I have been affected by this over the past week or so. I've been on holiday, and came back to a house with no fresh food, and no working bank account to pay for any, so I've been eating processed shite out of the freezer like a student for four days, and it's making me feel a bit poorly, not to mention the freezer is starting to look a little bare. I haven't had breakfast for days, and I have about two meals left if I stretch it. Surely this isn't acceptable in 2012?
Perhaps a little less seriously than the effect on my health from a lack of fresh food, I was paid my monthly salary yesterday, and that hasn't appeared in my account. I'm assuming that it'll appear in the next few days, but if it doesn't, I can't purchase the car I'd arranged to buy on Friday. It's all a massive balls-up and affecting my life in so many random ways.
Can any British readers recommend any alternative banks? I'm based in the centre of Sheffield, so I have the choice of pretty much all of them.
I'm 22, so you might say I haven't experienced the full spectrum of banking products, but for what I have used I really like HSBC. Always quick to answer the phone, and maybe not so specific to their service levels but they were one of the few banks to not take bailout cash if I remember rightly.
They have their First Direct offering too, which gives you a higher interest rate for less face-time. You still get to use parts of the HSBC branches too.
We're refinancing our house through HSBC and our account manager has been exceptionally nice. It's a premier account so we're still trying to get a handle on the different and new fees (recommended because we do a lot of intl travel).
I've been with the Nationwide for years now, and never had a problem with them. Being a building society they're a bit less profit driven, though I don't know if anything can protect against offshore cost-cutting exercises in this day and age :/
One of the problems with a large-scale outage for a large financial institution is it will cascade down to other banks.
So if a bank the size of RBS/NatWest (comparable to Bank of America, or Chase) falls over and you don't have an account it might not affect you - unless your employer uses that bank to carry out their pay runs, in which case you're not going to get paid. Several newspapers were reporting people whose house purchases fell through because their solicitors were using NatWest as an intermediary.
(I actually bank with Nationwide as well, although their online service is a bit odd. Then again, when is that not true for a bank?)
The Co-Op? (Although rumour has it that they're going to completely replace their computer systems either this year or early next year so that might be a case of jumping from one basket case to another!)
RBS appears to have fouled up the scheduling of their overnight batch run in a way that meant large tranches of transactions simply weren't going through the system. Fixing the problem has taken days (which may be down to poorly managed outsourcing) and it's then taking even more time to catch up with the backlog of unregistered transactions, because they can only fit so many extra into the overnight run.
If you've got a pay slip or something, then get yourself to an RBS branch and they'll give you cash to tide you over in the meantime. Don't starve yourself!
I can't use the Co-op. They won't let me have an account because I apparently have a bad credit rating. (The real reason, I expect, is because I have no credit rating as I've never applied for a credit card or loan, or been late on a bill.) They're probably overdue a computer system overhaul as they've recently taken over several other banks and building societies, notably the Britannia where I had a few friends working.
My pay now seems to have appeared, and my second account doesn't have £0.00 in it any more, so I've got my fingers crossed that I'll be able to go to Tesco tonight. I might go to the branch and get cash though, just in case I get the dreaded 'card declined'.
I can't use the Co-op. They won't let me have an account because I apparently have a bad credit rating. (The real reason, I expect, is because I have no credit rating as I've never applied for a credit card or loan, or been late on a bill.)
It's really worth double checking. Identity theft is not always obvious...
The cost is minimal, and I've twice had debts associated with someone else who's shared an address with me (not at the same time) get attached to my name. In one of those cases it appears to have been a deliberate act by the debtor.
Also when I was sorting these out I was told that the "no credit card == bad credit rating" thing is pretty much a myth in the UK at least. It can help make a credit rating better, but its absence doesn't make a credit rating bad.
Credit rating has never worked that way in the UK afaik. I have never had a credit card, or a loan or an overdraft (or a mortgage, or savings account). I have been late on bills and had warnings sent out yet have a perfect credit score (had to be checked recently for pre-mortgage application checks).
The Co-Op run Smile, the internet bank. They've got a great premium current account.
