Root cause of the RBS/Natwest/Ulster bank IT problem and my advice

sirmarcus

It is alleged that the root cause of the RBS/Natwest/Ulster bank IT problem last week is an off-shore Indian operator performing an incorrect upgrade to their CA-7 system.

In order to update customer accounts each day, RBS use a legacy mainfame (probably IBM) application and run hundreds of batch jobs each night. They use a 3rd-party software tool called CA-7 to schedule the running of these batch jobs each night.

During Tuesday 19/6/12 evening, an upgrade was performed on the CA-7 application. A problem was encountered during the upgrade, which meant that the Indian operator attempted to back-out the upgrade. Unfortunately, whilst doing this back-out, he/she made the catastrophic mistake of deleting all of the scheduled batch jobs for that night and so the problems then materialised and continue today as we have all seen.

A complicated legacy mainframe system at RBS and a team inexperienced in its quirks made the problem harder to fix.

RBS have been persistently challenged to confirm that the root cause of the problem was an Indian operator and/or team but they have refused to comment or confirm; so by not doing so I think that we can assume this to be correct.

For those effected by this appalling service, my advice is to email and complain to Stephen Hester, RBS CEO. Also request him for compensation as result of his bank's incompetence.

To find his email address, do a google search with 'ceoemail rbs', select the 2nd option displayed in the search result list and then search for 'rbs'. With luck;), this will work;).

Good luck and HTHs.

fozmcfc

Yeah, I can really see him responding to each email personally. I'm sure he hasn't got anything better to do.

I'd rather he is conducting a full investigation as to what went wrong, then sitting at a computer screen waiting for peoples emails to arrive.

Tell me sirmarcus as an outsider what is your take on the human race?

callum9999

So refusing to speculate on the cause of the problem therefore means it's an Indian's fault? Interesting... I allege it's alien interference, lets wait and see if they comment on that...

By all means, email and try for compensation if you want (I would be if I didn't prepare for this eventuality in advance and therefore "suffered") but if you think it's going to be news to the CEO (or more likely, his secretary) that people aren't happy about this, you may be bitterly disappointed.

I also think it's safe to say now this has actually happened, RBS will do everything in their power to make sure it never, ever happens again. Not because they "care about their customers" - but because this has cost them millions upon millions of pounds - and that's not even taking into account all the people who may take their business away from them in the future.

NAR

This "scoop" story broke on the N.Ireland forum just after 4pm: -
https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/4029009 post #15
It has a link to the source of the story.