

RBS software issues likely to continue into third week - lucaspiller
http://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/item/28081-ulster-bank-problems-may/

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Irishsteve
I'm a customer with these guys. The problem started on the 21st of June, the
only transactions on my account are small ATM withdrawals. No card payments or
more importantly no salary!

Tried to pay the rent. Didn't work. Tried to pay the phone, didn't work,
broadband? Nope didn't work either.

From what I understand its some old mainframe-ish style legacy infrastructure
that broke down. Ulster bank downsized anyone who was working in that area a
year ago and shipped it all out of the country.

~~~
luxpir
The Register had some decent coverage of what went wrong [1].

If this does prove to be the root cause, it just highlights the costs of
cutting costs irresponsibly.

For customers, as has been said elsewhere, second bank accounts and cash
buffers can be cheap insurance against the incompetence of others.

[1]
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/28/rbs_job_cuts_and_off...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/06/28/rbs_job_cuts_and_offshoring_software_glitch/)

~~~
pasbesoin
Boy, some of that described experience is pretty familiar.

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EwanToo
I can see this going down in IT folklore, "Remember to do test your backups
and roll back plans, or you might end up like Ulster Bank"

~~~
d4nt
I work with some people who used to work for RBS IT, they tell me that the
department was as bureaucratic as they come (presumably to reduce risk) but
once all the hoops had been jumped through, it came down to single team who
would put code into production, and they were often quite poor at it.

When I think about the scale of this mess, and the hundreds of millions that
RBS is going to loose in compensation and lost customers, I hope that RBS (and
in house corporate IT in general) starts to appreciate the need for automated
deployment and fault tolerant IT systems rather than yet more process as the
answer (I'm looking at you ITIL).

~~~
webwanderings
ITIL is not a problem, in fact it is a good thing that has happened to IT.
However, the problem is the non-IT people running the ITIL. They end up
sidelining the developers, or the developers badmouthing the processes, which
causes all sorts of separation and issues. When people follow processes
appropriately, things work out well and on time.

~~~
acdha
ITIL _is_ a problem. It's extremely rare that an organization has problems
because nobody's ever thought about how to do things better rather than having
broken internal structure or incentives – ITIL can't help with either of those
but the huge amounts of time and money it soaks up will make it much harder to
actually do anything about them.

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jacktams
Its really not an IT problem, the upside to this for RBS is they can keep a
very tight grip of their deposit to loan ratios. They aren't bothered about
the customers, its about keeping the bank above the waterline.

[http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/incomeStatement?stmtTy...](http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/incomeStatement?stmtType=BAL&symbol=RBS.L)

Just look at how very close the Deposit vs. Loan values are, and also consider
the timeline of this whole debacle.

RBS downgraded, more loans than deposits, suddenly a "IT problem" that lets
them even out the odds a bit, so they can afford to borrow to cover the
remainder, and gain much needed liquidity.

[http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/rbsulster-glitch-
slog...](http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/rbsulster-glitch-slog-survey-
of-users-plus-analysis-of-the-numbers-raise-further-doubts/)

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urbiops
Given that both payments in and payments out seen to have been affected, this
isn't really likely, not to mention that the fallout from events like these in
terms of press coverage and regulatory interest would outweigh any benefit
from such an act. Lastly, organisation of such an event would require way too
many people to stay secret.

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hopeless
I'm beginning to wonder if Ulster Bank have reached the event horizon beyond
which they don't have the computing power to recover from this.

~~~
Irishsteve
Interesting. I wonder what would happen in this instance. They have admitted
losing some transaction information forever. Wonder what the financial impact
will be

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sausagefeet
Thanks online news source for just reposting twitter comments without adding
anything. Would have been nice to actually contact a poster to get more
details or like...do more work than search for a hashtag.