However, I've applied six times online (the only way you can). I'd wade through all my details, previous addresses, employers details, passwords, pin numbers - the works. Took at least 20mins a time - then I'd go to the final page and get a generic "There has been an error with your request, please return to your previous page." And that's it - my entire application lost. So I have been unable to open an account for months. I've given up.
I phoned them, but with no reference number, the woman said they weren't aware of any IT issues and that was that.
I tried Co-op online a couple of times and was rejected. I finally went in to the branch on Leadenhall St in the City and applied 'manually' it went very smoothly and the staff are very helpful. They are very strict with checks for loans and mortgages as well. I wasn't able to get a mortgage with them despite being a customer and with them and having a completely clean credit record because they surmised from the location of my new house that I would be changing jobs and ended up putting me in a position where I had to admit that I was going self employed...game over. No other bank even asked. I would definitely trust them to be fiscally prudent, but if you need some credit you might need to look elsewhere.
The co-op's online banking system is horrible. They used to have it designed so that entering your password multiple times would lock you out of your account, even if you were entering your password correctly but the system was having problems and couldn't verify it for some reason.
I had to call them to reset the password every time the account got locked because of system errors on their part. The current system isn't much better, with the password field at login not accepting backspaces.
I've had my main current account with the co-op for years and it's been fine. However I'm a bit pissed off that they've just withdrawn their low-cost phone line and replaced it with a pricier 0844 number.
I'm with the Co-op and as far as banks go, it's the best I've dealt with so far. Once you memorise the couple of keys to skip straight to a human they pick up straight away and have always been helpful.
On the web though they are horrible. The site is awful and little more than a truncated list of recent transactions with the odd money transfer bit thrown in. I don't know what other banks are like but statements don't go back very far (especially if you have lots of small transactions like I do). They wanted to charge me £395 for statements covering September 2010.
However, they have never cut off my student account without warning a month before I finished (Halifax) or threw my parents out of their house over some fucking clause in the PPI (Natwest).
I've used a few and ultimately ended up at HSBC for my business and personal account. Haven't had any problems so far (touch wood) and been pretty impressed so far with the service.
If I remember correctly, they were one of the few banks to come out the back of the banking crisis largely unscathed. Convinced a few friends to move too and have had good feedback so far (but ymmv as usual).
I had actually decided to move away from Natwest before this outage - as part of RBS acquiring some bank branches from one of the other bankrupt banks, the EU competition authorities forced them to sell some of their accounts to Santander, and they thought it would be a good idea to sell half of my accounts (business and personal credit card) whilst retaining the other half (personal, savings and joint account). Given that I would crawl over broken glass rather than use Santander, this prompted me to think about alternatives and duly switch my personal banking to First Direct (which took a matter of minutes and has worked perfectly), and my business banking will go to either HSBC or Barclays (under consideration because Barclays offer data feeds which I can pipe directly into FreeAgent).
Ditto the Ditto - but note that Note all Barclays account are available for feed into FreeAgent. My Business Account was not. Had a hilarious few days speaking to various Barclays people who didn't know the service existed, or that Barclays even had a Data Services division.
I moved from Natwest to First Direct a couple of months ago, and have had a great experience so far.
Their online banking isn't quite so nice as Natwest's, but that's more than made up for by the amazing phone service. I've had to call a couple of times (once to replace a lost card), and almost instantly been put through to someone who can solve my problem.
I have been with First Direct for a few years and I really like it, wouldn't move. It's good for people like me who want to interact with their bank firstly online, and secondly on the phone, and in person at a branch at a distant third.
First Direct is entirely owned by HSBC - it's essentially a branch of HSBC on the internet not the high street. If you need to deposit a paper cheque or the like you will be directed to a HSBC branch.
First Direct has no 2FA barrier to online banking, which is one of the key reasons I moved to them from Barclays (who were mostly a decent bank in fairness).
Same here, although they have recently changed the wording of their T&Cs to include 2FA. I asked them about this, and they said they were considering its introduction. (HSBC already has it).
Also, they use that "second letter from your password" style of login, and I'm not sure how they're doing that without keeping the plaintext of the whole password somewhere.
Agree - HSBC - good experience for me. I've been with HSBC UK for personal use for about five years. Their online banking is what I'd expect - allows for low-hassle international FX transfers, security seems solid, stuff works, no user interface horror. On the phone they're consistently helpful. Like the parent, they block my card the moment I do too many transactions with new overseas providers without warning them. But they sort it out quickly if you call and verify.
