TSB damned over IT lockout blunder

A DAMNING report into last year’s IT meltdown at TSB which locked nearly two million people out of their accounts accused its board of lacking “commonsense”.

Law firm Slaughter and May found customers had been shifted to a new IT platform over a weekend in April before it had been fully tested.

It blamed both the bank and Sabis, the IT arm of TSB’s Spanish owner Sabadell.

It said: “TSB did not give sufficient consideration as to whether a largely single-event migration was the right choice, what the risks of this approach would be, or how those risks would be mitigated.

“We would have expected the TSB board to have been presented with the full range of implementation options before a final decision was taken.

“There were certain commonsense challenges that the TSB board did not put to the executive.”

TSB said there are aspects of the report it had ordered “with which the board does not agree” and insisted the go ahead had followed “a long period of testing”.

Former chief executive Paul Pester, pictured, who stepped down months after the fiasco, said the report found Sabis “cut corners” with critical IT testing.

But he claimed Slaughter and May’s “scattergun approach makes their report a complex and confused read which casts very little light on lessons the industry could learn”.

He added: “Obviously, if we had been aware of Sabis’s shortcuts in the testing programme, the TSB board and I would never have pressed ahead.”