This set the whole project up for trouble from an early stage:Ģ.23… At the time of its offer for TSB in March 2015, and without detailed knowledge of TSB’s requirements, Sabadell set an expectation that the Programme would be completed by the end of 2017. The date was defined without up-front understanding of *how* they’d hit it. The Live Proving was not carried out at a sufficient scale to allow TSB to identify the problems that would arise when the Proteo4UK Platform was taken live to TSB’s entire customer base.īoth the bank and the supplier (SABIS) seemed to be keen to settle on the same target date. While the Early Cutovers allowed some problems with the Proteo4UK Platform to be identified and resolved, the functionality put into live use constituted only a small part of the Proteo4UK Platform, and therefore did not significantly de-risk the MME. It seems like the piloting work that was done was inadequate and probably a waste of effort:Ģ.20… TSB sought to de-risk the Main Migration Event (the “MME”) through a number of Transition Events (Early Cutovers and Live Proving) that migrated or piloted parts of the functionality ahead of Go Live. In addition, it appears that neither the TSB Board nor the Executive requested or received any advice on this issue from their external advisers. This choice was not substantively discussed by the TSB Board. Right from the start, the decision was made to do a “big bang” migration and there was a lack of consideration of other options:Ģ.18… TSB did not give sufficient consideration as to whether a largely single event migration was the right choice, what the risks of this approach would be, or how those risks would be mitigated. The Slaughter and May report is hugely detailed, but the executive summary alone reveals problem after problem: The company lost 80,000 customers and 330 million British pounds, and the CEO’s seven year tenure at the bank came to an abrupt end, perhaps not surprising given his admission, a week into the crisis as IBM were parachuted in, that the company was “ on our knees”. The migration failed, locking TSB customers out of their online accounts for an extensive period, and creating huge pressure on the bank’s customer channels. Their tech organisation, SABIS, was given the task of implementing a UK instance of that platform, and handling the migration. They initated a project to move TSB to the Sabadell banking platform, Proteo. However, Sabadell was understandably keen for this awkward arrangement to end, for a number of reasons - not least the financial and opportunity costs it imposed on them. The name TSB was resurrected for a chunk of the Lloyds TSB business, which was acquired by a Spanish bank, Sabadell.įor some time afterwards, TSB rented space on the Lloyds bank IT platform. As this qualified as state aid, European law later forced the bank to sell a significant part of its assets. However, the 2008 financial crisis ultimately led to the UK government taking a major stake in the company. There are many lessons to be learned here, particularly about the fundamental difficulties of executing such a dramatic single change using linear, waterfall project methods.įirstly, some important background: Lloyds TSB had been formed in 1995 with the merger of Lloyds Bank (one of the UK’s “big four” high street banks) with the Trustee Savings Bank (which was one of the bigger banks outside that top four). The report, commissioned and published by TSB themselves, revealed a near-perfect storm of issues which led to the company going live with a new banking system long before it was ready for production, if indeed it was ever going to be. In this article, I’m going to walk through some of the key points in the executive summary of the independent report, carried out by Slaughter and May, into the TSB migration failure which is likely to have prompted this outsourcing (IBM, incidentally, were parachuted into the bank after it struggled to recover). It was interesting to read recently that TSB, the British bank which made headlines for the wrong reasons with a cataclysmic IT migration failure in 2018, has now effectively thrown in the towel and outsourced its entire IT banking systems operation to IBM.
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