The ongoing TSB IT meltdown has been strong evidence of the risks and challenges financial institutions face daily. It has caused mass uproar from customers and severely tarnished the bank’s overall reputation.

TSB started a long-planned move of 1.3 billion customer records from its former parent company, Lloyds Banking Group, to Proteo4, a platform built by TSB’s Spanish owner, Banco Sabadell. The change-over, which started on Friday 20 April, was supposed to be completed over the weekend by 18:00 on Sunday. But on Monday morning millions of customers were unable to use online or mobile banking or had been given access to other people’s accounts.

Error messages and glitches meant paydays and company salaries were turned upside down across the UK. This has understandably caused a chain of problems across many sectors. TSB’s overall response has not been appreciated by the public and its customer service methods have been hugely questioned.

Below Finance Monthly lists some of Your Thoughts on TSB’s IT failure and its customer service approach.

Mark Hipperson, CTO, Centtrip:

Looking more closely at what happened and how the events evolved, it appears that some key IT best practices might have been omitted, such as:

1. Production system access: it appears developers had access and were making live fixes to production. This is a big no-no in software development even in an ultra-agile DevOps environment.
2. Rollback plan: when it all went wrong, it appeared there was no contingency plan or option to revert back.
3. Incremental proving: it would have been more appropriate to first validate each change to ensure it was successful before moving to the next.
4. Testing: It is pivotal to confirm all changes have been implemented successfully and work well. There are many different types of testing: user, operational, data migration, technical, unit and functional, which would have helped identify any issues before customers did.
5. Early Live Support: it is crucial to make sure sufficient highly skilled staff are available immediately after the release in case things still go wrong.

And last but not least is proof of concepts (PoCs), which would have revealed any tech and planning errors. TSB should have run PoCs on test accounts, or even staff accounts, before the full release.

Alastair Graham, spokesperson, PIF:

Small business customers have reached a nadir in their relationship with traditional banking partners. Branch closures and the move of services online have meant that few now receive any active guidance or support from their bank in helping to grow their business.

At the same time, many feel that even basic banking services aren’t meeting their expectations. Even without issues such as the recent TSB banking crisis, businesses would like improvements to be made.Whether that is quicker account opening processes, simple lending or transparent and fair charges, the demand for alternatives is growing.

Tech innovations, combined with legislative changes such as Open Banking, mean that more products and services are being launched, designed specifically to meet the needs of small business customers. SMEs have already shown they will trust other providers when their banks fail to provide adequate services. This has been particularly evident where prepaid platforms offer more versatility, while still being a safe, secure and flexible method to transfer money.

Yaron Morgenstern, CEO, Glassbox Digital:

In today’s digital age, customer experience is more important than ever. This banking app drama has revealed how important it is to measure your consumer’s experience with complete visibility of any problems. This should really be an ongoing effort, and not just when you plan large scale back office migration. There are three fundamental tenets to an effective customer experience: observation of the customer journey via touchpoints, reshaping customer interactions, and rewiring the company’s services to align with customer expectations.

It is only through advanced digital analytics and AI technology that organisations can understand what is going through their customers’ minds. These are powerful tools for mapping out customers’ digital journeys from the moment they visit a website. This all goes to the heart of improving conversion in the digital customer journey.

Fabian Libeau, EMEA VP. RiskIQ:

The fact that TSB’s IT meltdown dragged on for such a long time, meant that customers were locked out of their accounts for extended periods. It also made them vulnerable to digital fraud in the form of phishing. TSB itself has warned more than five million customers that fraudsters have been attempting to take advantage of its IT breakdown to trick people into handing over information that could enable them to steal their money. Criminals exploiting brands to defraud stakeholders in this way is nothing new, and we know that financial institutions are a much-loved target for hackers, given the highly-sensitive and valuable information they’ve been entrusted with – it is therefore no wonder that cybercriminals are queuing up for an opportunity to impersonate the bank online.

Andy Barratt, UK Managing Director, Coalfire:

In the grand scheme of things, the TSB incident is perhaps not as significant an event as a nation-state hack like last year's WannaCry. But it has still left many, including the ICO, concerned that a major 'data breach' occurred just weeks away from the implementation of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation.

The power to hand out major fines that GDPR affords the regulator means that the price of poor data protection is about to become far easier to quantify. When the regulation comes into force at the end of the month, a breach like TSB’s would certainly require a Data Protection Impact Assessment and measures put in place to ensure a similar incident doesn’t happen in the future. At the very least, TSB will have put themselves on the ICO’s radar as ‘one to watch’ when GDPR comes into effect.

