TSB boss Paul Pester hits wrong note at Treasury Committee hearing on IT failure

CEO says he 'doesn't recognise' scenarios described by affected customers

Paul Pester was in front of MPs answering questions about the bank's recent digital issues (Reuters)

TSB chief executive Paul Pester struck a sour note during a Treasury Committee hearing on the company’s recent IT failures when he thanked MPs on the panel for using his bank.

TSB has been under fire recently after a planned migration of data from its old system, which belonged to former owner Lloyds Bank, to a new platform led to a prolonged outage.

Thousands of customers were left unable to access online and mobile banking services for a period of 10 days, with some issues still ongoing.

Mr Pester, along with TSB chair Richard Meddings and Miquel Montes, chief operations officers at TSB’s owner, Sabadell, faced questions from a group of MPs led by Nicky Morgan.

When Ms Morgan told Mr Pester that two committee members had tried and failed to log on to their own TSB apps, the chief executive said: “It’s nice to know we have so many customers in the room. Thank you very much for using TSB.” Viewers slammed the bank boss for his comments, with one customer of the bank stating on Twitter that Mr Pester’s “attitude is arrogant”.

Ms Morgan read emails she had received from customers complaining that they had been left without access to their accounts for almost two weeks, to which Mr Pester replied that he did not “recognise the scenario” the MP was describing.

Ms Morgan said it seemed as though Mr Pester was unwilling to “recognise the scale” of the problems at the bank.

He said no group of customers had been locked out of their account for two weeks, and instead said the failure was “equivalent to having a shop that is too small for the amount of customers you have”.

“All I can give you is the data I have,” he said. “As of now we are at a point where our mobile app login success rates are at a level where you’d expect them to be. The percentage of people logging in successfully is 95 per cent. Of course that means 5 per cent are not logging in successfully but that is often the case for any bank.”

Mr Meddings said neither he nor the chief executive would be removed from their posts as a result of the IT problems, but Mr Pester has offered to forfeit his bonus related to the data migration – although he will still receive a bonus for the year.

The bank has hired law firm Slaughter & May to carry out an investigation into the IT failure.