New IT glitch hits RBS’s long-suffering customers

Its worst IT meltdown was in 2012, when 6.5m customers were left locked out of their accounts for days

RBS’s chief executive warned two years ago that the bank’s IT was urgently in need of an upgrade (Corbis)

RBS’s famously accident-prone computer systems have claimed thousands more victims as the taxpayer-controlled bank was found to have blocked customers trying to retrieve their own cash from old bank accounts.

The latest incident will reignite concerns about the bank’s IT systems, which its own chief executive has admitted have been starved of investment for “decades”.

The latest problem affected so-called “dormant” accounts, opened decades ago and forgotten about. An industry-wide scheme has been set up to make it easier for the public to trace them through a website called Mylostaccount.org.uk. This is meant seamlessly to link banks to their long-forgotten customers, enabling them to be reunited with cash that is rightfully theirs.

However, when thousands of RBS customers contacted the bank through Mylostaccount, they were wrongly told it did not have their savings.

RBS apologised and blamed a computer glitch.

The amounts at stake appear to be fairly small – up to £50 on average, according to the bank. But it remains embarrassing, and is yet another mishap to have occurred due to RBS’s accident-prone technology.

Ross McEwan, RBS’s chief executive, warned two years ago that the bank’s IT was urgently in need of an upgrade, declaring: “For decades, RBS failed to invest properly in its systems.”

That statement came after a system crash which left more than 1 million customers unable to withdraw cash or pay for goods on Cyber Monday, 2013 - one of the busiest shopping days before Christmas.

Its worst IT meltdown was in 2012, when 6.5m customers were left locked out of their accounts for days. The bank was eventually fined £42m over the fiasco

In June of this year, about 600,000 transactions were delayed due to a computer failure. The Financial Conduct Authority has ordered the bank to contact all customers affected by this latest mistake.

Analysts and banking industry executives say RBS is still suffering from an outdated patchwork of computer systems.

In a now-familiar mode for RBS, yesterday it was apologising to those affected: “We are very sorry this happened and as soon as we discovered this we took steps to correct our error.”

About 4,500 customers with an average of less than £50 were affected, it said.

Missing millions

Amid concerns that banks were profiting from the interest on some £850m in dormant accounts, in 2008 Parliament passed an Act creating a central reclaim fund into which all accounts untouched for 15 years were placed. Any surplus from the funds is given to charity. Simultaneously, a website, Mylostaccount.com, was established to help customers to locate old accounts. The British Bankers’ Association, Building Societies Association and National Savings and Investment have tracing systems which feed into Mylostaccount. An update on the new regime last year found that £200m had been reunited with savers.