While the share price of Banco Sabadell, TSB's Spanish parent, wasn’t overly affected by the incident, there could still be a significant financial consequence for the bank. We now know that a large number of customers are affected so the cost of rolling back any mistaken transactions as well as offering support, and potentially refunds, is likely to eat up a lot of operational resource. This event should be a reminder that data protection and the safeguarding of personal information has to be to priority for financial institutions.

Andy Barr, Founder, www.10Yetis.co.uk:

The best thing you can say about the TSB approach to public relations throughout its issues is that it is going to become the modern benchmark for university lecturers on how not to approach crisis communications.

From the very outset, TSB has failed in its approach to handling this ongoing crisis. Its messages have been wrong, even from its highest-level member of staff, the CEO. He has repeatedly issued statements that have been incorrect and that he has had to retract and apologise for.

TSB’s brand reputation is now circling the plughole and its Spanish owners could very well be forced down the route of a re-brand in the mid to longer term in order to try and recover their reputation. I fully expect a classic crisis communications recovery plan 101 to be rolled out, once this all dies down. Step one; apologise (usually full page ads), step two; announce an independent investigation, step three; a member of the C-Suite gets the Spanish Archer (El-bow), and then step four; another apology before trying to move on.

Whatever the final outcome, this has been a public relations disaster for TSB and they are very lucky that at the time that it happened there was so much other “hard news” going on such as Brexit, rail company re-nationalisation and, of course, Big Don, over the pond, constantly feeding the 24-hour news agenda.

Danny Bluestone, Founder & CEO, Cyber-Duck:

The TSB fiasco shows that many organisations vastly underestimate data migrations. Moving data on such a scale from an incumbent system to a different one is an inherently complex task. There are several steps to follow for a successful migration.

First and foremost, it begins with a considered strategy for structural changes that ensures no legacy data is made unusable and new functionality is accounted for. Banks like Monzo test new features within alpha and beta modes, so new pieces of functionality are tried and tested before a mass general public release. TSB would have been wise to utilise test scripts and automated testing to auto-test thousands of permutations from login to usage of the system. Relevant applications that monitor errors could have then detected issues early on.

TSB could have also used a run-book for deployment so all steps of deployment are documented. When an error was detected, TSB could have rolled back without data loss. Problems could also have arisen if TSB failed to use a testing environment that was identical to the production environment. As if there is even a slight difference, the user experience can break.

With regards to the application hosting, TSB should have an active engineering team monitoring performance 24/7. In our experience at Cyber-Duck – from working with numerous institutions including redesigning the Bank of England’s digital website – there really is no excuse for users to suffer. Complex data migrations can be dealt with in a secure and efficient manner if best practice methodology is followed.

Adam Alton, Senior Developer, Potato:

Software is difficult; Microsoft still hasn't finished Windows. Trying to write a new piece of software or create a new system, and then migrate everything over to it in one go is likely to go badly. The chances of it working are incredibly slim. Instead, a migration in several parts would be better. Release small, release often. When Mark Zuckerberg said "move fast and break things", you could interpret that as "you're going to break things, so do frequent and small releases in order that you break as little as possible before you get a chance to fix it". The problems with TSB's migration appear to be multiple and disparate; error messages, slowness and capacity problems, users shown the wrong data. It seems unlikely that these stem from a single cause or single bug, so it would seem that they tried to do too much at once.

Coerced optimism: when under pressure to get something to work, it's easy for a team of developers to wishfully believe that something is finished and working because they can't see any problems, even though their experience tells them that the complexity of the system and the rushed job they've done means that it's extremely unlikely to be free of issues. I wouldn't be surprised if IT workers at TSB fell into this trap, leading to the premature announcements that the problems were resolved.

Denying that you have a problem is always a bad idea. Amazon Web Services (AWS) provide a detailed status dashboard giving a continuous and transparent view of any issues on their systems. They don't deny that they occasionally hit problems but instead have a process in place for actively updating their customers with as much information as possible. This transparency and openness clearly win them a huge amount of customer trust.

Senthil Ravindran, EVP & Global Head, xLabs, Virtusa:

Fortunately for all involved, it seems as if the worst of TSB’s IT debacle is now behind it. But its botched migration led to more than 40,000 customer complaints in what was arguably the most high-profile banking error we’ve seen this year. Worse still, the technology itself isn’t to blame here – both previous owner Lloyd’s and the Proteo4UK system used by new owner Banco Sabadell have a good record in handling data. Instead, the responsibility here rests solely with TSB.

