British bank TSB has been fined more than £48 million due to long-term IT problems

The British bank TSB has been issued two fines totaling £48.65 million. The bank is being fined due to a failed migration of its IT platform in 2018. It took eight months before all problems were resolved and customers were no longer inconvenienced.

The fines come from two financial regulators: the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA). TSB has been fined £29.75 million by the FCA and £18.9 million by the PRA. By agreeing to a settlement, TSB received a 30 percent discount, the regulators wrote in a statement.

In April 2018, TSB began transitioning its business and customer services to a new IT platform. The data was successfully transferred, but the platform itself experienced “immediate technical glitches.” This has led to ‘significant disruption to TSB’s banking services’, including bank branches, telephone, online and mobile banking, the FCA and PRA wrote. All TSB offices and a large proportion of TSB’s 5.2 million customers were affected by the problems. It took until December 2018 for the bank’s services to return to normal.

“TSB’s migration was an ambitious and complex IT project with high operational risk. Its success was critical to TSB’s ability to provide continuity of critical functions and security and robustness. However, regulators have determined that TSB’s IT “failed to properly organize and control the migration program and to mitigate operational risks,” the FCA and PRA said.

In a statement, TSB CEO Robin Bulloch apologized to customers affected by the issues, writes Reuters. “We worked hard to solve the problems for our customers and have since transformed our business. Over the past four years, we have leveraged our technology to deliver new products and better services for TSB customers.” TSB has also paid £32.7 million in compensation to customers who suffered damage at the time.