured that each offers an ever lower level of service then it doesn't matter who the consumer moves to the service will be no better or little better at their new choice of provider for that service.
I can say I think my bank is pretty reliable, so far they have not broken down on me, I think there was the odd web outage but nothing stopping my cards from working..
BUT I don't trust a single bank card to be sufficient..
I carry multiple cards from different banks. if one goes down I can pretty much rely on one of the others working..
if none of them are working, then I REALLY need to worry, but not about paying for things...
"So, based on anyone's real knowledge of the systems in place, which bank(s) are least likely to have serious IT problems? Serious question, because I want to change and this is one of my important criteria."
From a purely customer service point of view I'd recommend First Direct. Always been very helpful and have sorted out things for me that weren't actually their problem. The phone even gets answered really quickly.
I can't answer about their IT systems, but they're a part of HSBC so there is probably some reliance on that".
No, I don't work for them or have any connection, just been with them since soon after they opened and found their service good.
I've been with them since soon after they opened too. I remember the special CD for dial-up (not internet) banking.
They've been great during all that time. Recommended.
Also have no idea about who does the IT, but I've yet to hear them say "sorry, sir, the system's down" when I call them. And they call me before charging me if I've made a right cockup of my account and there's not enough cash in there for a DD,
This is just a stupid thing to say, sorry. Have you thought about what "being left to fail" means? It means that at some point RBS would have declared bankruptcy and at, or shortly after, that point all its customers would have lost access to their accounts for some indefinite period. That means that, if you were a customer, what happened on Monday night would have gone on for weeks. That's a pretty bad outcome, to put it rather mildly.
"Oh no" you say, "what would have happened is that someone would have bought the business as a going concern". Here's a clue: that's what happened, with the "someone" being "the UK government" since there were no other organisations willing or able to buy them.
The real problem is that RBS's new owners (that's the people who hang out in Westminster) have done essentially nothing: in particular they have not split the investment bank from the retail bank, possibly split the retail bank further, and they certainly have not done anything to deal with the IT mess in RBS and the other banks over which they directly or indirectly have power. It's not, unfortunately, very hard to guess why this might be, though saying it out loud would probably result in accusations of defamation by said Westminster people.
"This is just a stupid thing to say, sorry."
Well, strictly speaking RBS did fail, and the government had to bail it out as the UK deposit protection scheme meant that either the state paid up, or other financial services companies (who couldn't absorb losses on that scale) would have been dragged down with RBS.
The mistake the state made was not in making attempts to revive RBS - they should have accepted that it had failed, and actively facilitated its disappearance from the market, whilst keeping the core bank operational. Much in the manner of an insurance fund in run-off. They should have opened the banks books to the SFO and City police, offered an amnesty for whistleblowers, and cleansed the dirt. Had they done that then a fair proportion of the LIBOR rigging guilt would not have attached to RBS, and the bank wouldn't now be sucking on a total of £700m in fines (perhaps more like £200m). New entrants and competitors could have bought tranches of customers if they wanted (not the failed hive off a few dormant and unprofitable accounts model that RBS offered, mind you).
Last time I looked that's how capitalism works. The reality is that the bank could have been sold without taxpayer intervention but it would have been the end of the bank and a lot of jobs in Scotland would be lost.
Instead the monster was kept alive because it would have become very apparent in the unwinding that the various regulatory bodies had screwed the pooch and the damage to the public would have been a guaranteed election defeat if it had been let go.
Given the banking guarantee on savings from the government only the wealthy depositors faced losses, the average customer was fine and well protected.
Letting it die would have sent a strong message to the others but now they are all to big to fail is business as usual.
I think you are confused. Firstly, as others have said most of RBSs employees and customers are not in Scotland, so the whole Scottish thing is just a (rather nasty) red herring.
Secondly, try and work out how much the banking guarantee would be worth to you at the point that your account stopped working: my guess is that it's worth something only if it works immediately and if it makes all your direct debits and so on magically work in whatever new bank you are now with. It would not do that. The knowledge that at some future point the government is going to pay you what is in your account is not much help until they do, because before that point you have no access to money, which you might need if you like to eat. And of course this is all assuming that the failure of RBS had not caused a cascade failure of other banks, which it likely would have.