It mostly boils down to a lack of proper preparation on TSB’s part. Banks carry out small data migrations regularly, but a large-scale migration such as this typically calls for months of preparation. Actually moving the data isn’t the tricky bit; drawing the data from the siloes it’s stored in across the business and knowing how it’ll fit within the target system is the real challenge. This is why banks are increasingly looking to ‘sandbox’ the testing process; creating a synthetic environment with the data they hold to gauge how it’s likely to fit within a new system of record. Granted, this approach to testing doesn’t happen overnight, but when applied properly, it reassures banks that the actual migration will run smoothly.

This method would likely have spared TSB the disaster it has faced. Yet in reality, we’ll likely see similar high-profile stories appear over the coming months thanks to the combined pressures of GDPR and open banking. The former is forcing banks to bolster their data handling practices in order to avoid hefty financial penalties, while the latter is forcing banks to expose their data to all manner of third parties. Both initiatives are incredibly difficult for banks reliant on decades-old legacy IT systems to manage (indeed, it’s likely that the GDPR deadline this month may have added pressure on TSB to rush the migration through), and as the reality of this new banking environment begins to set in, expect to see other examples along the same lines as TSB’s.

We would also love to hear more of Your Thoughts on this, so feel free to comment below and tell us what you think!

Over the years, the astronomical earnings of top-flight footballers have been widely talked about. Considering, on average, a Premier League footballer earns 100 times more in a week than a UK employee – it’s easy to see why there is an underlying controversy.

This debate inspired TicketGum.com to identify 25 England players who are in contention for the World Cup 2018 squad and see how long it would take a person with the same name in the working world to earn their footballing namesake's considerable weekly wage.

To accomplish this, TicketGum.com utilised Adzuna’s ‘ValueMyName’ tool, which analysed over 500,000 CV’s to reveal the average salary for 1,200 first names. Although the first names of England’s two most prominent players (Raheem Sterling and Dele Alli) could not be found on Adzuna’s system, the findings were astonishing.

Experienced goalkeeper Joe Hart has the highest weekly wage out of all the considered footballers. This ironically translates to an average Joe working the longest amount of time at an exact 4 years, 7 months, 1 week and 3 days to earn the £175,000 made by the shot stopper. Thereafter, a normal Kyle would have to work the second most at 4 years, 3 months and 5 days to achieve the £130,000 weekly income of high-flying right-back Kyle Walker.

Individuals called Phil, on average earn the most in the workplace at £1,071.30 per week. Consequently, anyone with the first name Phil must work 10 months, 3 weeks and 2 days to make the weekly wage of centre back Phil Jones (£50,000). Contrastingly, individuals called Jordan earn the least in the workplace at £529.83 per week. This means they would need to work 3 years, 7 months, 2 weeks and 2 days to match the weekly wage of dynamic centre midfielder Jordan Henderson (£100,000).

Putting the spotlight on England’s star player Harry Kane – he not only earns 163 times more in a week than a regular Harry but it would take the regular Harry 3 years, 1 month, 2 weeks and 2 days of work to reach the hefty £100,000 made by the free scoring talisman on a weekly basis.

On the other end of the scale, goalkeeper Tom Heaton has the lowest weekly wage (£15,000) from the included English players. Therefore, a working Tom would have to work the shortest duration of time at 4 months, 2 weeks and 2 days to attain the same sum. Slightly above Tom is Marcus, who would need to work 8 months and 3 weeks to get the weekly £30,000 paid out to the young and exciting Marcus Rashford.

Adam Taylor, a spokesperson from TicketGum.com commented: “Over the years, the disparity between the earnings of footballers and that of normal people has further widened. To show the extent to which that has been the case in a measurable context, this research precisely highlighted the amount of time regular Joes would take to earn their footballing namesake’s weekly wage. The findings demonstrate that most individuals would need to work excess of one to four years just to make the one-week wage of England’s most prolific players – which is truly astounding.”

(Source: TicketGum)

It’s a discussion that has been ongoing since business was a thing. Why should the boss be paid more than his/her employees? Here Chris Abbass, co-founder of Talentful, delves deep into the considerations to make when posing this question.