This is the thing. Credit cards are the perfect solution here (and in many other situations), but there's a hard core of people who have some sort of ethical disagreement with them.
there's a hard core of people who have some sort of ethical disagreement with them
I (as a matter of choice) don't have any credit cards. I have no ethical problem with them. I do have an excellent idea what the results of my incredible lack of will power and a credit card will be though :-)
It's not really like that at all. It's worthwhile having a backup account at an alternate bank (that's obviously not within the same banking group), for the same reason we make backups of our data -- things happen. It's nice to know there's a second debit card and a chunk of change in another account should anything happen.
This thread is relevant to my interests: I'm totally going to switch when I can actually get at my cash. If the problem has been because of cuts to & outsourcing of IT staff, we can only assume there'll be more of them.
So, here's a question: does anyone know what the frontline IT setups of other UK banks are like? There'd be no point in jumping to an outfit which has similarly weak infrastructure.
If you're going to switch, why wait? You can have more than one account at a time.
Open the new one, and start using it. When you have access to your old account, write yourself a check and deposit it in the new account.
It's that easy. You don't have to officially "close" the account and withdraw the cash.
Once your balance is zero in the old account, give them a call and confirm that you want it closed, but at least in the US banks will auto close zero balance accounts after a little while.
Over here they tend to deliberately keep them open (and will encourage you to leave 5 pounds in there to do so), presumably to inflate their statistics.
Can any British readers recommend any alternative banks?
Consider building societies.
I've been very happy with the Nationwide for twenty odd years. Online banking is pretty good. Also, because of their organisational structure, building societies seem to have weathered the various banking stupidities of the last few years considerably better then some.
For personal and small business banking that crosses borders, I'm partial to HSBC's systems and practices which feel somewhat less unethical than most, though I cannot attest whether those are the same in their UK home as they are in the smattering of branches in New England.
I'd strongly recommend Nationwide. Their staff are always friendly and helpful, it's a building society and their online banking site shits all over Natwest's offering (I had a NW account up until a year or so ago).
I keep the equivalent of about 500 USD in cash at a "hidden" spot in my apartment, in case something bad temporarily would happen to my bank account. Not enough for it to hurt if it was stolen, but enough to last for a while (I am a student). Perhaps that's something you could consider once this mess is sorted.
TLDR: Looks like a failure in their CA-7 batch processing systems, which compounded so they weren't able to back out. Lots of the experts in RBS's implementation of CA-7 have been made redundant, and been replaced with offshore-expertise
I'm not going to question the proficiency of the offshore talent, however, I'm sure most on HN would agree that there's great value with legacy systems in not getting rid of the people who have been working on them for the last 20 years, and know all the idiosyncrasies and foibles.
Lots of the UK banks still use highly complex decades old main-frame based systems which interact with hundreds of other systems. It feels to me like the systems have got so complex, that its hard to see a way of replacing or rewriting and simplifying them.
"It seems whoever made the update to CA-7 managed to delete or corrupt the files which hold the schedule for the overnight jobs, so they did not run, or ran incorrectly"
The aspect that they didn't export the job queue prior to update is something that cross's the border of neglegence with both feet.
Still can't understand why a bank that had people who made bad deals and lost money causing the bank to partialy fail are kept inplace and paid bonus's and the IT people who did there job well are replaced by cheap labour external to the country and this is at a time when there going on about TAX evasion, this too me makes no sence and is why I don't run banks :|.
IT is seen as an overhead, and as something that doesn't contribute directly to profitability. When compared to dealers, dealers bring in the profit, IT slurps it away.
Very true sadly. Don't see many outsourced HR and accounts sections though.
Sad part is that when it goes wrong it does effect the balance sheet. Even sadder is how they internaly cost IT and do it wrong. Remove the IT and see how many people/time is needed to do the same job and that is the true cost/potentual impact of IT. Sadly though that is never done and only comes to light when things fail and then they blame IT and not the effects of seagul managment, budget cuts etc.
