MSE News: Regulator criticises TSB ahead of bank's showdown with MPs

alanq

eskbanker wrote: »

I was under the impression that their error was simply to write to switching customers about that rather than actually reporting deaths, but could be wrong....

Direct debits failed or were cancelled giving death of the customer as a reason thus other organisations were informed that the customer had died. Hence customers having to ring round to say that reports of their deaths had been greatly exaggerated.


https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/news/banking/2018/05/tsb-cancels-wrongly-cancels-direct-debits-and-tells-companies-customers-have-died-in-switching-blunder

eskbanker

alanq wrote: »

Direct debits failed or were cancelled giving death of the customer as a reason thus other organisations were informed that the customer had died. Hence customers having to ring round to say that reports of their deaths had been greatly exaggerated.

Oh yes, I remember now!

However, the same ultimate question applies in the context of the original comment about 'fraud-scoring impact', i.e. if TSB wrote to a DD recipient erroneously asserting that the customer had died, has that gone any further in terms of triggering any sort of fraud alerts to authorities, etc? In each case the bank receiving the switch will presumably also have notified the DD recipient that the customer had switched....

HornetSaver

eskbanker wrote: »

Oh yes, I remember now!

However, the same ultimate question applies in the context of the original comment about 'fraud-scoring impact', i.e. if TSB wrote to a DD recipient erroneously asserting that the customer had died, has that gone any further in terms of triggering any sort of fraud alerts to authorities, etc? In each case the bank receiving the switch will presumably also have notified the DD recipient that the customer had switched....

If there are question marks over whether someone is alive or dead, that is undoubtedly something that fraud-scoring organisations are going to look at far more carefully. I don't have a clue whether this has or is going to have an impact on those affected. Equally, those actually affected - if any - might not have a clue for quite some time and if affected would have quite some difficulty figuring out the root cause of why they can't get better deals.

Even on a more simplistic level - most people aren't aware of the existence of fraud-scoring - the idea of all your DDs being cancelled would deter more than a few people from switching.

As to your question, the new bank wouldn't notify an organisation of the switch if the DD had been cancelled by the old bank prior to the switch.

eskbanker

HornetSaver wrote: »

the idea of all your DDs being cancelled would deter more than a few people from switching.

As to your question, the new bank wouldn't notify an organisation of the switch if the DD had been cancelled by the old bank prior to the switch.

Indeed, but my understanding was that TSB were erroneously sending these letters out as a result of the switch rather than cancelling DDs before switching - one of the affected customers referred to in the MSE article linked above said:

Switch went ahead on 4 May - all ok. Then next thing I started getting letters and calls to say direct debits have been cancelled. Turns out on 10 May TSB told all my direct debits the instructions were cancelled.

which obviously suggests that the switch (presumably including the DDs) had gone ahead, so if TSB was writing to companies after DDs were switched then that would beg the question of why these companies would take any notice, if the TSB DDs had already been shifted by then!

Anyway, I do agree that question marks about people being alive would spook fraud-scoring organisations but am just curious as to whether that impact has actually been observed at all and if so, via what route the message would have been relayed.

eskbanker

So, following on from TSB's roasting by the Treasury select committee yesterday, its chair, Nicky Morgan, has taken the extraordinary step of writing to TSB's chairman Richard Meddings recommending "that the TSB Board should give serious consideration at to whether Dr Pester's position as Chief Executive of TSB is sustainable. The Committee has lost confidence in his ability to provide a full and frank assessment of the problems at TSB, and to deal with them in the best interests of its customers. It is concerned that, if he continues in his position, this could damage trust not only in TSB, but in the retail banking sector as a whole".

This is largely as a result of the committee's work having been "hindered by Dr Pester's evidence, which has fallen short of the standards of openness and transparency we expect", which is about as close as parliamentarians can get to publicly accusing someone of lying.

Strong stuff, that'll presumably be covered on here in the morning - the letter is tweeted at https://twitter.com/CommonsTreasury/status/1004773998541099008 rather than published on the main committee website at this stage.

Meddings has apparently responded that Pester "continues to have the full support of the TSB board"....

Wellard_Mann

Having watched most of the hearing, I can fully understand why the Committee has reached this conclusion. The three TSB executives did not come over at all well and seemed to me not to have a command of their brief and to seek to avoid questions with frequent apologies and assurances that they were determined to fix things. I put that down to inadequate PR coaching initially but, as the hearing went on , I thought it was deliberate obfuscation. (Certainly, Pester’s early tweets before he, wisely, withdrew from Twitter were distinctly misleading). The bank’s communications throughout this sorry saga have been very poor.

I guess the TSB board won’t do anything at this point. If they do decide that Pester should go, I would think they’d need to wait until the conclusion of the Slaughter and May investigation – and possibly the FCA review, though I’d imagine the time frame for that might be extended – otherwise they could open themselves to the possibility of being sued for unfair dismissal. I’d hope Meddings is considering his own position as well.

Although I got my funds safely out of TSB and have no dog in the fight, I’m still interested to see what the final outcome of all this will be.