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from the why-is-common-sense-so-uncommon? dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The board of TSB[*] has been accused of a lack of "common sense" in the run-up to IT failures that left up to 1.9 million customers unable to bank online, some for several weeks, in April 2018.
An independent report into the incident by law firm Slaughter and May blamed both TSB and IT provider Sabis.
Customers were moved on to a new system, but the report said it had not been tested properly before going live.
[...]"We have concluded that the new platform was not ready to support TSB's full customer base and Sabis was not ready to operate the new platform," the report said.
"While the TSB board asked a number of pertinent questions... there were certain additional common sense challenges that the TSB board did not put to the executive.
"These included why it was reasonable to expect that TSB would be 'migration ready' only four months later than originally planned, when certain workstreams were as much as seven months behind schedule."
The report also said that there were more than 2,000 defects relating to testing at the time the system went live, but the board were only told about 800.
Other failings by TSB that it identified included setting "unnecessary" time constraints, which did not understand the complexity of the project, and being dishonest about the reasons for delays.
TSB is part of the Spanish banking group Sabadell and its in-house IT provider Sabis built the system.
The IT failure has cost TSB a total of £330m for customer compensation, fraud losses and other expenses.
[...]The Slaughter and May report was commissioned by TSB. Another joint report by two regulators, the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England's Prudential Regulation Authority, will be published at a later date. Those regulators have the power to fine and reprimand businesses and individuals.
[*] TSB - Originally "Trustee Savings Bank"; see the entry on Wikipedia.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Friday November 22 2019, @02:16PM
Well said. I have seen this in the wild, can confirm, true story.
In fact I am at the moment having trouble thinking of an IT job I got where I was not hired to clean up an impossible mess that I was almost immediately blamed and held responsible for.
Think about it, you have a management layer of accountants, who need to be explained what an ip address is in the first place, do not understand the technology.
They will never have any more actual power in the situation than they do at the auto mechanic, they can't tell if someone fucked up or not, they are reading people's faces and playing poker, not looking at technical details.
What is amazing is that given how much money they have, and how difficult it is to get jobs at these places, how the people who works at banks are usually actually certified specialists who have passed background checks and verified their history, they are still incapable of administering their systems without losing 300 million in the current iteration of the web.
It is almost like this authentication over distance is a problem, and that the browser vulnerabilities and ease of infecting the windows ecosystem, plus global hatred of the elite owners of banks, all comes together in a way that makes it look to me that this is a problem the elite owners of banks and software companies are bringing upon themselves.
By overlooking public interest technology and putting wealthy people who don't do their homework in charge, they perhaps learn some details are more than details. With technology some mistakes are so expensive you can lose things you did not even know you could lose, maybe that you did not even know you had.
thesesystemsarefailling.net (but especially bankers, governments, corps and quasi corps overriding the judgement of people who know what they are doing)