Interesting that a retail bank whose core business is to process transactions takes the decision to outsource that capability. And then is exposed as unable to monitor/control the outsourced operation.
Some similarities to the now defunct Railtrack whose remit was to maintain the UK railways decided that it was a good idea to outsource all of its engineering capability. It turned out that Railtrack did not have the ability to manage, monitor or access the state of work carried out by contractors. Some details and links in...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railtrack#Founding
A good lesson. Accessing which are the core functions of your company. And the ability to execute them without failure.
To both your questions, the answer is lack of expertise at hand. People who knew the smells and idiosyncrasies of the systems were not there anymore. A good engineer (as I'm sure there are plenty in the new offshore teams) can fix mostly anything, he'll just take some time if he never did it before. Now they learned how long those delays were.
Maybe in their next business case for off-shoring, they'll plug in realistic numbers for the risk of downtime and its cost.
> there's great value with legacy systems in not getting rid of the people who have been working on them for the last 20 years, and know all the idiosyncrasies and foibles.
As someone who unfortunately has been in touch with CA-7 and who comes from a strong Unix/Linux background I can tell you I wouldn't want to touch that thing with a 30ft pole and on top of that these batches are usually extremely complicated in terms of dependencies and a ton of history and lessons-learned go into building those chains and the whole system is so complex yet so critical, we have 1 or 2 guys doing graveyard shifts for nothing but watching CA7 do its thing because if anything fails it could also shut down vital parts of the bank. (e.g. because literally some plain text files didn't get copied from A to B, in 2012...)
So not only is there possible great value in NOT getting rid of people who basically grew up with the system and know it inside out but when you do get rid of them it should be more than crystal clear to even the most disconnected manager that this is some really serious stuff you are outsourcing and just blindly trusting the friendly sales guy's promises is not going to cut it... it is almost like outsourcing a custom in-house software to an off-shore "expert" and hoping they can just instantly pick things up where your people left it off.
Now it is time to really take a very close look at those SLAs that the project team just wanted approved and signed asap....
Bankers do sometimes forget that these days, their entire business is an elaborate front end for a general ledger program.
I predict that banks which see IT as a key source of competitive advantage will prosper in the coming decades. Banks which see it as a cost centre will eventually be slugged with debacles like these.
Of course, such self-serving aggrandisement as this is not without its own problems. Banking software is enormously complex and is meant to be utterly reliable. Two things that rarely mix well.
Add in the storied difficulties of running enormous software projects and you begin to understand why most banks just don't want to hear about how the transactions occur, just that they occur.
Alistair Darling's autobiography describes some pretty scary moments - apparently when the Chairman of RBS phoned him (in a bit of a panic) they only had enough cash to last, at most, 2 hours.
[NB Slightly amusing to be posting this to HN when I am maybe 200m from the old RBS HQ]
Does anyone else think that 110,000 transactions shouldn't take a whole weekend? Of course, we don't know exactly what a transaction involves but I would have expected this to take only a few hours at most. But, of course, I'm assuming modern hardware. It seems as if they just don't have the spare capacity to catch-up after an outage like this.
I wonder if this will make the conservative bank IT departments even more conservative or will they go in the opposite direction and realise the benefits of modern technology (performance, scalability and a pool of knowledgeable talent)?
What? It's not like they are sending the transactions by post anymore. This is a colossal screw up and 2 weeks is unacceptable. I wouldn't stand for 2 weeks of downtime on my shitty little hosted website, 2 weeks from a bank would send me to the moon.
The only explanation for 110,000 transactions taking a whole weekend is if bank employees are handling them manually. That amount of work should take 60 seconds.
First problems with them at University, they gave away free 5 year railcards to all students who opened a student bank. No one I knew got one, you only got it if you went through a laborious complaint process. Once I realised I did not have my card after several months I complained, and they refused to issue me one because I waited too long even though it was their fault for not dispatching it in the first place like they promised.
Second problems was with their disgusting ethics when I fell upon hard times.
Third time was when I went travelling and they lied to me straight up about the fees I would be charged using my card abroad, which caused problems. (They did settle with me afterwards and give me some money back, but it was another laborious mission).
