Troubled French outsourcer Atos finds pot of gold at the end of UK state bank Rainbow Following protracted negotiations, French outsourcer Atos has scooped up a £474.4 million ($612 million) contract without competition to build systems for a UK state bank at nearly three times the annual rate initially advertised three years ago. Last month, National Savings and Investments (NS&I) awarded Atos the deal for …
Pretty desperate to award a half billion contract without any competition to a business so incompetent that it's effectively gone bust already. To the management of NS&I, may I say you are useless bastards.
It's exactly this sort of wretched waste and incompetence that persuades people to vote for individuals promising to "drain the swamp" and "cut government waste". At the moment, UK polls suggest there's little to choose between support for Labour or the highly suspect Reform party, and it wouldn't take many Tory voters to change their allegiance to see Reform leading the polls. Obviously doesn't matter a hoot for four and half years, but still a very worrying prospect that if US voters don't wake up then Trump will likely be starting a third term a few months before our next general election, and he and his nasty acolytes will be backing Reform.
From NA&I Website
“ Simply savings
We’re savings specialists. If you’re looking to save, whether that’s a little bit of spare cash or your life savings, we can help.
We don’t offer current accounts, credit cards, mortgages, insurance or anything like that. To be the best at what we do, less is more.”
Plus Premium bonds and giving money to HMG.
NS&I should not be a complex banking operation. Certainly not £1/2bn ball busting for a new banking platform or continue operation of legacy.
"It's good to know that you understand the details and complexities of NS&I banking systems to pass such an extreme judgement on both parties. .... or do you?"
No I don't, that's the management's job, and (in case you missed it) they're the ones spaffing half a billion quid to a failed IT provider, because their previous choices have apparently left them no choice now. I'll say it again, incompetent bastards.
Now, from the high moral ground that you're sitting on, perhaps you'd care to enlighten me as to how complex NS&I systems are? And why they're in a bind now? And why none of this could have been foreseen and avoided? As NS&I are merely a savings bank with a web interface and no physical presence (oh, a prize draw for pensioners), even with a lot of legacy products I'm struggling to see how their systems can be more complicated than a small building society?
I worked on the contract about a decade ago, NS&I systems are complex because they are as much lottery provider as bank, which has lead to heavy customization of a system intended to operate a bank. They are heavily tied to Atos because they transfered their internal staff who know the systems to Atos under a TUPE agreement when they first outsourced it. This makes it very hard to replace Atos.
As is mentioned in other comments, the mistake was outsourcing it in the first place, but at the time it was central government policy that all government organizations should get rid of nearly all their assets and operations as PFI initiatives, so it wasn't a choice they were really in control of.
Its a mess, but when I was working on the contract a decade ago the people on the ground cared about getting good outcomes for NS&I (many of them were ex employees) and its unfair to lump them under "Atos is incompetent and evil". Its not a great situation for anyone, but as is often the case, its the result of many poor decisions being made by people much higher up the chain than anyone involved in the contract at either NS&I or Atos.
I know that the readership of El Reg is primarily English-speaking, but we are talking about a French company, so it would have been nice to see the pounds and dollars converted into Euros.
$612 million is (following Wise's current exchange rate of 0.9209) equivalent to €563.59 million.
Just for the record.
So essentially they created some really poor solutions over the years - by the sounds of it totally non modular, a real Frankenstein's monster of horrendous interdependencies, and bizarrely* were not binned from contracts at an early stage but allowed to continue.
And because its a total pigs ear, they get handsomely rewarded for tinkering around the edges to keep it limping on and adding more functionality on decidedly shaky foundations**.
* Not that bizarre as doubtless signed off by non technical folk who swallowed Atos sales pitch hook line & sinker.
** Castles made of sand slip into the sea eventually.
