RBS’ Payments Nightmare: Our Experts Sort Out the Disaster

 

To say it’s been a bad week for the Royal Bank of Scotland doesn’t come close: beginning last Tuesday, millions of RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank customers were frozen out of their bank accounts, unable to make or receive payments.

The bank announced on Saturday that the glitch that first caused the problem had been resolved “” but not before a backlog of 100 million transactions had piled up on the bank’s servers, the Daily Mail reports.

It remains to be seen what impact the outage will have on RBS’ business going forward once all the issues are resolved, but the fallout is sure to extend beyond just one bank. Think of Turkey, for example, and its stated plans to be a cashless economy by 2023; how do you think this is making those guys feel?

To at least start the conversation about how far the effects of this payments crisis might reach, MPD founder David Evans got on the line with Colin Klipin, former vice chairman of global payments at Barclays Bank, to answer a few key questions.

Find out why Kiplin thinks this is a very significant problem “” but not a catastrophic one; which parties will be giving RBS some grief over the next several months (beyond perturbed customers, of course); and whether Kiplin thinks cost cutting through IT outsourcing is likely to blame for these issues.