Throughout, general appalling service speckled with useless calls from customer service research departments asking me how long I had to queue for in my recent visit and other pointless questions. Flacid attempts at 'caring for customers'.
I'm at a stage now where I can move from them, and will do soon. I'm always happy to spend time telling people about my experiences with them and my recommendation to completely avoid them if possible.
I know banks are not exactly beacons of ethics and good business in society. My expectations for banks is low because of this yet Natwest consistently have managed to go to new depths.
Attention entrepreneurs: there is a real opportunity, at least in the UK, for a bank built the right way from the ground up. I'm talking about contemporary systems, real product ownership in the technology group where IT isn't just an outsourced cost, automated testing and continuous integration in the systems. Most of the efforts at 'new banks' in the UK have been built on the foundations of ancient, creaking mainframe systems. There is a lot of important logic in those legacy systems for sure, but I think progress could be made in building fresh solutions by starting at the relatively simple end of things e.g. customer setup, identity verification and basic savings accounts. Could built out from there to offer more complex products. The upsides of a fresh approach: lower maintenance costs, higher reliability, more operations can be carried out in realtime etc.
70 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadPerhaps a little less seriously than the effect on my health from a lack of fresh food, I was paid my monthly salary yesterday, and that hasn't appeared in my account. I'm assuming that it'll appear in the next few days, but if it doesn't, I can't purchase the car I'd arranged to buy on Friday. It's all a massive balls-up and affecting my life in so many random ways.
Can any British readers recommend any alternative banks? I'm based in the centre of Sheffield, so I have the choice of pretty much all of them.
They have their First Direct offering too, which gives you a higher interest rate for less face-time. You still get to use parts of the HSBC branches too.
Hope all ends well for you sir!
So if a bank the size of RBS/NatWest (comparable to Bank of America, or Chase) falls over and you don't have an account it might not affect you - unless your employer uses that bank to carry out their pay runs, in which case you're not going to get paid. Several newspapers were reporting people whose house purchases fell through because their solicitors were using NatWest as an intermediary.
(I actually bank with Nationwide as well, although their online service is a bit odd. Then again, when is that not true for a bank?)
RBS appears to have fouled up the scheduling of their overnight batch run in a way that meant large tranches of transactions simply weren't going through the system. Fixing the problem has taken days (which may be down to poorly managed outsourcing) and it's then taking even more time to catch up with the backlog of unregistered transactions, because they can only fit so many extra into the overnight run.
If you've got a pay slip or something, then get yourself to an RBS branch and they'll give you cash to tide you over in the meantime. Don't starve yourself!
My pay now seems to have appeared, and my second account doesn't have £0.00 in it any more, so I've got my fingers crossed that I'll be able to go to Tesco tonight. I might go to the branch and get cash though, just in case I get the dreaded 'card declined'.
Just make sure you pay off the balance in full each month so you never get stung by interest.
It's really worth double checking. Identity theft is not always obvious...
The cost is minimal, and I've twice had debts associated with someone else who's shared an address with me (not at the same time) get attached to my name. In one of those cases it appears to have been a deliberate act by the debtor.
Also when I was sorting these out I was told that the "no credit card == bad credit rating" thing is pretty much a myth in the UK at least. It can help make a credit rating better, but its absence doesn't make a credit rating bad.
However, I've applied six times online (the only way you can). I'd wade through all my details, previous addresses, employers details, passwords, pin numbers - the works. Took at least 20mins a time - then I'd go to the final page and get a generic "There has been an error with your request, please return to your previous page." And that's it - my entire application lost. So I have been unable to open an account for months. I've given up.
I phoned them, but with no reference number, the woman said they weren't aware of any IT issues and that was that.
I had to call them to reset the password every time the account got locked because of system errors on their part. The current system isn't much better, with the password field at login not accepting backspaces.
On the web though they are horrible. The site is awful and little more than a truncated list of recent transactions with the odd money transfer bit thrown in. I don't know what other banks are like but statements don't go back very far (especially if you have lots of small transactions like I do). They wanted to charge me £395 for statements covering September 2010.
However, they have never cut off my student account without warning a month before I finished (Halifax) or threw my parents out of their house over some fucking clause in the PPI (Natwest).