As the founder of a fast-growing business, I can attest to the levels of stress, sacrifice and sleepless nights executives go through to build and run their companies. At an executive level, you are expected to be available 24hrs a day and have a huge amount of responsibility for the successes, but also any failures your business may go through. Further, individuals who set up businesses take on an immense amount of risk – they have much less security, and put themselves at risk of potential failure if the business does not go to plan, which can greatly damage their reputation.

When it comes to CEOs and those at C level positions, though they did not start the business, they have the success of it resting on their shoulders. We have seen many individuals at executive level get fired for things that have gone wrong without the bat of an eyelash. Executives are in positions with the highest risk and are held accountable for anything that goes wrong or right in the organisation. Because of this, I believe that their pay should be reflective of their successes and failures.

Pay, at the executive level, should always be in line with how well the business is doing, how successful they are, and how much value the individual is bringing the business. If the business is performing well this should be reflected in executive pay. Conversely, if an organisation’s performance is very bumpy and inconsistent, then CEOs should not be taking home huge pay checks and bonuses.

An example of when executive pay has gone tremendously wrong was during the economic crisis when big bankers were taking home massive bonuses while firms were failing and people were losing their jobs and homes. As a business founder, I believe this is unacceptable and suggests individuals taking advantage of their position and thus their pay. This should never happen, but on the other hand, if banks and institutions are doing very well and are creating a lot of money for the economy, then executives undoubtedly deserve their large pay checks and bonuses. Overall, executive pay should reflect on how well the individual is doing. If you are making losses for the business and are putting your employees out of jobs, you should not be taking home a massive salary.

Executive pay should be an accurate reflection of the amount of work and pressure the individual takes on and should be proportionate to the size and profitability of the business. If a company is losing money, then this should be reflected in executive pay, and conversely, if the company is over-performing those at the top should reap the rewards.

The average British earner would have to work for a staggering 35,715 years to make a billion and join the world’s top tycoons, as revealed in a newly launched innovative tool.

Budget Insurance reveals a wealth of stats and facts about the world’s richest people, demonstrating how average UK workers stack up against top tycoons like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates in ‘The World’s Richest: How Do They Compare?’.

Daydreaming about striking it rich or how many pay cheques it would take to save a life-changing financial sum is common. Discover how average British earners really compare to the world’s richest and take a deep dive into their traits, exploring comparisons over the last decade and even seeing how many years of hard graft are required to join that prestigious world rich list.

In its latest discovery piece, Budget Insurance reveals that a worker in the UK on the average wage of £28,000 would need to work roughly 35,715 years to make their first billion.

The results also reveal that the net worth of those gracing the rich list has increased by $26.88 billion (78%) over the last decade. The average net worth of the world’s current top 10 richest is $61.28 billion[1] whilst, in contrast, the average British person currently has a net worth of £147,134.[2]

The average worker’s net worth may not be as jaw-dropping as that of the world’s most affluent, but it is imperative for everyone to safeguard assets like health and the home by ensuring that the right insurance cover is in place. Yet despite the huge differences in assets between the world’s richest and the average worker, there are some surprising similarities. Government statistics indicate that 32% of Brits have two or more cars, much like the billionaires in the top 10, who typically own between two and three cars each.[3] However, a rough estimation of annual insurance of £575 for a 2017 Ford Focus pales into insignificance against the cost of insuring Bill Gates’ Porsche 911 Carrera at £2,794.52.[4]

Anna McEntee; Associate Director Consumer Marketing; Frontline at Budget Insurance, said: “It’s fascinating to hear how the other half lives. We imagine they probably all have an army of assistants to keep them on top of their household admin – but whether that’s the case or not, we’re sure it’s just as important to them as it is to us to ensure they have the right insurance to protect the things they hold dear.”

From net worth to hair colour, height to children, the piece compares the traits of today’s richest and pits them against data over the last decade.

What’s more, the insurance provider has delved into how much money the world’s richest have donated to charity, their Twitter followers and the number of times they’ve been married, amongst other personal traits like car and home ownership.

The 10 Richest People in the World 2017[5]

• Bill Gates
• Warren Buffett
• Jeff Bezos
• Amancio Ortega
• Mark Zuckerberg
• Carlos Slim
• Larry Ellison
• Charles Koch
• David Koch
• Michael Bloomberg

(Source: Budget Insurance)

[1] https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list

[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2574038/Average-British-person-net-worth-147-134-0-01-cent-David-Beckham.html

[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/road-use-statistics-2016

[4] https://www.comparethemarket.com/

[5] https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/list/

With wage inflation stagnating below the rate of increased property prices, it has become very difficult to get a firm foothold on the London property ladder. Many people have therefore been forced into the private rental sector; signified by nearly one in three London household’s renting privately.

