A recent poll by Which magazine shows that TSB is now regarded as poor and rated even lower than RBS and other lenders responsible for the financial crisis.

In February 2018, TSB was highly ranked by its customers as a bank you can trust, but then the sky fell in for the bank when their new IT systems that hadn’t been tested sufficiently collapsed and many customers were locked out of their accounts for days or weeks in some cases.

Some customers had accidental access to other people’s accounts, the bank had little idea of what to do and their communication with customers was poor leaving many very angry at what happened.

To make matters worse, many fraudsters jumped on the bandwagon and began sending fake emails and making calls to TSB customers, leading to a large number of frauds.

The problems led the FCA to begin an investigation with the Prudential Regulation Authority.

Up to 1.9 million people using TSB’s digital and mobile banking found themselves locked out of their bank accounts following the migration of data on customers from former owner Lloyds’ IT system to a new one managed by current owner Sabadell.

TSB CEO Dr Pester told MPs on the Treasury Committee that he took “absolute responsibility” for the problems, but said the migration of billions of customer records was successful “to the penny” and the underlying engine of the bank was “working well”.

Paul Pester lost his job but the damage done to consumer confidence will take a long time to recover.

The problems had a simple cause – inadequate testing of the new systems in order to save time and stay on schedule.  That was a bad judgement.

The lesson is clear – do not take risks with customer data as you may end up very sorry.

If you’ve had bad experiences with TSB – let me know by email.