If I remember correctly, they were one of the few banks to come out the back of the banking crisis largely unscathed. Convinced a few friends to move too and have had good feedback so far (but ymmv as usual).
I had actually decided to move away from Natwest before this outage - as part of RBS acquiring some bank branches from one of the other bankrupt banks, the EU competition authorities forced them to sell some of their accounts to Santander, and they thought it would be a good idea to sell half of my accounts (business and personal credit card) whilst retaining the other half (personal, savings and joint account). Given that I would crawl over broken glass rather than use Santander, this prompted me to think about alternatives and duly switch my personal banking to First Direct (which took a matter of minutes and has worked perfectly), and my business banking will go to either HSBC or Barclays (under consideration because Barclays offer data feeds which I can pipe directly into FreeAgent).
Their online banking isn't quite so nice as Natwest's, but that's more than made up for by the amazing phone service. I've had to call a couple of times (once to replace a lost card), and almost instantly been put through to someone who can solve my problem.
First Direct is entirely owned by HSBC - it's essentially a branch of HSBC on the internet not the high street. If you need to deposit a paper cheque or the like you will be directed to a HSBC branch.
Also, they use that "second letter from your password" style of login, and I'm not sure how they're doing that without keeping the plaintext of the whole password somewhere.
You just need to warn them when you travel or they will block your card.
If you depend so much on one single provider then you have a problem, not the system.
Get some redundancy. Get at least one other bank account. Get a credit card, or two. Keep some emergency cash lying around.
Possibly as a banking customer you'd expect the bank you're with to have a level of redundancy on their key infrastructure.
This is the thing. Credit cards are the perfect solution here (and in many other situations), but there's a hard core of people who have some sort of ethical disagreement with them.
I (as a matter of choice) don't have any credit cards. I have no ethical problem with them. I do have an excellent idea what the results of my incredible lack of will power and a credit card will be though :-)
Fair enough, but this isn't endemic to RBS. It's like looking for a new neighborhood to move to if your cat gets run over.
So, here's a question: does anyone know what the frontline IT setups of other UK banks are like? There'd be no point in jumping to an outfit which has similarly weak infrastructure.
Open the new one, and start using it. When you have access to your old account, write yourself a check and deposit it in the new account.
It's that easy. You don't have to officially "close" the account and withdraw the cash.
Once your balance is zero in the old account, give them a call and confirm that you want it closed, but at least in the US banks will auto close zero balance accounts after a little while.
Consider building societies.
I've been very happy with the Nationwide for twenty odd years. Online banking is pretty good. Also, because of their organisational structure, building societies seem to have weathered the various banking stupidities of the last few years considerably better then some.
TLDR: Looks like a failure in their CA-7 batch processing systems, which compounded so they weren't able to back out. Lots of the experts in RBS's implementation of CA-7 have been made redundant, and been replaced with offshore-expertise
I'm not going to question the proficiency of the offshore talent, however, I'm sure most on HN would agree that there's great value with legacy systems in not getting rid of the people who have been working on them for the last 20 years, and know all the idiosyncrasies and foibles.
Lots of the UK banks still use highly complex decades old main-frame based systems which interact with hundreds of other systems. It feels to me like the systems have got so complex, that its hard to see a way of replacing or rewriting and simplifying them.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/jun/25/how-natwest...
"It seems whoever made the update to CA-7 managed to delete or corrupt the files which hold the schedule for the overnight jobs, so they did not run, or ran incorrectly"
Still can't understand why a bank that had people who made bad deals and lost money causing the bank to partialy fail are kept inplace and paid bonus's and the IT people who did there job well are replaced by cheap labour external to the country and this is at a time when there going on about TAX evasion, this too me makes no sence and is why I don't run banks :|.
Sad part is that when it goes wrong it does effect the balance sheet. Even sadder is how they internaly cost IT and do it wrong. Remove the IT and see how many people/time is needed to do the same job and that is the true cost/potentual impact of IT. Sadly though that is never done and only comes to light when things fail and then they blame IT and not the effects of seagul managment, budget cuts etc.
Some similarities to the now defunct Railtrack whose remit was to maintain the UK railways decided that it was a good idea to outsource all of its engineering capability. It turned out that Railtrack did not have the ability to manage, monitor or access the state of work carried out by contractors. Some details and links in... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railtrack#Founding
A good lesson. Accessing which are the core functions of your company. And the ability to execute them without failure.