Despite the tremendous growth for the sector itself, the increased demand has driven up private rental values. Especially in London, where the average rent for a one bedroom property is a substantial £1,329 per month.

Sellhousefast.uk analysed data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS), revealing that single tenant’s in 25 of London’s 32 boroughs are sacrificing more than 50% of their monthly salary (after income and council tax deductions) on rent for their one bedroom property.

Single tenants living in a one bedroom property in Kensington and Chelsea are sacrificing an astonishing 85% of their monthly salary on rent – the highest out of all the London boroughs.

Single tenants in Kensington and Chelsea are then closely followed by those in Hackney – who give up 81% of their monthly salary to pay for rent on their one bedroom property. In third place is Westminster, where single tenants use up 79% of their monthly salary to pay rent for their one bedroom property.

Single tenants in Bromley as well as Havering, sacrifice the joint lowest percentage of their monthly salary on renting their one bedroom properties in London at 42%. Redbridge (49%), Merton (49%) Richmond upon Thames (48%) and Bexley (43%) are the other London boroughs where single tenants sacrifice less than 50% of their monthly salary on a one bedroom property.

Sellhousefast.uk asked a couple of single tenants living in a one bedroom property in London about their experience of renting.

Jessica, 26, has been renting a one bedroom property in Southwark for the last two years: ‘I am giving up a lot of my monthly income on renting a one bedroom in Southwark. It’s frustrating but I only tolerate it due to the convenience of living a short distance away from my workplace. It’s ideal as I start early and finish late most days. The biggest benefit is that it eradicates any time that I would lose through commuting if I lived outside the area. A lot of my colleagues are also currently doing the same thing as me. Whilst most are unhappy about giving up such a huge proportion of their salary on rent each month, it’s ok for the short-term. But in the long-run, it isn’t sustainable, as I wouldn’t be able to secure a deposit for a property of my own.’

Chris, 29, has been renting a one bedroom property in Hounslow for the last four-years: ‘Rent in London is truly extortionate. For the past three years, over half my monthly salary has gone on covering rent. On top of that, I have to pay for my food, utilities and travel every month – so I am not left with much to save, let alone enjoy any leisure activities. With me nearing thirty I want to settle down with my partner and this tiny one bedroom flat is certainly not going to suffice for the both of us. We have started to look at bigger properties in Hounslow, as we both work in the area. With rental prices as they are in London, it might be an uphill struggle for us’.

Robby Du Toit, Managing Director of Sell House Fast commented: “Demand has consistently exceeded supply over the last few years, Londoner’s have unfortunately been caught up in a very competitive property market where prices haven’t always reflected fair value. This notion is demonstrated through this research whereby private rental prices in London are certainly overstretching single tenants; to the extent they must sacrifice over half their monthly salary. For those single tenants with ambitions to climb up the property ladder – their intentions are painfully jeopardised, as they can’t set aside a sufficient amount each month to save up for a deposit or explore better alternatives. It’s not only distressing for them but worrying for the property market as a whole – where the ‘generation rent’ notion is truly continuing too spiral further.”

(Source: Sellhousefast)

New layers of regulation are forcing banks and other top financial institutions to raise salaries for specialist professionals in the UK, a new survey reveals, despite pressure to cut costs.

According to the Robert Walters Salary Survey, professionals across regulatory reporting, product control and internal audit sectors have been securing double digit pay rises in return for accepting a new job.

Many banks are also offering a range of non-financial incentives to retain other sought-after staff – most notably newly qualified accountants - including flexible working hours and improved work-life balance.

With an increasing number of institutions relocating away from London to cut costs, demand for regulatory specialists is also exacerbating talent shortages in the regions, particularly for managers and leaders with strong strategic management skills.

“Although muted salary growth remains the norm for most banking professionals, the weight of regulatory scrutiny means that experienced specialists are still able to command significant rises,” said Peter Milne, Director of Banking & Financial Services Recruitment at Robert Walters (www.dubaidesignweek.ae).

“Greater competition for the best candidates is also contributing to a number of other trends, including steeper contractor day rates and an increased level of hiring from regulatory bodies.

“While competitive remuneration is important, so too is cutting down on delays between interviewing and making an offer – many regulatory professionals are receiving multiple offers, so any delays put hiring managers at risk of missing out on preferred candidates.