Ulster Bank waves £100 at punters pummelled by RBS IT fiasco
Very generous compo, we think you'll find
Steps to Take Before Choosing a Business Continuity Partner
Small businesses and personal customers that were affected by IT problems experienced by Ulster Bank can claim up to £100 in expenses incurred as a result of the problems under plans outlined by the bank.
In June RBS Group announced that a "large number" of its NatWest and Ulster Bank customers, and some RBS customers, had been affected by a "failure" of its systems to update account balances. Business customers were also affected. The problem left the Group with a backlog of transactions to process. At the time the company announced it would "automatically waive any overdraft fees or charges on current accounts for customers affected".
Ulster Bank has now said that it will repay "reasonable out of pocket expenses" that customers had "incurred" as a result of its systems issues. It will begin processing claims from today. In addition the company said it would pay customers who have personal current accounts £20 in compensation for "the inconvenience caused" by the "technical incident", subject to certain conditions.
"[Ulster Bank is recognising the inconvenience caused with] an automatic one-off payment of £20 to those Personal Current Account customers who visited and transacted at a branch during the period of the incident (19 June – 18 July 2012) more frequently than in the equivalent period before the incident (19 May – 18 June 2012)," the bank said in a note (8-page / 77KB PDF) to its customers.
"Reasonable out of pocket expenses incurred as a result of this incident [will be reimbursed]," it added. "For Personal and SME customers, we will pay an additional 20 per cent on top of these expenses up to a maximum of £100. It will help if you can back up your claim with any paperwork you may have, for example, phonebills, bus tickets, travel receipts, bills or invoices."
In the note Ulster Bank said it was waiving current account fees, charges and interest incurred by customers between 19 June and 19 September. It also outlined plans to "automatically refund or correct any Ulster Bank fees, charges or interest we may have charged in error as a result of our technical incident between 19 June and 22 July 2012".
Ulster Bank personal loans and mortgage customers will also receive a "full refund" on the interest they were charged due to their payments being missed or delayed as a result of the incident, the bank said. It said it would also "ensure" that savings customers were not "out of pocket" on interest they were due as a result of the problems.
"Once again, I apologise unreservedly to our customers and customers of other banks for the inconvenience this has caused and thank them for their patience as we worked to resolve this issue," Jim Brown, chief executive of Ulster Bank, said, according to a report by the BBC.
"We recognise that we have work to do to restore our customers' trust in us and we believe that this is the first step in that direction. We have worked with our key stakeholders to ensure the additional measures which we are taking provide a comprehensive response to customer concerns and demonstrate our commitment to making amends," he added.
Copyright © 2012, Out-Law.com
Out-Law.com is part of international law firm Pinsent Masons.
COMMENTS
Nowhere near as simple as it sounds
Our "local" (not geographically, but regular) pub doesn't bank with RBS, but had RBS as their card acquirer. When the RBS outage hit, they lost 2 weeks of card payments - over £5,000 worth. And even when things were "sorted", they had missing transactions, where the customer had been debited, but their account hadn't been credited. (I know, because mine was one of them).
They went bust 2 weeks ago, when the brewery refused to cover their debts to suppliers.
How much do you think they should get ?
Hester has said he will not take his £2.4m bonus has been reported as saying that "there needed to be a cultural change in banking. "[Bankers] thought they were masters of the universe, when they should have been servants of the customer.", words are cheap, no doubt he had a crocodile on hand to provide the tears.
Strange I would have thought that having got rid of 20,000+ staff, including the 1,800 experienced IT staff that he replaced with cheap inexperienced off-shore staff, that the bank would have had enough money to pay his fat cat bankster bonus, the legacy of Sir Mr Goodwin lives on.
In 1932 Georges Clemenceau, the French journalist, physician and statesman and one time president of France said "War is too serious a matter to entrust to military men" (often misquoted as "War is too important to be left to the generals"), to paraphrase Georges Clemenceau, banking is too important to be left to the bankers. The same applies to the banks, nationalise every single last one of them, banking is too important to left in the hands of banksters who are only concerned with short term profits to boost their own salaries and bonuses.
Nationalise and amalgamate all retail banks and run them as a non-profit organisations whose primary goal should be to provide the reliable cheap banking services that modern society needs in order to conduct business.
And don't even get me started on the Libor rate fixing scandal.
And it's not £100 compensation, its up to £100 compensation, probably £20 if you're lucky!
"Inverted commas"
The use of "certain language" by "financial institutions" always "concerns" me when they're "required" to "provide compensation" to their "customers".
Presumably the bank's intended context for all of these terms results in the number of people to whom the bank owes money to be in the region of "zero".
IT infrastructure monitoring strategies
What you need to know about cloud backup
Enabling efficient data center monitoring
Agentless Backup is Not a Myth
Top 10 SIEM implementer’s checklist