Quite an understatement that, the €71bn RBS acquisition of part of ABN Amro often makes it into the lists of "worst business deals ever":
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/analysis-and-feat...
1) Why did it take until the early hours of Wednesday to find out? Why not run a manual check after the change went in?
2) If they found out on Wednesday morning, why did it take until Friday - after three failed batch runs - to fix it?
Maybe in their next business case for off-shoring, they'll plug in realistic numbers for the risk of downtime and its cost.
As someone who unfortunately has been in touch with CA-7 and who comes from a strong Unix/Linux background I can tell you I wouldn't want to touch that thing with a 30ft pole and on top of that these batches are usually extremely complicated in terms of dependencies and a ton of history and lessons-learned go into building those chains and the whole system is so complex yet so critical, we have 1 or 2 guys doing graveyard shifts for nothing but watching CA7 do its thing because if anything fails it could also shut down vital parts of the bank. (e.g. because literally some plain text files didn't get copied from A to B, in 2012...)
So not only is there possible great value in NOT getting rid of people who basically grew up with the system and know it inside out but when you do get rid of them it should be more than crystal clear to even the most disconnected manager that this is some really serious stuff you are outsourcing and just blindly trusting the friendly sales guy's promises is not going to cut it... it is almost like outsourcing a custom in-house software to an off-shore "expert" and hoping they can just instantly pick things up where your people left it off.
Now it is time to really take a very close look at those SLAs that the project team just wanted approved and signed asap....
I predict that banks which see IT as a key source of competitive advantage will prosper in the coming decades. Banks which see it as a cost centre will eventually be slugged with debacles like these.
Of course, such self-serving aggrandisement as this is not without its own problems. Banking software is enormously complex and is meant to be utterly reliable. Two things that rarely mix well.
Add in the storied difficulties of running enormous software projects and you begin to understand why most banks just don't want to hear about how the transactions occur, just that they occur.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-18590028
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1cRXipswfA
Alistair Darling's autobiography describes some pretty scary moments - apparently when the Chairman of RBS phoned him (in a bit of a panic) they only had enough cash to last, at most, 2 hours.
[NB Slightly amusing to be posting this to HN when I am maybe 200m from the old RBS HQ]
"The bank processed more than 110,000 transactions with a value of €500 million over the weekend" - http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/0625/break...
Does anyone else think that 110,000 transactions shouldn't take a whole weekend? Of course, we don't know exactly what a transaction involves but I would have expected this to take only a few hours at most. But, of course, I'm assuming modern hardware. It seems as if they just don't have the spare capacity to catch-up after an outage like this.
I wonder if this will make the conservative bank IT departments even more conservative or will they go in the opposite direction and realise the benefits of modern technology (performance, scalability and a pool of knowledgeable talent)?
That's a two week outage. Is this sort of thing common in other countries?
The Register uses cookies. Some may have been set already. Read about managing our cookies.
Please click the button to accept our cookies. If you continue to use the site, we'll assume you're happy to accept the cookies anyway.
Is this really the way to handle the new cookie regulations?
First problems with them at University, they gave away free 5 year railcards to all students who opened a student bank. No one I knew got one, you only got it if you went through a laborious complaint process. Once I realised I did not have my card after several months I complained, and they refused to issue me one because I waited too long even though it was their fault for not dispatching it in the first place like they promised.
Second problems was with their disgusting ethics when I fell upon hard times.
Third time was when I went travelling and they lied to me straight up about the fees I would be charged using my card abroad, which caused problems. (They did settle with me afterwards and give me some money back, but it was another laborious mission).
Throughout, general appalling service speckled with useless calls from customer service research departments asking me how long I had to queue for in my recent visit and other pointless questions. Flacid attempts at 'caring for customers'.
I'm at a stage now where I can move from them, and will do soon. I'm always happy to spend time telling people about my experiences with them and my recommendation to completely avoid them if possible.
I know banks are not exactly beacons of ethics and good business in society. My expectations for banks is low because of this yet Natwest consistently have managed to go to new depths.