So there was really no short-term option but to keep RBS running.: it really was too big to fail. What is, in my opinion, not forgivable is that they then have done nothing about it or really any other bank, with the result that all this is going to happen again (not RBS in particular, but somewhere).
That's all I have to say on this.
i noticed that my POS payment on monday at ASDA appears on my Natwest statement with absolutely no detail whatsoever (unless you call the last 4 digits of the card number..detail).
Every other payment from this retailer is clearly definied and includes who the retailer was and the type. But not this one.
Let the speculation begin !!
At a guess, the RBS credit acquiring systems fell over, and one of Link/VISA/Mastercard did stand-in authorisation on your card, or the transaction never went to online auth and was just floor-limit authorised at Asda, which means all your statement gets is the data passed back from the scheme to the bank.
it said it would be spending an additional £450m on top of its £2bn annual IT spend for a "complete refresh of the mainframe"
So we can expect further outages when they balls up the upgrades. In the long run I think it would be better to re hire all the IT Staff the fired and use them to train the new staff.
Well, it is 2013. one decade ago was only 2003, two decades ago was 1993 - he only said the plural, and may have been exagerating a bit in an effort to play for sympathy.
I work for a reasonably large investment bank and one of the critical cash processing systems has been barely touched for nearly 20 years, is running a software version that the vendors who wrote it do not officially support anymore and is on hardware that EOL'd in 2005.
It doesn't surprise me to find that the big "tier 1" banks are in a worse state.
I would assume that the bigger the bank, the more risk-adverse it is when it comes to their critical IT systems. Unfortunately, it seems that "risk adverse" usually translates to "it's working fine and has been for years, don't touch it in case it stops and doesn't start again!!"
It's rubbish, anyway, RBS have some of the most up-to-date technology you'd hope to find. Sure there are legacy systems, there always will be in companies that are 300-odd years old (or whatever it is) but the core stuff is seriously up to date and seriously invested in. Or at least it was until the current management turned up...
Basically they run everything from z servers (the largest in Europe) down to desktops. You'll not be finding any punch cards or reel tape though.
Probably means they have shed loads of CICS/COBOL/ISAM code and IBM assembler that no one understands any more and is hard to maintain. Buying a faster mainframe is probably not the best way to go in this case (something like a clustered Power 7+ Server and Oracle RAC would probably be a better and more robust solution for general ledger/real time payments).
One point that has not been considered is that RBS are in an on-going transformation. As an RBS customer in England, I was given an outline of the Santander abortive sale, and recently information about the Williams and Glynn split (RBS are splitting most of their Scottish Nat-West branches, and most of their English RBS branches out into a separate bank with the revived name of Williams and Glynn).
I've already been moved onto a different URL for on-line banking and banking-as-an-app, and we've had our debit cards re-issued twice in the last 18 months with different numbers, presumably with a different bank code hashed in the long number.
I suspect that much of the $2bn+ spend promised next year is already earmarked for that split to happen
It is possible that it was some of the on-going work for this which caused the problems, although Cyber Monday would be a really bad day to plan it. More probably, someone just screwed up.
"I've already been moved onto a different URL for on-line banking and banking-as-an-app, and we've had our debit cards re-issued twice in the last 18 months with different numbers, presumably with a different bank code hashed in the long number."
And you're still sticking with them? Were you the bloke over the barrel in Deliverance?
Actually, it's mainly a matter of momentum. They are still providing the banking services for me mostly successfully, and it looks as if I was not too badly affected by the problems (I managed to get money out of an ATM at just past 19:00, in the middle of the supposed problems). I was not affected at all by the previous problems, but that is probably because I get paid at a different time from most people (it was credits into the accounts that were affected).
Also, it's easy moving an account, it's less easy moving a (reasonably priced) overdraft facility!
I find this statement by an RBS spokesman (quoted in The Guardian) to be telling: "If any customer is experiencing issues they should get in touch with our call centres or come into our branches, where our staff will be ready to help." This suggests that they don't have a handle on the data loss and need customers to identify the errors for them.
"It is too early to speculate on the cause. Our priority and focus has been to fix the problem."
