“The ticking time-bomb at the heart of our big banks’ computer systems” by Mark Latham
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Experts have for years been warning that the legacy systems of high street banks – some dating back to the 1960s – are an IT disaster waiting to happen. (…)
Rewind 15 years to RBS’s acquisition of NatWest in 2000. Although the integration of the two banks was lauded by City analysts for huge cost savings, Ian Fraser’s acclaimed account of the demise of RBS Shredded recounts how a decision was taken at an early stage to ditch NatWest’s more advanced computer systems and migrate all of the enlarged group’s IT onto RBS’s smaller IBM-based platform.
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Although RBS has the worst record IT failures, there have also been well-publicised outages at Lloyds, the Cooperative Bank, TSB and the Bank of Scotland.
And the UK’s banks are not alone. (…) The big players throughout the developed world (…) use computer systems that have been built up and adapted over several decades.” read full article