TSB hit with £330m bill following major IT outage

The IT outage that hit high-street bank TSB last year cost the company millions in charges and compensation, it has revealed.

The company's latest financial results disclosed that fixing the chaos has left the bank into a £105.4m loss last year, as well as losing thousands of customers.

The outage, caused by failures when moving customer data to new systems last April, left up to 1.9million TSB customers unable to access their digital or mobile banking accounts for a number of weeks.

"Challenging year"

Overall, TSB, which is owned by Spanish banking giant Sabadell, reported paying £330.2m in costs to repair the damage, although £153m of this will be partly offset as the bank expects to recover this from their computer provider Sarbis.

Of the £330m costs, about £125m was for customer compensation and sorting out their problems, £49m was due to fraud and operational losses, £122m for extra help and advice to sort out the IT problems, and £33m in lost income from waived fees and charges.

The bank also saw 80,000 customers switch their accounts away from TSB last year, and received 204,000 customer complaints, although it said around 90 percent of those (181,000) had now been resolved.

Staff had been paid an extra £1,500 in December in recognition of the work they had done to keep the company upright during the crisis, the bank said.

In a statement, TSB executive chairman Richard Meddings acknowledged that 2018 was the banks "most challenging year".

"But we enter 2019 with renewed ambition to re-emerge as the leading challenger bank in the UK – firmly on the side of the customer," he added.

Via:BBC

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