Who benefits financially and materially*
And to whom are the fine millions/hundreds of millions paid.
*Or is it and IT all a virtual exercise and Great Game which is being played spectacularly badly and most revealedly.
RBS, Natwest and Ulster Bank have today been hit with a £56m fine from regulators for their IT meltdowns in 2012. They received a £14m smack from the Bank of England's Prudential Regulation Authority and a £42m penalty from the FCA. The PRA said the IT incident could have threatened the safety of the banks and "in extremis" …
If memory serves the fine will be paid to the Lord Chancellor's Office (the government), probably out of the bank's reserves, so the banks owners (the government) will pay, albeit indirectly.
It may seem a little silly for the government to fine the government but the point of the exercise is to give the impression that someone got a bollocking.
the only person that thought it amusing that the Financial Conduct Authority shares an acronym with the Ferengi Commerce Authority, considering the banking sectors very Ferengi ways in their pursuit of profit. Sadly, when watching the new this morning, the FCA spokesperson wasn't called Liquidator Brunt.
"The cause of the IT incident was the failure of the banks to have the proper controls in place to identify and manage exposure to the IT risks within their business" - The Regulator
I thought that the cause was the bank outsourcing their IT operations to people that had never seen a mainframe before.
It might be worth mentioning that the fine levied on Ulster Bank was the maximum possible. The accompanying judgement was spectacularly forthright in it's condemnation of both Ulster Bank's and its parent's incompetence and mismanagement.
More of this sort of thing, please.
"More of this sort of thing, please."
Why? RBS have been repeatedly fined for dishonesty and incompetence, often many billions of quid, and they just keep on doing it. Their approach to regulatory fines is much like the behaviour of advertisers in response to an ASA slobbering - they do stop what they were doing, but they just move onto something new.
RBS is institutionally rotten. A start would be to separate out the investment banking, prop trading and other City gambling operations, and let the twerps involved crash and burn next time they get caught out. Even so the retail bank clearly has more than enough rotteness to deal with even after that separation, and I think a start on that would involve demerger into smaller businesses with their own systems. Maybe wait until they need another bail out, fully nationalise them, then demerge into a number of building societies with full retail banking licences and their own IT. Doesn't solve all the problems by a long way, but goes a long way towards it.
If they're both (parent and child) that incompetent, why weren't they forced out of offering financial services? And their senior managers and directors blacklisted from ever again holding any position of responsiblity for, or in respect of, financial IT?
Until the sociopaths who run all large corporations are identified by name and permanently blacklisted, we're going to see this kind of malfeasance over and over and over again.
"If they're both (parent and child) that incompetent, why weren't they forced out of offering financial services? "
RBS are the biggest bank in Europe, and are protected by two talismen: their vast lobbying influence, and their "too big to fail" status. And who would benefit? The behaviour of other banks is almost as reprehensible - they all got fined over PPI, for example, even the "ethical" Co-op bank had to put aside hundreds of millions of pounds for this.
No: the financial system did not fail in 2008: it was bailed out. The difference is that if a bank runs into financial trouble you can fix the problem by throwing money at it, while if a bank runs into computer trouble you can't fix the problem by throwing computers at it.
Just in case y'all missed the earlier heist/fraud/con/abiding vulnerability to ruthlessly continue to exploit ........ http://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2014/11/19/bank_cyber_attack_warning/#c_2364357
"Natwest have a message on their site, when you log in, saying they're carrying out maintenance this coming weekend."
Maybe their web developers have finally learned a sorting algorithm, so that when I use their Bankline system, I can opt to have transactions sorted chronologically forwards by date, instead of backwards, and they're going to implement that.
Having spent a few months in that IT shop and seen it with the drains up following the 2012 event, I came to a firm decision never to have any of my accounts or investments with any of the institutions in that group of companies. At least not until it is seriously fixed.
There have been various other bollock-dropping incidents since the big one (e.g. card payments and online services going offline), all recovered through the extraordinary efforts and special, only-in-the-head knowledge of some grizzled old timers. One day it will happen again and all the fix-it heroes may have retired. Then what ? This is why its a race against time for them to replace the whole lot but of course that will be extremely expensive and painful....do they have the guts to do it, or will they cut off the budget ?
It would be worrying if they were going to simply re-create this gem of a system as part of splitting off branches into new banks, wouldn't it ?
Something along these lines: not long after operations were outsourced to India a DB2 database upgrade on a mainframe failed and the backup copy was corrupted/overwritten/deleted so several million financial transactions had to be dealt with manually, which is why it took several days of round the clock processing to catch up.
Meanwhile, back in blighty the UK management hear about it and demand the UK support team fix it as they have all the experience and know-how. Response is that sorry, as you requested we let the last of them go a couple of weeks ago...
I guess that with a £56m fine and another £70m paid out as compensation the choice to outsource a perfectly competent team of IT professionals was another great money saving idea.
Nothing to do with DB2. An operator based off-shore accidentally deleted the schedule which had been prepared for that evening's batch run, whilst performing an upgrade to the CA7 scheduler software. This meant all end of day processing was stopped. I'm not sure how it cascaded from there. They were insistent that "no data was lost", and I guess that's why there were frantic managers standing over ageing techies demanding that they find the most important transactions amongst the VSAM files. The data was all there... if you knew how to find it. Helpful Banking.
...the survivors to pick up the pieces.
Fred Goodwin
Ron Teerlink
Mike Errington
were the gents in charge of the systems at that time and could be asked to explain the outsourcing decisions and process. Has the FCA been to have a cosy chat with them do you think?