I tend to find that understanding the cause of a problem helps identify the extent of the data corruption and the course of action required to fix it; it further helps to identify who should be fired because at the moment whoever it is will be busy trying to cover their tracks and muddy the waters.
Unless, of course, it's outsourced and offshored, so that if someone is "fired" he just gets swapped with someone making a mess of some other organisation's IT. If the entire outfit to which it is outsourced is "fired" the same principle will apply: you'll end up with someone else's rejects, either directly or indirectly (though mass hiring, firing, and forming new companies to tender for the work)
Outsource the catering and the cleaning. If it's mission-critical it must be done in-house. If it's mission-critical and it fails because of under-investment, the CIO (and possibly CEO, rest of board) should be taken out and shot.
So technically in RBS the mission critical stuff is done "in house" and isn't outsourced.
It just so happens that many of the RBS employees who are supporting and maintaining the mission critical stuff are now employed in India and not the UK.
But as events in the last two years have shown, you don't really need those 7,500 man years of site knowledge you've built up to run your business, any old "techie" in the world can pick it up and run it. NOT!
"any old "techie" in the world can pick it up and run it"
Isn't it remarkable how many shit headed banking and corporate executives believe this crap about "outsourcing/offshoring low value activities", and swallow all the guff from consultants about "wage arbitrage", but then can't see that's what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Oi McEwan! If Indian salaries, terms and experience are good enough for the employees you rely on to serve your customers, then perhaps Indian salaries, terms and experience should be foisted on the board of Bent Bank of Scotland. You, your overpaid mates, your jumped "traders" and investment bankers, you can all f*ck right off to Bangalore, and take whatever the going rate for directors is there.
... further helps to identify who should be fired summarily executed because at the moment...
FTFY!!!
Huge bonuses for manglement at year end for their invaluable attempts at increasing shareholder value.
Now there is an idea
Because of last year's and this year's fuckups, no one in manglement should get a bonus at year end. The costs to clean up after the shit hit the fan should be borne by manglement. Think that'll teach them??? Doubt it!
The problem isn't historical under investment - I was there for 7odd years before I took redundancy - during this time they spent money like there was no tomorrow on their IT infrastructure. The problem is letting all of your most skilled staff take redundancy and walk off with something like 7500 man years of experience, then pretending that it's under investment to try to get out of the consequences of the current policies at the company by blaming it on the unpopular previous management.
In a mea culpa statement, chief exec Ross McEwan said that the systems failure on Cyber Monday was "unacceptable" and admitted that the group had failed to invest properly in IT "for decades".
"It will take time, but we are investing heavily in building IT systems our customers can rely on," he said.
That load of bullshit caused me to expel lunch violently towards that poor monitor. Now I have to get another one.
What the fuck do you expect from damagement whose only method of increasing shareholder value is to keep on cutting costs while rewarding themselves with ever increasing bonuses?
This is RBS:
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02109/boat1epa_2109054i.jpg
After reading a number of articles on their "business practices" (deliberately duping their customers), which came up on several blogs recently (Naked Capitalism for example), I can only say that RBS should just die and their managers should be prosecuted.
This latest c**c-up just shows they are not even remotely interested in offering proper services to their customers. The only thing they're interested is money and they don't care about the how and why. How is it possible that they still exist given their track record?
OK! The truth is that the card reader broke down, just as we were about to start the paper tape import job.
Then due to a blockage in the chilled water supply we blew a few valves in the memory chassis.
Luck for us we were able to recover back to Friday last week using our new floppy disk archive. Then it was just a case of loading up the 9 track tape with all the outstanding transactions on it and just hit "go" on any parity error reports.
"The investment pot is the same one that RBS talked about this summer when it said it would be spending an additional £450m on top of its £2bn annual IT spend for a "complete refresh of the mainframe"."
Seems to me they're frenetically spending millions on hardware to tick the box, but nothing to update the old stuff written in Cobol 68, which happens to still run, no-one knows how, on modern mainframes, and is an explosive waiting to blow up.
I'm sure we'll discover more, as each incident is reported here, in the 2 coming years.
As as been said above, move banks, they're not all the same, and the time spent to move on is well spent. Did that myself 8 years back, and I never regretted any of the hours spent for this.