Following the news that British lender TSB Bank was fined $48.65m ($59.07m) by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority over a botched IT platform migration that left two million customers locked out of their accounts in 2018;

Chris Dinga, Payments Analyst at GlobalData, offers his view:

“Prior to making the transfers, TSB could have tested the system to see how it would respond to the migration. Instead of attempting to migrate 1.3 billion customer records over two days, TSB should have staggered the data migration over a period of several weeks to monitor the process and identify any potential risk.

“During the IT failure some customers were at the risk of seeing their personal bank details being exposed and their funds being stolen. According to GlobalData’s Financial Services Consumers Survey H1 2022*, 20% of UK respondents reported closing their account after experiencing a fraud.

“This incident raises concerns not only on the current IT infrastructure of TSB Bank but also of other financial institutions. The banking industry relies on complex IT infrastructures, and it is possible that in the future other financial institutions experience the same issues if they do not improve their current IT infrastructure. COVID-19 has forced many institutions to consider adopting cloud technology to improve their infrastructure to make them more responsive and easier to deploy new solutions. But if those cloud migrations are not done correctly, we will see similar issues repeat themselves.