RBS fined €70m for 2012 technology meltdown

Royal Bank of Scotland vowed there would be no repeat of a system crash two years ago that left millions of customers unable to make or receive payments, after it was fined £56m(€70m) by British regulators yesterday.

The 2012 outage, caused by a botched software upgrade, affected 6.5 million customers of RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank in Britain for several weeks and raised questions about the resilience of the group’s technology. Some industry sources say RBS’s systems are outdated and made up of a complex patchwork of systems after dozens of acquisitions. To prevent a recurrence of the problems, RBS has said it will invest an extra £750m by the end of 2015 to enhance the security and resilience of its IT systems. Chief administration officer Simon McNamara said that more than £500m of that investment had already been invested to improve the bank’s systems. “I can pretty much guarantee that that incident will not happen again because of the actions we’ve taken,” he said.

The penalties comprised a £42m fine from the Financial Conduct Authority and a £14m fine from the Prudential Regulation Authority.