Ulster Bank, the Irish arm of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), has been fined 3.5m ($4.4m) by Ireland’s Central Bank for a 2012 IT failure that disabled customers’ accessibility to basic banking services for about a month.
The fine is the highest ever imposed by the Ireland’s Central Bank.
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The IT glitch, which occurred between June and July 2012 after a software upgrade went wrong, resulted in problems regarding customers’ ATM withdrawals, card purchases and processing of payments including salaries.
Following this IT failure, Ulster Bank had to pay 59m as compensation to affected customers.
The Central Bank said that Ulster lacked robust governance arrangements for IT systems, which not only resulted in customer inconvenience after the IT failure, but also reduced confidence in the wider retail banking sector owing to the knock-on impact it had on other banks’ payments.
Ulster bank has said that it has taken various measures to tackle the issues, which includes investment in its IT systems.
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By GlobalDataThe lender added that it had worked to enhance its IT outsourcing arrangement with RBS, and launched a dedicated system which will prevent problem in one part of RBS to automatically affect another.
