The Royal Bank of Scotland has been forced to admit Edinburgh staff were responsible for the systems failure which hit millions of customers – and not a worker in India.
In a letter to MPs sitting on the Treasury Select Committee, RBS boss Stephen Hester contradicted media reports that claimed a junior technology worker based in India made the error that affected 17 million customers of RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank.
An upgrade made to batch processing software from CA Technologies is believed to be at the heart of the failure, and RBS was given until the end of last week to provide a preliminary explanation of the problems to MPs.
Hester wrote: “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 June 19. 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.”
Banking services have now returned to normal for RBS and NatWest customers, although Ulster Bank customers are still suffering, because the Irish bank’s systems are “in part” dependent on NatWest systems.
RBS has proposed to carry out a full investigation, overseen by independent experts, into the causes of the problem “once the critical system recovery tasks are completed”, and report the findings “in due course”.
