Ulster Bank in £18m payout

Published Thursday, 11 October 2012

The Ulster Bank has paid out over £18m to almost 300,000 Northern Irish customers after a technical glitch in June left them without proper access to their bank accounts for weeks.

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The revelation was made at Stormont on Thursday when senior bank officials were questioned by Assembly Members from the Enterprise, Trade and Investment Committee as well as the committee for Finance and Personnel.

The misery for customers at the bank began on 19 June when its parent company RBS suffered a massive technical failure.

Over 100,000 people were then faced with missed payments and most didn't see their wages go into their bank accounts.

The backlog also affected thousands who weren't Ulster Bank customers - many employers couldn't pay their workers, if they were business customers of the bank.

After weeks of disruption, the bank eventually sorted most of the problems and announced a redress programme on 31 August.

Jim Brown, Chief Executive of Ulster Bank said: "All our customers are being returned to the financial position they would have been in had the incident not occurred and are receiving fair redress for the inconvenience caused.

To date we have provided redress of over £18m to nearly 300,000 customers in NI.
Jim Brown

He said that the systems failure has been resolved, before adding that "robust measures are being put in place with a view to ensuring that there can be no repetition of the issue or its impact on our customers."

"We are determined to move on from this issue and to continue to play a full part in the recovery and future growth of the Northern Ireland economy."

Mr Brown said that the RBS had commissioned "a thorough independent report into the root causes of the IT failure."

This is in addition to a separate report commissioned by the Financial Services Authority.

The bank chief said that both reports are due in the next few months.

Mr Brown also addressed the likelihood of another failure.

"In advance of these reports, RBS has already put in place a number of measures to reduce the likelihood and impact of another failure.

"This includes steps already taken to improve the resilience of the batch, make it less complex and identifying ways they can separate the brands and recover more quickly in the unlikely scenario of a similar incident occurring," he said.

Comments

3 Comments

mark in cookstown wrote (250 days ago):

That's all well and good quoting a large sum of £18m but do the math. Spread evenly between 300,000 customers that's £60 each. Given that businesses would have been entitled to a lot more than personal accounts I don't see how this puts peoples accounts back to how they were before the incident. By making the channel for claiming such a hard task many people simply didn't bother or those that did settled for what they got.

James in north down wrote (251 days ago):

All well & Good but what has senior management at Ulster Bank learnt about Public Relations from their debacle? Also why if personell are sufficiently responsiblt to sign a letter to a customer in reply to a specific question can they not discuss that matter with the customer on the phone.The Banks call centres operators are well trained in shielding so called responsible personell within the bank from the ire & wrath of customers.Until the whole ethos of the bank is reviewed and modernised and the very top tier of Management replaced by commercially minded people the bank will continue to struggle to gain customer confidence.

Michael in Portedown wrote (251 days ago):

I really do have to laugh at the bankers going up to stormont. Not sure which is more funny them or the ones up at stormont! Neither of them have any clout, so to sum it all up... It looks good to the public if theyre seen to be doing something. Never mind, we are paying for all of them in the end. Our so called government has powers to do NOTHING! Why are they there if they are the puppet arm of the UK government!