TSB planned outage

Uxb

Do I take it that "we" are all now in favour of IT work being done to a military/aviation quality standard in house and in the UK and of course "we" are all now going forward going to be all in favour of paying an annual fee of a few hundred quid per current account to supply such an exemplary service?

No? - I though not.

Herbalus

Uxb wrote: »

Do I take it that "we" are all now in favour of IT work being done to a military/aviation quality standard in house and in the UK and of course "we" are all now going forward going to be all in favour of paying an annual fee of a few hundred quid per current account to supply such an exemplary service?

No? - I though not.

I dont see the need for a few £100 per person per year (that seems excessive anyway: TSB revenue in 2017 was £1.1bn and they have 4.5 million customers. £200 per customer equals £900m I.e. almost double turnover).

The revenue figure is from their 2017 annual accounts, which contains a CEO statement on page 3. I am not joking, but their first strategy is

to provide the kind of banking experience that people tell us they want...through investing in becoming a more agile, digital business.

Probably facepalm time for the CEO. :rotfl:

PROLIANT

First world problems - If I still can't get online tomorrow, payday,I will simply go into the branch after work or phone them up to transact the important stuff.

molerat

PROLIANT wrote: »

First world problems - If I still can't get online tomorrow, payday,I will simply go into the branch after work or phone them up to transact the important stuff.

Good luck with that one

quantumlobster wrote: »

Well, having just visited the branch, it's what we scientists would call a complete and utter fustercluck. Nothing works. Couldn't transfer funds from one account to another, couldn't even print a statement. To say the staff are beyond frustrated is to radically understate things.

Zinc20

As someone who works in I.T, I can only have sympathy for those who were doing the migration. People can kick and scream all they like, it isn't going to resolve the issue any sooner.

From what I understand about banking I.T systems (from speaking to a person who used to work in banking IT), much of the software the banks use for transactions and funds etc was written long ago, in the modern world, we have just stitched on other parts to make it work. In that respect the front end what the customer sees, ie funds going missing etc, doesn't mean that is what has actually happened. In the backend system, everything may be ok, you just can't access or get to it through the customer side of things.

From what I remember about TSB/Lloyds branches, they just connect to a webpage on the same system, so they may well be down as well. But I may be wrong!

Clearly whoever planned the migration did not have a sufficient recovery plan in place should it all go wrong. It should have been possible for the bank to revert to the old Lloyds system if required. My guess is there were errors in the original migration and they are having to start from scratch.

globetraveller

PROLIANT wrote: »

First world problems - If I still can't get online tomorrow, payday,I will simply go into the branch after work or phone them up to transact the important stuff.

:rotfl::rotfl::rotfl:

quantumlobster

Zinc20 wrote: »

Clearly whoever planned the migration did not have a sufficient recovery plan in place should it all go wrong. It should have been possible for the bank to revert to the old Lloyds system if required.

This is what you can't do on a live transactional system unless you're both willing and able to undertake the mother of all reconciliations. Basically you'd have to replay (on the old system you're going back to) all the transactions from the time you cut over to the new system up until now, then find a way of keeping up with reality whilst you prep to take down the new system.

Sounds awful? It is. Littered with opportunities for huge, expensive mistakes that would make the current state of affairs seem quite appealing by comparison.

A_Nice_Englishman

Zinc20 wrote: »

As someone who works in I.T, I can only have sympathy for those who were doing the migration. People can kick and scream all they like, it isn't going to resolve the issue any sooner.

From what I understand about banking I.T systems (from speaking to a person who used to work in banking IT), much of the software the banks use for transactions and funds etc was written long ago, in the modern world, we have just stitched on other parts to make it work. In that respect the front end what the customer sees, ie funds going missing etc, doesn't mean that is what has actually happened. In the backend system, everything may be ok, you just can't access or get to it through the customer side of things.

From what I remember about TSB/Lloyds branches, they just connect to a webpage on the same system, so they may well be down as well. But I may be wrong!

Clearly whoever planned the migration did not have a sufficient recovery plan in place should it all go wrong. It should have been possible for the bank to revert to the old Lloyds system if required. My guess is there were errors in the original migration and they are having to start from scratch.

Further complicated by transactions occurring every second of the day and night. Gone are the days when banks locked their doors at 3.30 on a Friday afternoon and nothing happened until 9.30 Monday morning, If something goes wrong they can't simply revert to how things were before they started and try again.

Zinc20

Most times "the" migration will copy over say 99% of the data, then just before the final stage, the account will be locked and both copies (on the new and old system) compared to see if there are any changes, if so they are copied, and then the migration is complete. This is how you would do it on a per account basis anyway. I guess bank accounts are more complex with payments coming in and out.

One has to ask why they didn't pay Lloyds for a copy of their own system, instead of moving everything to a new system.

teddysmum

They say they have taken down the internet banking for 'a few hours':rotfl:

As long as they pay my correct interest on our current accounts and don't mess up the standing order to our savers, I don't care, but if it goes to next month the standing order will dig into the current account, so lose interest there (standing order monies are paid in from outside)

I mentioned before all this started that staff expected this, when stage one of a number went wrong.