In arrears, how much? $13.2 million, WTF TSB

[FiF]

What will the excuse be this time? Is there any point in running the arguments again about how to do system updates properly?

Out of interest which banks haven't had massive balls ups?

[Burrow01]

FiF said:

Out of interest which banks haven't had massive balls ups?

All the ones that are still working on migrating away from legacy systems

[cerbfan]

Very reasonable minimum payment considering your balance...

[Leicester Loyal]

Not been able to access my TSB app for well over a week now on and off, it's bloody annoying,

[BoRED S2upid]

Mine is working fine but I’ve not got the volumes of digits to display as the OP.

[AMST09]

Couple of beers then did some serious buying on eBay?

[FiF]

Good luck with that one boys.

[NickCQ]

$13 mill is a fairly standard mortgage around PH these days, isn't it

[FiF]

Not when you don't have a mortgage it isn't.

CEO claims system was tested 9 times, and claiming only nominee accounts are affected. I call bullst.

[98elise]

DELETED: Comment made by a member who's account has been deleted.

Testing should be relatively simple though shouldn't it?

Backup the data and refresh test systems
Create a view/table of the account balances in the legacy test system.
Create a view/table of the account balances in the new test system.
Query to look for differences between the balances.

My rates is £600 per day

[FiF]

So now they're claiming fixed, but deliberately limiting access as a load reduction measure. So you still cannot log in. Keep trying they say. Morons.

[Gio G]

I finally accessed my TSB app this morning, however looking on Twitter last night, people were complaining they could not withdraw money from their accounts for days and had to borrow money from friends and family etc.. I had no issues using my bank debit card paying for things, I did not go to a cash machine, therefore not sure if that worked.

Maybe I was the lucky one, however genuinely not being able to pay for things over the last 4 days is worrying, if true..

G

[Robertj21a]

Gio G said:

I finally accessed my TSB app this morning, however looking on Twitter last night, people were complaining they could not withdraw money from their accounts for days and had to borrow money from friends and family etc.. I had no issues using my bank debit card paying for things, I did not go to a cash machine, therefore not sure if that worked.

Maybe I was the lucky one, however genuinely not being able to pay for things over the last 4 days is worrying, if true..

G

Hence why I've always had more than just the one account/card *from a totally different bank* that can be used

[condor]

Me too I'll wait till the fuss has died down before I take a look at my balance - I know what it should be and think the only loss might be the 3% interest hasn't been credited correctly.

[FiF]

Yep me too, it's annoying though. Especially with the data integrity issues. Seems as if it's when migrating data from the old rented legacy space with Lloyds. Who iirc had a big problem in 2017 around the same sort of issues, data migration from a legacy system.

[BoRED S2upid]

Ignore yesterday’s comment my account is affected my mortgage has disappeared! Obviously I’m not going to be ringing up complaining about that going 🙂

[tankplanker]

98elise said:

Testing should be relatively simple though shouldn't it?

Backup the data and refresh test systems
Create a view/table of the account balances in the legacy test system.
Create a view/table of the account balances in the new test system.
Query to look for differences between the balances.

My rates is £600 per day

The problem is that you are trying to hit a moving target, a bank can't just refuse to accept transactions while they upgrade so you have to have a proper strategy for handling the switch between the old and new systems. At some point you can't back out no matter how much you want to.

In order to compare the old and the new properly you would need to take a snapshot of both systems at a point in time, then compare. The problem with systems like TSBs that have been under invested for a long period of time is that it isn't just one system, its a huge number of often poorly understood systems that can be older than the people working on them. These disparate systems have been roped together to appear as one system. Can you imagine the size of that data if you were to take two different complete, working copies of it that would require completely duplicated infrastructure (as the old systems are often creaking at the seams already)? Let alone wanted to run it in parallel for a period of extended testing. Likely they would have tested with a subset of data and accepted the risk that presented.

Lots of banks have outsourced and offshored the resources that did know how the old systems worked, and those resources then replaced in turn. The level of understanding of the old systems at each subsequent level of change is reduced and frankly the average quality of the resource is lowered as well in the quest to reduce the IT overhead.

Sadly banks (and not all of them) are starting to realise that IT is the (retail) bank these days and in fact IT isn't actually an overhead but the core business.

Edited by tankplanker on Wednesday 25th April 10:46

[FiF]

On the matter of a bank refusing to accept transactions while they upgrade. Isn't that what they did by shutting down over a whole weekend?

Now when the next banking day arrives on the Monday, and automated payments are timed to arrive and depart, that's when it gets complicated.

A numpty question, if the transfer to the new system doesn't work, is it beyond the possibility to just fire up the whole old system until you figure out the issues?

[tankplanker]

FiF said:

On the matter of a bank refusing to accept transactions while they upgrade. Isn't that what they did by shutting down over a whole weekend?

Now when the next banking day arrives on the Monday, and automated payments are timed to arrive and depart, that's when it gets complicated.

A numpty question, if the transfer to the new system doesn't work, is it beyond the possibility to just fire up the whole old system until you figure out the issues?

While they can refuse to accept any new transactions from their own punters, can they really do that with transactions from other banks? I really don't think they can do that for any length of time. Once the outage window is closed they have to start working again, and if they have gone past the point of no return so can't back out they are quite literally fked.

The best they could do is queue them to both the old and the new system, but that is massively complicated and has its own bunch of risks associated with running two systems in parallel at the same time.

Once transactions have been written to the new system backing out becomes almost impossible as you then need a way of getting those transactions into the old system, otherwise wages, bills, etc. would all just get lost in the shuffle back.

To make matters worse I would guess TSB negotiated a period of time they could use Lloyd's systems and if they went over they'd hit significant penalty causes to extend their use. This I'm inferring from the substantial bonuses for the board for the successful transition from Lloyds. So TSB went earlier than they were completely ready for and ended up in this mess.

With a system this big and complicated, held together with string and sticky tape, there is no way they could test everything. Best they can do is test as much as possible, so if they compromised testing to hit a deadline, then its understandable they missed things.

[FiF]

Well, there is something funny still going on.

Managed to get a logon screen finally.

Two fields, customer id, password.
Next screen, memorable info, pull down fields, 2nd letter, 5th letter, 11th letter and so on.

New system, first screen looks same,
Second screen, additional field to re-enter password. Plus drop down boxes, 3rd letter etc.

Get in, all accounts there, quickly reconciled the one account with regular movements, all the rest looked to be there and the correct amount based on a quick overview screen.

System bombed.

Try to log in again, after some delays due to limiting access, get login screen again.

First screen same.
Second screen, the additional password field now missing.

Enter data, accounts missing from overview list.

Now really getting annoyed. Thick end of 40k they're fking about with.